Howard Mandel's Urban Improvisation
Pianist Cecil Taylor, live at the Village Vanguard from July 2008 with drummer Tony Oxley, was recorded for a 2-lp vinyl album titled Ailanthus/Alitssima, and one cut of it is being offered as an MP3 for a limited time, free, by the website Destination-out.com.Â
howardmandel.com
Subscribe by Email |
Subscribe by RSS |
Follow on Twitter
All JBJ posts |
Pianist Cecil Taylor — who yesterday I might have described as “preeminent” rather than “predominant” — read his erudite, sound-sensitive poetry in the first half of his sold-out 80th birthday concert at Merkin Hall, then performed solo sonatas for approximately 50 minutes. An infant in the audience occasionally cooing along with Taylor’s precise diction made it difficult to catch every word (much less all the meaning) of his texts, filled as they were with the recondite references to biology, mathematics, Egyptian and Mayan civilization, yet some striking images and insightful thoughts emerged.
Cecil Taylor is the world’s predominant pianist by virtue of his technique, concept and imagination, and one of 20th-21st Century music’s magisterial modernists. A figure through whose challenges I investigate the avant garde in Miles Ornette Cecil — Jazz Beyond Jazz, he turned 80 on March 25 (or maybe on the 15th), and tonight, Saturday, March 28, “Cecil Taylor Speaks Volumes” — and presumably performs solo —  at Merkin Concert Hall.
Taylor belongs to no school but his own yet has influenced and generated a legion of followers on piano and every other instrument, too. He identifies with the jazz tradition, many of whose most ardent adherents have regarded him since his 1950s debut insultingly, incredulously, quizzically, disdainfully, reluctantly, regretfully or not at all. But he does not limit himself, or his defininition of the jazz tradition: he draws from all music’s history and partakes of the whole world’s culture.Â
“…Cecil Taylor wants you to feel what he feels, to move at his speed, to look where he looks, always inward. His music asks more than other music, but it gives more than it asks.” – Whitney Balliett
howardmandel.com
Subscribe by Email
Subscribe by RSS
All JBJ posts
Wynton Marsalis has high regard for the music of Ornette Coleman — as demonstrated by Jazz at Lincoln Center’s just-released 2009-2010 concert schedule, which begins next September 26 with a single performance by Coleman’s quartet featuring two bassists and his son Denardo on drums.
Fred Anderson, tenor saxophonist, is one of America’s less-acknowledged Jazz Masters, a man of deep musicality who has had enormous influence on three generations of players and listeners drawn by his brawny, free-wheeling Chicago sound. He turns 80 on March 22, and a weeklong celebration at the Velvet Lounge, his music room on the near-South Side, starts tonight, March 15, with the AACM Great Black Music Ensemble.Â
What gets New Yorkers to watch and/or contribute to PBS? Jazz, blues, r&b — American vernacular music, of course.
Chris Botti – promotional photo
performing with John Mayer, Josh Groban, Steve Tyler and the Boston Pops, and the 1959 broadcast “The Sound of Miles Davis,” featuring music from the trumpeter’s classic album Kind of Blue, now 50 years old and satisfying as ever.
The National Endowment of the Arts’ first program of the Obama “Recovery Act” focuses on the preservation of jobs in the arts. But it upholds an adage quoted by Billie Holiday in “God Bless the Child“: “Them that’s got shall get.” Applicants must be organizations that have received NEA grants during the immediately prior four years (since 2006). The NEA’s announcement is crystal clear:
[R]ecogniz[ing] that the nonprofit arts industry is an important sector of the economy the Arts Endowment has designed a plan to expedite distribution of critical funds for the national, regional, state, and local levels for projects that focus on the preservation of jobs in the arts. . . This program will be carried out through one-time grants to eligible nonprofit organizations. . . All applicants must be previous NEA award recipients from the past four years. . .Â
This decision is understandable enough; the NEA may want to ensure that organizations it has supported already aren’t going to fold, rendering its previous assistance irrelevant, and if it wants to put money to work quickly, organizations that have already been vetted in the grants-awarding process are surer bets than those organizations needing to be scrutinized from scratch. Nor do I carry any brief against the NEA’s actions during the second term of President George W. Bush — NEA Chairman Dana Gioia was one of the most successful leaders of the Endowment in its distinguished history, turning around Congressional hostility that somehow surfaced during the term of President George H.W. Bush, managing against inestimable odds to promote literacy, Shakespeare, arts journalism and, yes, jazz.Â
But from the point of view of a mostly volunteer administrator of a non-profit arts organization that after 20 years of self-supporting activities is just now making its first bid for grant funding to the NEA (the Jazz Journalists Association, of which I’m president, is applying this month for $s to produce a major conference on jazz journalism early in 2010) it’s disconcerting that as far as salaries for hard-pressed non-profits go, newcomers may not apply. Maybe the NEA’s next initiative could encourage new groups and new arts jobs? Wouldn’t that empower change? And disprove the second line of Billie’s “God Bless the Child” couplet: “Them thats not shall lose”?
howardmandel.com
Subscribe by Email
Subscribe by RSS
All JBJ posts
George Wein will celebrate the 55th anniversary of the historic Newport Jazz Festival and the 50th anniversary of his equally renown Newport Folk Festival by producing both a jazz fest and a folk fest in that Rhode Island resort town next August, according to a press release issued on March 3 by publicist Carolyn McClair — but perhaps without his sponsor of 25 years and independent of the company he helped establish just two years ago.
On Saturday, while making chopped liver for a dinner party and emptying a bookcase in need of repair, I listened to and commented on Facebook about 14 cds from the stacks of dozens of albums that have arrived since the first of the year seeking my review. I chose what I heard almost at random, pulling discs from the tops of piles, and rather than pre-selecting artists in whom I have established interests and prior knowledge, I mostly checked out people and groups I hadn’t encountered before (I acknowledge a couple exceptions). I employed this standard for rating the cds, allowing no half-points into the process:
5 — great, everybody ought to hear it
4 — really, really good or peculiarly interesting, recommended to aficionados
3 — good, not bad at all, good, maybe even very good (no half-points!)
2 — ok, but maybe flawed, commonplace or I don’t get it
1 — stay away, waste of time, who cares but the artist’s mom?Â
Thanks to President Barack Obama, January-February 2009 has been a great time for American popular music. It’s well known he’s got big ears. But Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen and Herbie Hancock at the Lincoln Memorial, Aretha Franklin singing at the Inauguration, Paul Simon and Esperanza Spaulding among those paying tribute to Stevie Wonder, winner of the Library of Congress’ Gershwin Prize — who himself tore it up on “Superstition” and “Signed, Sealed and Delivered” —  at the White House!?! What other U.S. leader has so valued and spotlit our internationally popular vernacular music?
The Master Musicians of Jajouka, a troupe from Morocco’s Rif Mountains, stretch anyone’s definition of “jazz.” They sure don’t make the cut according to alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson, who regaled the crowd attending his “Jazz Conversation” at the PDX Jazz Festival (Portland OR) with the opinion that he’s the only real “jazz” artist on the sched during the fest’s second weekend, dissing saxophonists Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman and Tom Scott, among others, as having “nothing to do with jazz” slighting Frank Morgan as a “phony” and Cannonball Adderley as “not all they said he was.”
A new hole in the safety net for jazz musicians: In an e-mail message sent February 18, Jazz Foundation of America executive director Wendy Oxenhorn reports:
Our magnificent E*TRADE Emergency Housing Fund has allowed us to pay rents and mortgages all these years when elderly musicians fell ill, and when Katrina struck. Because of this fund we have never lost anyone to homelessness or eviction in the past 8 years! What ETRADE did for us all these years was amazing but we have just been told that they can no longer support our program going forward. Without their contribution our Emergency Fund is now at an all time low.
