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Jazz Beyond Jazz

Howard Mandel's Urban Improvisation

Listening to Coltrane’s “Ascension,” and what I’ve done. . .

Yesterday’s Concert dropped a podcast in which I offer guidance in listening even to challenging jazz recordings such as John Coltrane’s ambitious, gnarly Ascension.

And semi-shameless self-promotion: Music Journalism Insider has published a comprehensive career interview with me.

For Todd L. Burns’ invaluable, subscription-supported newsletter/platform about music journalism, I lay out at his request the steps that got me to my present point — writer/editor/radio producer/president of the Jazz Journalists Association, board member of the Jazz Institute of Chicago.

On Lance Ingram’s well-edited and scripted podcast digging into music as it sounds, I try to demystify “free jazz,” the idea of musical genres and subgenres, and the challenges of music that doesn’t conform to conventions, but has a lot of truth to tell.

My best friend tells me she was impressed with my enthusiasm in the verbal interview, but I am indeed excited still by listening to music and thinking about what that activity means or can do for us. I believe listening is a subjective experience that none-the-less coincides with external reality.

And re my career rundown: I seem to have done a lot, although I thought I was just kinda hanging out. Frankly, I don’t know what I could have done if I hadn’t done what I did.

Howard Mandel at Latin Jazz Festival, Humboldt Park, Chicago, July 16 2022, photo © Lauren Deutsch

And I have every intention of keepin’ on — listening, writing and working with others who are interested in the same.

More on live jazz streaming, Chicago to Zurich and beyond

Saxophonist Chico Freeman, a third-generation Chicago jazzman, live-streams his new international band from Zurich on Saturday 2/27 at 2:30 pm ET, and I moderated their Zoom talk of coming together for the first

time in person — a rarity over the past 10 months — with Carine Zuber, artistic director of Moods Digital, as part of their three-day residency.

The perspective and genuine high spirits at getting to collaborate in physical proximity of these extraordinary musicians — besides Freeman, the UK-born four-mallet vibes/marimba player Jim Hart, Tunisian progressive oudist Armine M’riama, Canary Islands percussionist Alberto Garcia Navarro, Swiss bassist Emanuel Schnyder and drummer Luigi Galati — during a break while they’re working up new material for a challenging concert, adds another dimension to the thoughts about online programs and performance voiced by the dozen jazz people in my previous post with two Zooms on how jazz has faced down the virus, often by going online, difficult though that’s been.

(For another example of winning the battle: Chicago boogie and blues pianist Erwin Helfer, who I

blogged about in August re his pandemic-related psychological breakdown, hospitalization and recovery after shock treatment, celebrates his 85th birthday and new album release tonight, Feb 27, with his socially-distanced band webcast live from Evanston’s Studio 5, thanks to The Sirens Records).

But back to Chico Freeman, whose C.V. starts with his being the son with Chicago legend and NEA Jazz Master Von Freeman (nephew of guitarist George and drummer Bruz, grandson of a pioneering black Chicago cop who was pals with Louis Armstrong), then opens to: composition studies at Northwestern University as well as in the early AACM with Muhal Richard Abrams, Fred Anderson, Adegoke and Iqua Colson; journeying with the midwest’s hottest blues and R&B bands; blazing through New York’s disparate scenes — avant gutbucket, Young Lions, loft and Latin jazz, what have you; creative associations with Dizzy Gillespie, Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner, Jack DeJohnette, Paquito D’Rivera, among many others;

recording with his dad and Wynton and Ellis Marsalis; decades now as a leader of independent projects, like his previous project for Moods, the gospel steeped Voices of Chicago.

Freeman originally intended to call his new group “Concepts in Jazz and Afro-Cuban music” and that still almost covers it, except with these individuals’ evocative and virtuosic approaches to saxes, oud, vibes/marimba/keyboard and multi-culturally sourced hand-drumming, plus a practiced rhythm team keeping it together, it’s more that Latin jazz, Jazz-Latin music, or any portmanteau fusion. Watch the performance to see and hear how their ambitious project is realized. If you missed it, try Saturday night at 8 pm CST on:
https://stepnorth.com/sndtv
https://stepnorth.com/wfsn-tv
https://stepnorth.com/lifestreamingmoments/live
https://www.twitch.tv/jnancejr
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS6lFIxCIOc
and a variety of StepNorth DTV affiliates.

As for the venue support: As Carine Zuber explained on our Zoom call, the progression of some presenters from ticketed in-person events to digital distribution of concert videos, live-streamed or not, preceded the pandemic.

She cited a colleague whose foresight in 2017 led Moods to acquire top quality recording equipment and begin webcasting shows staged before actual people (!), offered also to remote viewers on a subscription basis (they say they have a revenue sharing agreement with performers that assures post-livestreaming income).

“When the pandemic came, we continued producing live-streams, but without the audience. The feeling of the streaming without an audience is not the same as a concert with audience,” Zuber concedes. “Something is missing. It’s cool that in spite of the pandemic we can follow livestreams, but it will never never never replace a real concert and the physical emotion you can feel being there in the same room!”

But it is cool that in spite of the pandemic we can follow livestreams. And imagine if in the 1950s Monk, Mingus, Roach, Rollins, Dolphy, Coltrane, Miles, Ornette, Cecil and on and on had been documented as fully as the global generation of musicians trying so hard to play and be heard today.

Jazz beats the virus online

Chicago presenters of jazz and new music, and journalists from Madrid to the Bay Area, vocalist Kurt Elling, trumpeter Orbert Davis and pianist Lafayette Gilchrist discussed how they’ve transcended coronavirus-restrictions on live performances with innovative methods to sustain their communities of musicians and listeners, as well as their own enterprises were in two Zoom panels I moderated last week .

The Show Goes On – Online on February 18 convened Chris Anderson of the Fulton Street Collective, trumpeter Davis of Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, vocalist extraordinaire Elling and his business partner Bryan Farina, Marguerite Horberg of HotHouse, Olivia Junell of Experimental Sound Studio and Steve Rashid of Studio 5 under the auspices of the Jazz Institute of Chicago. They’ve all produced live-streams, pitched to international as well as local audiences, achieving unprecedented results.

ESS started quickly last March with its Quarantine Concerts, and Fulton Street Collective’s Jazz Art Record Collective quickly followed suit; HotHouseGlobal has mounted five nights of music connecting Havana and Chicago musicians, among other far-reaching programs; Chicago Jazz Philharmonic engaged eager music students from the Cuban province Matanzas and launched and International Masters of Improvisation Workshop; Studio 5 conceptualized and has realized the very entertaining Into the Mist, an unique combination of website design and real-time, interactive Zoom play as a 90-minute immersive and interactive event, offered once a week (next on March 5);

Elling sang from his porch and the otherwise locked-down Green Mill, one of his performances from isolation reaching 180,000 listeners!

The Jazz Journalists Association (of which I’m president) followed up on Feb. 21 with Reviewing “Live” in the Age of Covid. Are these live-streams being reviewed? Do special techniques apply? Is there a market for such analysis? Is live-streaming changing jazz journalism, and here to stay?

This panel comprised freelance writers Jordannah Elizabeth (Baltimore-based), Paul de Barros (Seattle) and Andy Gilbert (Berkeley — both those latter two JJA board members); Seattle Times news editor/former features editor Melissa Davis; publicist Ann Braithwaite (of Boston-area Braithwaite & Katz Communications); Henry Wong, director of the Baltimore listening room An die Musik, which in past months has produced some 200 live-stream performances, and Gilchrist, who has live-streamed from An die Musik (video remains available for $5) as well as the Village Vanguard. Also speaking up were Spanish jazz journalist Mirian Arbalejo, MinnPost Artscape columnist Pamela Espeland, KNKX Jazz Northwest program host Jim Wilke and Amsterdam News writer Ron Scott, who said he felt it imperative to report more than ever on issues regarding social justice for Black Americans.

We learned that coverage of live-stream performances from mainstream media almost entirely consists of advance listings rather than reviews; that traditional print publications continue to grapple with declining revenues and content wells (there’s more news than can fit) besides digital platform challenges; that live-streams, unlike in-person performances, give reviewers the opportunity to re-watch but may also be judged on video production values; that individuals, professional or not, use social media to comment on live-streams in real time — and that news of the pandemic, social and political turmoil throughout 2020 have led many writers as well as musicians and indeed people in all professions to refocus, as best they can.

Panelists in these Zooms discussions were unfailingly candid and thoughtful (there may be something about staring at yourself in a grid with your peers that encourages best self-projection). No one indulged in whining about how life’s so different now that we’ve been victimized by Covid-19. Everyone was intent on people over profits, creating, producing, promoting and commenting seriously on musicians’ and venues’ online efforts in order to serve the art form in its many dimensions, most specifically addressing its local/global communities and constituents.

Almost a dozen presenters, more than half a dozen music journalists and media-purveyors, three musical artists (and special thanks to Lafayette for representing the concerns of many on the Show Zoom — view the JJA 2020 Awards Winners Live-Streaming party to hear others’ takes on the issues). They represent the grit, imagination, energetic devotion to their labors and the spirit fundamental to keeping not just jazz but all our arts alive today. Without exception they predict that hybrid models of presentation melding some sorts of live-streaming with some sorts of live, in-person shows (when those can resume), are the future. Hear them out! Or in the more urgent onscreen-version of radio/tv’s “Stay tuned” — Keep close watch!

Love movies, jazz, and thinking about them? A treat

Movies, jazz and reading remain my favorite solitary diversions, and Fresh Air critic Kevin Whitehead enables immersion in all three with Play The Way You Feel: The Essential Guide to Jazz Stories on Film,

his entertaining, provocative, deeply informed look at some 120 flicks and a handful of tv shows relating tales that mirror or inform American culture.

From The Jazz Singer (1928), long cited as the first motion picture with sound (it wasn’t exactly, but launched the form) to Bolden, a too-little distributed imagining of the first jazz star, whose music is “ghosted” by Wynton Marsalis, Play The Way You Feel digs into the narrative fictions about jazz’s origins (New Orleans, Birth of the Blues, Kansas City), Swing Era, early and modern jazz stars (the Hollywood bios of, besides Buddy Bolden, W. C. Handy, Irving Berlin, Red Nichols, George Gershwin, Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, the Dorsey Brothers, Glenn Miller, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, sort-of Dexter Gordon), artists’ conflictual strivings (Young Man with the Horn, A Man Called Adam, The Gig, Mo Better Blues, Sweet and Lowdown, Whiplash, LaLa Land), and jazz as an all-encompassing milieu (Stormy Weather, Some Like It Hot, High Society, The Connection, New York, New York, The Cotton Club, Treme).

“Jazz and the movies are natural allies,” Whitehead asserts, and “Jazz musicians would seem perfect movie heroes.’ Yet “in general, these films get little respect. . .” and “[o]n the jazz side, their reputation is even worse.” In a curated overview (supported by a 129-item YouTube playlist), he re-discovers and saves some (Broken Strings, for instance, an all-black-cast independent production of 1940, and Second Chorus, also from ’40, starring Artie Shaw with Fred Astaire and Burgess Meredith vying for Paulette Goddard), and eviscerates others (he’s none too fond of Robert Altman’s Kansas City and bypasses Altman’s Short Cuts, in which singer Annie Ross is significant).

He mentions but doesn’t dig into jazz documentaries, and excludes (perhaps regretfully, but the book could only be so long) works in which the jazz soundtrack, however crucial, is non-diegetic — not heard by the characters, as with Stan Getz’s score to Micky One, and Miles Davis’ for Elevator to the Gallows). The only obviously jazz-centric films he’s overlooked are Dingo, with Miles Davis, and Cabin in the Sky (Ethel Waters, Lena Horn, Ellington, Armstrong). Except for Three Little Bops (1957) he ignores classic jazz animation (Mickey Mouse’s debut in Steamboat Willie, the Fleischer studio’s Betty Boop cartoons) and jazz abstractions (Jammin’ the Blues), to focus on films more obviously and intentionally “about” jazz, and dwells most of all on character and plot development in which general perceptions of our indigenous musical art/entertainment are revealed.

For instance, women are most often subsidiary to the male protagonists of jazz films, whether temporary distractions (Paris Blues), naive or catty (Orchestra Wives), slinky sirens (Lauren Bacall, Lena Horne), or homey-types (June Allyson, as Glenn Miller’s wife). Considering the all-but- forgotten, decades-ranging Syncopation (1942), Whitehead notes the climactic moment when the long-marginalized heroine, an amateur musician and fan, gets to play with famed singer Connee Boswell, who is sitting at the bar.

“Kit digs Boswell’s vocal so much she nudges the band’s pianist off the bench to grab a solo in her usual bluesy style, lightly modernized, winning a blink of approval from Connee,” Whitehead writes. “This is one of the rare moments in jazz films where women make music together. . .One hopes the band has noticed Kit sounds better than the regular pianist.” (Incidentally and ironically, audio for this encounter is gone from the film as posted on YouTube, due to ongoing legal complications re the Boswell Sisters’ estate).

He contextualizes, too, the quality of Sweet Sue and her Society Syncopators (with Marilyn “Sugar Kane” Monroe”) in Billy Wilder’s cross-dressing farce:

“They’re remarkably good for 1929. Rehearsing ‘Running Wild’ while crowded together in a moving train carriage, they play hot riffs with spark and varied dynamics. On stage, Sugar is a fine sultry singer; behind her Kewpie doll vocal on ‘I want to be Loved by You’ the Syncopators show they can play sweet as well as hot. The arranging is good, the violins are in tune, the brass blend smoothly, and the rhythm section has a light touch. [But they] lack memorable soloists. That new tenor saxophonist with the low Eve Arden voice plays in a somewhat corny sub-Bud Freeman style, and that new bassist with the throaty laugh seems eternally distracted, fingers barely moving on the fingerboard.”

Whitehead notes stereotypes and recurrent themes, acknowledged and unacknowledged alike, zeroing in on the conflicts over tradition and generational change, authenticity (the black elder conferring credibility on a young white protagonist is a common thread), appropriation, race, class, gender expectations and societal taboo-breaking that have fed motion pictures and jazz-as-it-happens, developing in parallel, for over a century. He’s particularly good, and always clearly descriptive, describing the music and analyzing the appearances of genuine jazz figures (Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Holiday, Rex Stewart and Hoagy Carmichael among them) in pivotal if typically secondary roles.

Whitehead, who is — full disclosure — a respected colleague and good friend, has previously written Why Jazz?, the best introductory handbook, and New Dutch Swing, a close study of the advanced improvisation scene in the Netherlands in the 1990s. As with his album reviews on Fresh Air, he is always thoroughly knowledgable about his topics, with incisive perspective delivered kindly but not soppily — he can cut with the snarkiest of puppies.

I’m taken with his digging up little known features — All Night Long, a jazz version of Othello, for instance, and John Cassavetes’ detective-jazz pianist television series Staccato, among other finds. I’m disappointed he neglects the great Lindy Hop dance scene and Marx Brothers’ positive embrace of blackface (I can make the case for it) in A Day At the Races, and the jazz wending through Francis Ford

Coppola’s The Conversation, which I think of as big points in jazz narrative, but that’s his call and our mild argument. The author’s scholarship seems strong (he’s formerly taught at University of Kansas), but this book is for a general audience. The dictum that furnishes his title — “Play the way you feel” — is truly core to the jazz ethos, and throughout this book, though one could argue with specifics, there’s no doubt Kevin Whitehead as a critic watches, listens, thinks and writes holding fast to that same imperative.

Four months of jazz adaptation, resilience, response to epidemic

In early March – only four months ago – I flew between two of the largest U.S. airports, O’Hare and JFK, to visit New York City. I stayed in an East Village apt. with my daughter and a nephew crashing on her couch.

The Jazz Standard (DoNYC)

We ate barbecue at a well-attended Jazz Standard performance by drummer Dafnis Prieto’s sextet, and the next day I went to a celebration of Ornette Coleman’s birthday, his demise five years ago and his ongoing spirit, hosted by his son Denardo at the Coleman’s midtown loft.

Noted improvisers David Murray, Graham Haynes, Craig Harris, Kenny Wessel and a gang from Philadelphia including Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Charlie Ellerbee and Bobby Zankel were there, bumping elbows instead of shaking hands or hugging, because of what we’d heard about Covad-19.

Ornette Coleman, seated, birthday party, 2014 —
Denardo Coleman behind him in blue shirt
photo by Sánta István Csaba

Afterwards, Denardo called it “the last great party on earth.”

At the event we were all a little nervous but still together. Within five weeks one guest, 84-year-old bassist Henry Grimes, had succumbed to complications brought on by the disease exacerbating previous conditions.

Henry Grimes, photo by Sánta István Csaba

By then — mid-April — with the world-wide coronavirus pandemic sweeping through jazz and every other U.S. performing arts sphere as an ill wind, musicians and jazz support organizations had hastened to batten down the hatches.

The Jazz Standard, like all other clubs across the country, was closed; concerts, tours and soon summer festivals were cancelled; record release promotions were scrubbed or postponed. That’s pretty much how it’s remained.

Some individuals – pianist Fred Hersch being a leader among them, having begun in late March to perform a “Tune of the Day” solo, free-of-charge on Facebook – quickly turned to live streaming from their homes or studios, with tip jars or donate buttons pinned to their platforms’ pages.

Catching on, ambitious live-streamed shows were mounted. For instance, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s April 15 gala “Worldwide Concert for Our Culture” and the International Jazz Day Virtual Global Concert sponsored by UNESCO in partnership with the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz were tent-pole events meant to proudly and loudly proclaim that jazz is here to stay, unbowed. Then attention turned to addressing those in distress – which, given the economic slowdown accompanying the health crisis, may be just about everyone.

So the Jazz Foundation of America scheduled its #TheNewGig, a Musicians’ Emergency Fund Concert fundraiser in mid-May with stars including Wayne Shorter promising to make appearances from afar, and videos from the JFA archives of Sonny Rollins, the Herbie Hancock Sextet and the Count Basie Orchestra, among many others. The JFA (disclosure: I’ve been a supporter almost since it’s start) also set up a Covid-19 Relief Fund as did the Recording Academy’s affiliated charitable foundation MusiCares.

BandCamp, the DIY musicians’ favorite platform for tracks and album sales, continues to designate days on which they renounce fees so the entirety of payments for recordings go to the music-makers.

Taking matters into their own hands, players have sought and some have offered tutorials on how to live-stream, how to teach music online and how to hold virtual fundraisers, among other potentially productive efforts. JazzOnTheTube, a website and list-serve reaching some 30,000 subscribers daily, has published several useful, free ones. From early March on, there have been an increasing number of such demonstrations of the jazz community taking care of itself and its own.

One such is the Jazz Coalition, organized to provide juried $1000 commission grants to members’ nominees from all over the globe. Having quickly raised more than $70,000 from individuals contributing at least $100 or whatever they can to the cause (disclosure: I chipped in), the Coalition’s burgeoning membership has come from all sectors of the jazz ecosystem, including booking agents, publicists, record company representatives, producers, presenters, educators and journalists as well as internationally renowned musicians. Everyone is intent on making sure we and our hallowed, ever-relevant, genuinely essential jazz culture survives. On May 21 the first 48 grantees were announced.

Many Jazz Coalition constituents have their own endeavors to guide income to the musical freelancers (aka, independent contractors, seldom qualifying for unemployment assistance) who typically depend on gigs booked one-at-a-time, at best a few months in advance. Such freelancers still suffer the disadvantage of not know what venues will open on what schedule, or if and when they do, audiences will brave infection to gather and listen.

The alternative is found in the myriad webpages like Jazz at Lincoln Center’s listing players’ online performances scheduled on platforms like Zoom, Facebook and Twitch.tv. Chicago’s jazz radio station WDCB has its Virtual Concert Calendar, alt.weekly Dig Boston is doing it. . . . I stopped researching when it became clear there are too many of these to name, and none is actually comprehensive. How could any single such listing be?

I’ll note, however, that Fred Hersch has migrated from Facebook to Patreon to produce weekly 15-to-20 minute “custom content”. Other thoughtfully curated streaming series:

  • Live From Our Living Rooms;
  • Act4Music;
  • The Jazz Gallery’s Lockdown Sessions, and other streams;
  • WBGO’s The Checkout Alone Together series;
  • Jazz i Norge;
  • Experimental Sound Studio’s Quarantine Concerts;
  • HotHouseGlobal, on which I mc’d a program called “Chicago Experimental” in mid-May, and on June 18 produced the 2020 Jazz Journalists Association Jazz Awards Winners Live-Streaming Party, with almost 30 all-stars in small groups candidly discussing current events, feelings and activities, interspersed with music highlights from JJA galas of the past. Without false modesty, I believe this document will be a rich source for future jazz scholars.

Also, harpist Brandee Younger and bassist Dezron Douglas have been doing a weekly Friday 11am brunch set from their apartment. 

Although the web empowers us to tune in to live-streams from wherever they originate, many such schedules, events and support opportunities for musicians, too, are locally focused. Billboard magazine’s resource guide for music professionals helpfully lists some potential avenues of support, which might help with rent, mortgages, health care or mental health counseling, state-by-state.

The National Endowment of the Arts (which postponed its annual celebration of Jazz Masters, to have taken place in April for the first time at SFJazz), has also created a page on its website listing resources for artists and arts organizations, It offers valuable information for freelancers, but still the NEA’s funding continues to flow mostly to non-profit presenting groups rather than individual artists.

For-profit jazz-presenting businesses — the clubs, concert halls and festivals – that have ongoing expenses like rent and personnel despite having no customers may have been qualified to apply for Federal, state or municipal loans or grants, though what was made available seems unequal to the need. In the light of this, small performance spaces that previously considered each other as rivals have banded together in the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA). Cooperative groups of former competitors may be a winning concept during this period. Together, they (we) can leverage numbers and strengths to lobby for necessary attentions and assistance, hoping performance can flourish in such spaces again.

That’s wished for in part because the live-streaming format isn’t perfect. A sense of genuine presence is unavoidably missing even for solo performers, despite its projection of a strange intimacy.

A musician’s face, especially a horn player’s, may be visualized on screen much closer to the viewer/listener than it would be even in the tiniest club; scrutiny, given the typical one-camera set-up, becomes intense. I’ve seen drummers video themselves from a vantage just an inch beyond their floor toms or ride cymbals, which puts an auditor as close to the struck surfaces as the drummer her/himself. Pianists, bassists and guitarists typically favor fuller-body shots, but they, too, tend to be as near as the other end of the bench or the next chair.

For groups, a latency lag of indeterminate moments requires musicians trying to connect through uplinks from their own rooms to anticipate each other even better than they ever have before. Won’t this necessarily affect the already subjectively collective projections of swing and groove? Click tracks audible to remotely deployed players through their headphones (but not to the rest of us) have been employed, as by the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra on “”Quarantine Blues” posted April 24, to address the issue,

and some platforms tout themselves as having less delay — though any of the connections in a live-streamed internet production can affect data flow. Demand for real synchronicity remains significant, and I predict this problem might be solved before there’s a vaccine to fight the pandemic.

There are other, complicated procedures for reducing the time lags. Some home-made music videos exhibit terrific editing, imaginative arrangements and choreography, such as the virtuosic vocal turn by Jacob Collier on Cole Porter’s “Fascinating Rhythm.”

Creativity is rampant. Everyone is digging in, seeking ways forward, trying out new ideas, sharing what they’ve learned. Yet while musicians and fans alike await the re-opening of jazz clubs (perhaps even more than they long for the return of larger, ostensibly more prestigious venues), beyond an occasional burst of irrational exuberance there’s general agreement that re-openings should depend on virus control. Few are over-eager for in-person attendance.

One of my favorite local venues, iconic Chicago saloon the Green Mill, jumped the gun on June 6 and 7, holding street concerts that attracted socially un-distanced, erratically masked audiences. City officials visited on June 8 to issue a warning against doing it again.

Saxophonist Eric Schneider, guitarist Andy Brown outside the Green Mill, June 7, 2020;
photo by Harris Meyer

The club had already been dark for five weeks, and media coverage might have helped the Mill to offset the cost of a fine, though none was forthcoming anyway. And the issue was rendered moot when Mayor Lori Lightfoot allowed Chicago to enter “phase four” of a five-stage re-opening plan. The Mill welcomed musicians, staff and customers inside on June 26, though at 44% capacity, with no vocalists or horns allowed.

It hasn’t been and probably never will be easy to completely transform jazz, which thrives on live, close collaborations, into something satisfying to hear or watch on phones’ or tablets’ screens. Yet jazz people are by definition improvisers. We’ve always faced hard times with creativity, buoyed by resilience. Our music is adaptable, a healing force, and it won’t be quieted.

Henry Grimes wasn’t the first jazz death attributed to the coronavirus. That distinction belongs to Marcelo Peralta, an Argentine-born multi-instrumentalist/composer/arranger who lived in Madrid (March 5, 1961 – March 10, 2020, as reported by Mirian Arbalejo in the Jazz Journalists Association series of international articles JazzOnLockdown, which I edit). Nor, sadly, will Grimes, Guiseppi Logan, Wallace Roney, Mike Longo, Bucky Pizzarelli or Lee Konitz be the last.

Their music will endure, however, as will jazz itself. Thanks to its African-American origins, its roots in the blues, it’s openness to every other influence and its profound sense of rhythm, the sound has withstood insults, suppression, under-financing and the distractions of glitz. Today it can be found everywhere, its tenets welcoming everyone who wants to freely sing or play how they truly feel (as Ornette Coleman, among a century’s worth of prophets and icons, would put it), for our own enrichment and the pleasure of others. Don’t despair. Jazz will surely outlive the damn virus.

A dip into Mexico City street music and avant-garde

Here’s writing I worked hard on last year, published in slightly different form as a “Global Ear” column in The Wire (UK) December 2019. Rafael Arriaga’s photos (unless credited otherwise) are a fit complement, as is Jazzamoart’s painting, “El Bop de los Alebrijes.”

El Bop de los Alebrijes, © Jazzamoart

The Harmonipan players, khaki-uniformed men and women grinding away for spare change on out-of-tune, ill-repaired 100-year-old portable German organs in the midst of Mexico City’s car-jammed boulevards, were the most surprising element of the soundscape on my recent quick trip to an under-recognized center of musical dynamism. These itinerant musicians offer, usually with a smile, distorted, note-gapped calliope airs as a momentary diversion from the zillion competing details of life in North America’s second most populace urban area (behind New York City), continuously inhabited since the eighth century and currently totaling more than 21 million.

Zocalo, Ciudad de Mexico, photo by Denis Vazquez/Flickr

As most of those 21 million seemed to be simultaneously on the roads, edging relentlessly in every direction for brief advantage, the organists’ random fragments of dusty melodies, incongruous as soundtracks in a Luis Bunuel film, served as a reminder to lighten up. Alain Derbez, the writer, musician, broadcaster and arts instigator I was visiting always rolled down his window to give the organ grinders a few coins.

I had met Derbez at the first Varadero Jazz Festival in Cuba in 1981, bonding as fellow journalists away from home do, and staying in loose touch. Over the decades we saw each other once at the Guelph Jazz Festival and Colloquium, and during trips to New York City he’s stayed in my apartments. He has always urged me to come to Mexico.

When he emailed to say that over a few days in late September French bassist Joelle Leandre was leading an improvisation workshop with young players, pianist Myra Melford and clarinetist Ben Goldberg were to perform on their own and with local musicians, that he himself was to gig with a free improv quartet at a jazz-dedicated club, and that he and his wife would put me up, the time seemed right.

I’d only been to Mexico twice before, with my parents as a pre-teen and for a couple days in the ’80s to hang out in a little town on the east coast of the Gulf of California, just over border from Arizona. The country does not have a high profile in generally accepted narrative of jazz and other progressive music, although it should Mexico City has a thriving community of skilled, sophisticated and risk-taking musicians, having produced and attracted modernists and innovators in all the arts since at least the 1920s emergence of Rivera, Kahlo, Orozco, Siquieros, including in the ’30s Carlos Chavez and visiting Aaron Copland, in ’40s and ’50s direct Bunuel and piano-roll composer Conlon Nancarrow – both of whom became naturalized citizens.

Jazz fans may think of Mexico as where Charles Mingus and Gil Evans went to die, but cultural exchange over the vast territory has always been rich and multi-directional — since well before Western Swing’s Bob Wills popularized “Mexicali Rose” and “Spanish Two-Step” in the 1930s. As detailed in El Jazz en Mexico, Derbez’s history, the Mexican Eighth Cavalry Regiment band of nearly 100 musicians wowed New Orleans in 1884 and ’85, when they appeared at the World Industrial and Cotton Exhibition, and some Regiment players stayed north, at least for a while.

Recent research has revealed that some early New Orleans jazz instrumentalists regarded as Cuban actually were Mexican.; Derbez cites New Orleans’ resident native Mexicans Lorenzo Tio Sr., Louis “Papa” Tio, and Lorenzo Tio Jr. as having taught clarinet to Sidney Bechet, Barney Bigard and Jelly Roll Morton, among others. That the Mexico/U.S. borderlands are so obviously porous is not universally admired; it’s the reality that has fueled extreme anti-immigration rhetoric and efforts by President Donald Trump.

But if anyone should concerned about cultural infestation it should be the Mexicans, considering the U.S.’s outsized influence in all things south of the border. Just consider the omnipresent folk music: forms favored by the southern U.S.’s European immigrant settlers – elements of polkas, jigs, waltzes and boleros of German and Polish, Irish, Austrian and Hispanic extraction remain prominent in the rancheras, nortenos and danzons requested of musicians working in Mexico City’s lively cantinas.

These are old school taverns, which serve tapas or “small plates” (I sampled ossa busco, chicarronne — fried pig skins — with salsa, a bean salad, shrimp in broth, tripe) to encourage and buffer alcohol consumption, range in size and elegance (“You go to a restaurant to eat and drink,” Derbez explained. “You go to a cantina to drink and eat”). Most have an acoustic combo – typically a guitarist or two, perhaps a fiddler or a percussionist with a hi-hat and timbales or a button accordionist, all capable of singing. This troupe walks from table to table, amid dice and domino players, loners nursing drinks and noisy family parties, soliciting requests.

© tripadvisor

Their per-song charges vary, maybe averaging maybe 50 or 60 pesos, about $3 or £2.5. At the Golden Lion Cantina, a table full of male office workers raised their voices in ebullient chorus, asking for one familiar theme after another. “They’re going to owe a fortune,” Derbez observed. He sometimes gigs in cantinas, playing accordion or soprano sax.

Generous and warm hosts, Alain and Marcela Derbez enabled my quick early October visit to be a deep dive into their artistic circle. Beyond his history El Jazz en Mexico, Alain has published essays (Plume en mano, Entre blues y jazz), poetry and novels. He lectures and presents his books widely, has a radio program, and plays professionally a couple times a month, employing a harmonium and blues harmonica, as well as soprano sax saxophone and squeezebox. Marcela is a a clinical psychologist and poet; their daughter is a feminist art critic and talented, entrepreneurial illustrator, their son a nascent rock star, in one Youtube sample (“Diles que no me maten – Cayó de su Gloria el Diablo”) declaiming a la Jim Morrison over psychedelic atmospherics. Busy as he is, he makes time to make things like three days of performances for friends just passing through possible.

“It was not a festival, I just had the contacts, and it was a good coincidence that Joelle was here giving this improvisation workshop,” Alain insisted of the three concerts he’d organized at Casa del Lago, an avant-garde cultural center of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, situated in the middle of Mexico City’s Bosque (forest) de Chapultepec. While I was there the Casa celebrated the 50th anniversary of its founding with a happening in which enlisted artists — Alain of course participated — read a summary of one year of its activities from a piece of paper, then did something “musical” with the page, crumpling it noisily, buzzing it like tissue over a comb, singing while flapping the paper as loudly as possible.

The Casa’s director José Wolffer, possessing a broad perspective on new arts endeavors, curated that event, which had a Fluxus air. On our second meeting he presented me with a copy of México Electroacústico 1960-20070, a three-cd set he’d instigated that’s comparable to Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center or Ohm: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music 1948-1980. All the tracks explore the sonic breadth available from electo-acoustic ensembles and/or compositions, most of them pursuing evocative, organic developments through flowing narratives. I’m especially taken with the dramatic tape piece “Juegos Sensoriales” (1987) by Francisco Nuñez.  

outdoor stage of Casa de Lago

The Casa itself, a Beaux Arts building opened in 1909 to house the Automobile Club of Mexico, sits on the lip of a man-made pond in the midst of the vast park that contains a castle, a zoo, the National Auditorium, sculptures and historical monuments, gardens, and most significantly the the world-renown Museo Nacional de Antropología, which profoundly establishes that civilizations flourished for centuries south of the Rio Grande, regardless of the U.S.’s ignorance and dismissal of that history. There are also eight other museums, rows of stalls with vendors hawking cheap souvenirs, and buskers such as a youth who played Bach on amplified cello. It was all new to me but of course Mexicans roam the grounds as familiarly as if in their back yards.

Some drifted over to the Casa’s free, mid-afternoon performances on an outdoor stage with covered seating for some 250 people. Listeners with no experience or expectations as well as musical devotees sat through these shows.

Myra Melford, Ben Goldberg, Israel Cupich, Gabriel Puentes, Miguel Costero at Casa de Lago stage; photo by Rafael Arriaga

Leandre did not perform with her dozen pupils, youngsters relative to Derbez, who is in his early ‘60s. She had tutored them on free improv strategies, emphasizing boldness, commitment to their instruments, and the importance of listening to each other. The basic advice was evidently taken to heart by the two guitarists, two players of synth and electronics, several percussionists, a pianist, bassist, woman with a sitar and man blowing high-pitched bamboo Japanese flutes. Their combinations were not all inspired, but there were no disasters and some bright moments.

On the following afternoon, Melford and Goldberg delved into their intricate, often reflective compositions that open wide for improvisation. Myra, although physically small, can dominate a grand piano, exploding from precise figurations into massive clusters, keyboard-length sweeps and propulsive rhythmic episodes without ever losing her place. Ben blows the quirkiest of melodies with composure, his tone even across the clarinet’s wide range. He employed circular breathing softly in passages akin to long, bluesy sighs.

Myra Melford and Joelle Leandre image © Rafael Arriaga

Joining them, Leandre used her bass as a physical extension with which to roughhouse. This set and the next day’s, in which Melford and Goldberg collaborated after just one rehearsal of their distinctive repertoire with Gabriel Puentes on drums, Luis Miguel Costero, percussion, and Israel Cupich on double-bass, won them all new fans.

Derbez, Costero, Melford, Goldberg, Cupich, Puentes

However, I already knew of Melford, Goldberg and Leandre’s prowess. It was the joyful and multiform aspects of two sets I witnessed at the club Jazzatlán that convinced me unconventional musical performance is alive and well in Mexico City. 

Jazzamoart (at sculpture, back to camera), Mauricio Sotelo, Alain Derbez, Gabriel Puentes

Derbez played soprano sax and blues harp; Puentes, who came to Mexico City from his native Chile in 2000 to record the soundtrack for the crime film Amores perros and never left, sat at the traps. Mauricio Sotelo wore a Chapman Stick and had within reach unique invented instruments, metal sculptures to pluck, strike or bow, hand-forged by his brother Francisco, with whom he co-leads the heavy metal/prog-rock band Cabezas de Cera (Wax Heads). Pianist Ana Ruiz, who has proudly played free since 1972, influenced by Cecil Taylor, among others, was at the back of the stage.

Ana Ruiz

Behind her two tall cardboard figures, resembling the towering Toltec statues I’d seen in the Museum of Anthropology, were propped against the wall. As the band began and its music quickly developed from tentative licks into a full rush of voluminous sound, visual artist Javier Vazquez Estupinan, better known as Jazzamoart, sliced at the cardboards with a box cutter and daubed them with paint.

I’ve seen visual artists work in the moment with improvised music in Chicago and in New York, typically from a point in the audience.. At Jazzatlán, Jazzamoart was onstage, action-painting as a member of the band. 

He was absent, however, when the second set began. Sotelo put down a throbbing bass line, Puentes used brushes for a nervous tattoo, Ruiz pressed dark chords, and Derbez blew the mournful theme of Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman.” True to Coleman’s harmolodic ways, they let their impulses shape a group exploration evoking distress unto anguish and empathetic concern, unbound while sustaining to the song’s essence. 

As the players reached a climax, bolts of brightly colored paper suddenly erupted from behind them. Giving new meaning to the phrase “sheets of sound,” the sheaves, shot forth in a seemingly endless stream by Jazzamoart, kept coming, flooding the stage.

Gabriel Puentes, backed by Jazzamoart sculptures

Ruiz, standing at her keyboard, laughed wildly, Puentes cut through the curling lengths with his sticks, Sotelo shifted to uplift, and Derbez, blowing with his eyes closed, unaware, increased his intensity. Their passion became merrily mad. The crowd, consisting mostly of couples in their 30s and 40s, watched with wonder, amusement and finally enthusiastic applause. At conclusion, everyone was smiling broadly — which is unusual in my experience of free improv events. 

The next night, Jazzamoart hosted a sumptuous wine-and-cheese party at his atelier. His paintings, dense with impasto renderings of musicians, Don Quixote, soccer players and figures such as Rembrandt with a saxophone, were hung or stacked everywhere. An amateur drummer, he had instruments for jamming in our gathering space. Melford and Goldberg were there, as were Derbez and his wife, photographer Rafael Arriaga, Puentes, Sotello, several companions and friends. They spoke of the weekend’s music, of their pasts — Puentes had abandoned an advanced degree in modern English literature to concentrate on music — and the present. 

Goldberg, Mandel, Jazzamoart, Melford, Derbez

All were positive about their careers to date, Sotello especially. He talked about how free improvisation was liberating, after years he’d spent in hard rock and heavy metal contexts. He mentioned musicians who had left for the U.S., Canada and Europe in pursuit of their careers, saying most had returned.

“It is expensive to live in the States,” he said, “and we are paid just as much here. There are plenty of opportunities to play in Mexico City, good venues, and talented people are coming from all over the world because they sense there is something happening here. Why not? We have a great future.”

Guitarist Kenny Burrell shouldn’t be in trouble. But he is.

Guitarist Kenny Burrell — since the 1950s a prominent, popular and influential jazz innovator, recording ace, bandleader and esteemed educator (prof and director of Jazz Studies at UCLA) — at age 87 is suffering grievous financial calamity due to health care costs and multiple frauds. His plight is candidly detailed by his wife Katherine at their GoFundMe campaign site, her story verified by The Jazz Foundation of America in its statement supporting the Burrells posted by JazzTimes magazine. Read that, then kick in, please, and demand to know from whoever might have a say in it why our safety net is so ragged even our best-established artists are just a slip from disaster.

Kenny starts playing at 2:38

Audio-video jazz improv: Mn’Jam Experiment, w/teens

What’s really new in improvisational music? Where else can innovation go? Mn’JAM Experiment — singer Melissa Oliveira and her visual/electronics/turntablist partner JAM — are daring to mix high-tech audio-with-video media in live performance, and as they say, it’s an experiment, in a direction that live performance seems sure to go.

Mn’JAM, photo by Charlotte Steunebrink

Grounded in jazz fundamentals (call and response, in-the-moment interactions, individualized expression, rhythmic drive, repertoire; she went to Berklee, he to New England Conservatory) they use screens, loops, layers, cut-ups, self-crafted as well as appropriated items, abstraction, distortion and familiar themes — and they’ve made it all portable, so they tour and teach worldwide, recently out of Melbourne.

Their performance last week Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music proved Mn’JAM’s essential ingredients of multi-track looping and rapid-fire yet intentional manipulations of images that are wedded to percussive, sometimes pitched, also malleable sounds can be rapidly understood, enjoyed and adopted by young players. Members of the School’s Teen Collective had a two-day workshop with Mn’JAM, then performed well, I’ll say rockin’, at the School’s estimably international Wednesday night community-donation series (which is funded in part by the European Union). These teens, 13, 14 and 15, added their own solo and backup voices, electric guitar, bass, keyboards and traps parts to the act — as Mn’JAM has on their 2017 DVD/CD album Live With A Boom (still, much of that album’s musical material is significantly more complex than what these forces tried).

Teen Collective members, from the Old Town School of Music — JAM at far right. Photo by Devin Sebastian Bean

While Melissa records stacks of vocal loops cleverly metered for polyrhythmic effects, over which she sings and which she can distort or add to using a Korg Kaossilator, JAM triggers images ranging from GIFs, pictograms, geometric figures to accompany, complement, lead (or ignore) her. He, too, manipulates source material, starting with a bank of let’s call them visual-sonic gestures, typically totaling 60 — consider bank a keyboard, different for each of the duo’s tracks (which they compose separately but collaboratively), which he can change with color, overlays, stretching/mirroring/dividing/warping functions by hand-drumming and table-spinning. The visual display can be — is — quirky, surreal, hypnotic, distracting, sometimes simultaneously. (They’re into moire patterns.) Melissa, sings affectingly in Portuguese, and rather more cooly in English, but still slices, dices and swirls her phrases, isolating key elements of “Body and Soul,” for instance, or offering a hot version of Bill Withers’ “Use Me.”

In the training sessions (I’ve attended two Mn’JAM conducted for adults), the two musical artists quite openly discuss and demonstrate their equipment and techniques, designed and devised to offer vast opportunities for creative composition, spontaneous variation and sensory overload, including considerations of what can be carried, used to greatest affect, replaced/repaired/modified on short notice. Having formerly been based in Amsterdam, Oliviera (she says she’s half-Portuguese, half-Australian) and JAM (persistently “all Portuguese”) have done a TedX SPJain Sydney, Talk, performed at the 2017 Cairo Jazz Festival and in India, in 2016 traveled extensively in China, Japan, Macau and Hong Kong.

They acknowledge a couple of other ensembles are trying to unite image and audio, but intend their own processes of combination to more immediate, organic and as much as possible analog — they abjure using a click track to sync music and image — and identify themselves, in the best sense, with jazz. So they keep experimenting, and explaining what they’re up to with weekly YouTube clips. Pretty cool.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions, Chicago free improv all-stars

Jim Baker, keys& synth; Brian Sandstrom, bass; Steve Hunt, drums; Ed Wilkerson, saxes, didgeridoo, oud, Mars Williams, reeds and toys — photo by Marc PoKempner

Keyboardist and synthesizer specialist Jim Baker has led the collective quartet Extraordinary Popular Delusions playing every Monday night in obscure Chicago venues for the past 13 years. My article on EPD, which features saxophonists Mars Williams and Edward Wilkerson Jr. (they switch off), multi-instrumentalist (bass, guitar, trumpet) Brian Sandstrom and percussionist/drummer Steve Hunt — all of whom have extensive creative music experience — was published today in the Chicago Reader — which I last wrote for in the 1980s.

Brian Sandstrom, bass and distorted guitar; Jim Baker, analog synth; Steve Hunt, drums.

Photos here by Marc PoKempner, from the free-form improv ensemble’s current regular gig, in the upstairs loft of the Beat Kitchen (they start around 9 pm, usually end by 11). No cover, no minimum (they put out a tip jazz), no limits — same as their interactive performance as part of painter Lewis Achenbach’s Jazz Occurrence at the Apple Store on Michigan Avenue, 6 pm. on January 24. See you there?

Luminous PoKempner pix of Sun Ra’s celestial music

Marshall Allen, ageless 94, leads the Sun Ra Arkestra

If you liked Black Panther, listen to the music that introduced and embodies Afro-Futurism. Photojournalist Marc PoKempner captured a bit of the celestial magic of the Sun Ra Arkestra (est. circa 1954) during its November touchdown in New Orleans’s Music Box Village. This picturesque venue is an assembly of little houses which MPoK says “each has some sound producing capability – bells, chimes, horns, drums.” (Above: Marshall Allen, Arkestra leader since 1995. All photos here Marc PoKempner copyright 2018).

Arkestra at the Music House Village. (This wide angle shot looks best in larger display. Either “un-pinch” or use “Command” and the + sign to open image, view HD details.)

Marc continues, “It’s next to the bridge on the upper side of the Industrial Canal, surrounded by a fence made of recycled corrugated metal.  Since last time I was there, they’ve added loads of interesting lighting, and smoke generators that add to the magical atmosphere – perfect for the Arkestra.”

Vincent Chance, who plays French horn in the Arkestra (and elsewhere), commented, “The concerts there were pretty amazing. The audience was knocked out by both shows, we played two days there and had two days before to familiarize ourselves with the instruments from their installations.” Preparation is good for liftoff!

Tara Middleton, Arkestra vocalist (successor to the great June Tyson)

Sun Ra was a visionary who gifted the Earth with his sensibility, forevermore. During winter holidays and times of social crisis — or really, whenever — traveling the spaceways with his sounds and messages in mind is recommended as an enhancement, inspiration, provocation and/or escape.

Tyler Mitchell bass; DM Hotep, guitar

John Szwed’s biography Space Is The Place: The Life and Times of Sun Ra is recommended for further reading about the singular bandleader/composer/arranger/poet/entrepreneur/satirist/philosopher, named by his Earthling parents at birth Herman Poole Blount. I’ve written about him, including liner notes for the Complete Performance resulting from his meeting with John Cage, and a 1991 concert at Inter-Media-Arts. Still, my favorite of Sun Ra’s many albums is Secrets of the Sun. The Omniverse being one, start anywhere.

Hear it now.

Chicago blues at 90

Guitarist Jimmy Johnson’s birthday at Space – photos by Harvey Tillis

Jimmy Johnson at Space, Evanston — all photos thanks to Harvey Tillis

 Blues have been heard in Chicago for about 100 years — and blues guitarist Jimmy Johnson has been alive for 90 of them. Johnson, born just four years after Papa Charlie Jackson was reported busking with his guitar on Maxwell Street, celebrated his entry to ninth decade last Wednesday night at Space in Evanston, and proved to be as powerful and thrilling a player/singer as he’s been since the 1970s, when he played second to Otis Rush and Jimmy Dawkins.  (All photos in this post © Harvey Tillis)

from left: Dave Specter, Mike Schlick, E.G. McDanniel hidden, Brother John Kattke

But he’s been a front man, too, since at least 1978, and Johnson excelled in that role at his party, slinging barbed, biting lead lines in alternation with his compelling vocals, synced with taut rhythms from guitarist Dave Specter, bassist E.G. McDaniel, keyboard player Brother John Kattke and drummer Mike Schlick. There was not a thing old about their set — the band thoroughly invigorated material well-chosen for variety, including “You Don’t Love Me, Baby,” “Little By Little,” “Turn On Your Love Light,” “Chicken Heads” (which was a big hit for Bobby Rush, which I previously misattributed to Jimmy’s r&b-singing brother Syl Johnson), and “People Get Ready,” the great gospel-influenced anthem Curtis Mayfield wrote for the Impressions in 1965.

Kattke, Specter, Johnson, McDaniel

Originally from Holly Springs, Mississippi, where he was steeped in gospel, Johnson moved to Chicago with his family in 1950, worked as a welder and made music avocationally as electric Chicago blues emerged from Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Buddy Guy and the other masters recorded by Chess Records — turning pro in ’59, just as the second “West Side Soul” generation including Rush, Junior Wells and Magic Sam emerged. His Delmark Records debut, Johnson’s Whacks, established his style — which besides cutting single note slashes is characterized by his high, keening voice, and no slack beats. 

Jimmy Johnson tells long-life secrets.

One of the tricks Johnson pulled at Space I’d never heard anyone do: a reverse-falsetto — a chorus sung in a range forced significantly below his natural pitch. How he did that, I don’t know. But Specter asked Johnson onstage for a few of his long-life secrets.

“Well, I think you’re taking care of yourself if you don’t drink — but I know the club here makes its money from selling alcohol, so everybody drink up!” he said. “And we all like to eat what we want to eat, right? But I’m telling you, you gotta sacrifice about some of that food, stay healthy by eating better,” he advised. “One other thing — if you live long enough, you’re going to get arthritis. Doesn’t matter if you hit 90 and don’t have it. If you live to 95, you’ll have it by then.” 

Jimmy and E.G. McDaniel

Johnson blew out a single candle on a cake as the crowd sang “Happy Birthday,” and then he played some more blues. His most recent recording is with Specter, an homage version of “Out of Bad Luck,” dedicated to Magic Sam, on Tribute, Delmark’s 65th anniversary release. Let’s hope for more from this evergreen bluesman (and of course Mr. Specter, carrying it on).

Jazz and beyond projects with 2018 NEA funding support

Given all the noise, the National Endowment for the Arts’ $25 mil for arts, literature and education announced Feb. 7 may have been overlooked. But these funds and the projects they support, nationwide, should be noted. From more than $3 million going to initiatives strictly labeled “Music” (exclusive of “Musical Theater” or “Opera”) here’s my subjective selection of 50 grants referencing “jazz” and beyond.

The largest amounts among them go to Carnegie Hall to celebrate

Philip Glass’s 80th birthday ($85k and there’s a second grant on this theme, of $30k to the Pacific Symphony in Irvine CA ); to the Kennedy Center to present NEA Jazz Masters ($65K — I just heard Jazz Master pianist Randy Weston perform there, new arrangements of circa WWI music of James Reese Europe, a worthy program), and to the New Music America Foundation, ($60k to support the estimable and invaluable website NewMusicBox.org).

Most of the grants are far less. I believe there’s enormous return to the public on $10,000 to $15,000 spent on underwriting festivals, concert series, unusual performances, installations and education programs in communities from Northville, Michigan to Lorman, Mississippi, Woodstock NY (and Manhattan, Chinatown, Brooklyn) to Minneapolis-St. Paul, Chicago, Oakland, LA, Toledo, Juneau, Pittsburgh, Sioux Falls, Ann Arbor, Santa Cruz, Louisville, Phoenix, and so on.

Sound investments, each one of these events (and many more supported by the NEA — really, see what good our taxes do, so cheaply. By comparision, $25 mil is the “relatively miniscule” (Time magazine, Jan 3 2018) amount just approved to fund development of a new road-mobile, ground-launched cruise missile, which Time reports is prohibited by Cold War agreements.

Oh, never mind. Here’s an entr’acte, then the grants.

  • Akropolis Quintet Inc. (aka Akropolis Reed Quintet) $10,000 Northville, MI To support “Together We Sound,” a festival of contemporary music by the Akropolis Reed Quintet.
  • Albany Symphony Orchestra, Inc. (aka Albany Symphony) $15,000 Albany, NY To support the American Music Festival.
  • Alcorn State University $10,000 Lorman, MS To support musical performances and an educational workshop at the Alcorn State University Jazz Festival.
  • Bang on a Can, Inc. (aka Bang on a Can) $50,000 Brooklyn, NY To support the Summer Festival of Music, a performance series and residency program for emerging composers and contemporary music performers.
  • Berklee College of Music, Inc. $25,000 Boston, MA To support musical performances and related educational and outreach activities at the Berklee BeanTown Jazz Festival.
  • Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music (aka Cabrillo Music Festival) $25,000 Santa Cruz, CA To support the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music.
  • Carnegie Hall Corporation (aka Carnegie Hall (CH)) $85,000 New York, NY To support a concert series celebrating the works of composer Philip Glass (see also Pacific Symphony).
  • Chicago Jazz Orchestra Association (aka Chicago Jazz Orchestra) $10,000 Skokie, IL To support a tribute concert to NEA Jazz Master Nancy Wilson.
  • Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra $40,000 Cincinnati, OH To support Classical Roots, a series of concerts and recitals in celebration of African-American musical heritage.
  • Columbia University in the City of New York (on behalf of Miller Theatre) $30,000 New York, NY To support artist fees and production expenses for the Composer Portraits and Pop-up Concerts at Miller Theatre.
  • Creative Music Foundation, Inc. (aka Creative Music Studio) $10,000 Woodstock, NY To support a series of concert performances featuring jazz and poetry.
  • Cuyahoga Community College Foundation (on behalf of Tri-C JazzFest Cleveland) $20,000 Cleveland, OH To support musical performances and educational activities at the Tri-C JazzFest jazz festival.
  • Da Camera Society of Texas (aka Da Camera of Houston) $25,000 Houston, TX To support presentations of chamber music and jazz with related educational activities.
  • DC Jazz Festival $35,000 Washington, DC To support musical performances as well as educational activities and audience engagement events at the DC Jazz Festival.
  • Earshot Jazz Society of Seattle (aka Earshot Jazz) $25,000 Seattle, WA To support musical performances and other activities at the Earshot Jazz Festival.
  • East Bay Performing Arts (aka Oakland Symphony) $10,000 Oakland, CA To support Notes from the African Diaspora, a concert performed by the Oakland Symphony.
  • Eighth Blackbird Performing Arts Association (aka Eighth Blackbird) $25,000 Chicago, IL To support the Blackbird Creative Lab, a training program for instrumentalists and composers.
  • Elaine Kaufman Cultural Center-Lucy Moses School for Music and Dance (aka Kaufman Music Center) (on behalf of Merkin Concert Hall) $15,000 New York, NY To support the Ecstatic Music Festival at Merkin Concert Hall.
  • Festival of New Trumpet Music, Inc. (aka FONT Music) $10,000. New York, NY To support the Festival of New Trumpet Music.
  • Healdsburg Jazz Festival, Inc. (aka Healdsburg Jazz) $20,000 Healdsburg, CA To support musical performances at the Healdsburg Jazz Festival 20th anniversary celebration.
  • Hear Now Music Festival $10,000 Los Angeles, CA To support the Hear Now Music Festival.
  • Hot Summer Jazz Festival (aka Twin Cities Jazz Festival) $10,000 Saint Paul, MN To support free musical performances at the Twin Cities Jazz Festival.
  • Hyde Park Jazz Festival $15,000 Chicago, IL To support concert performances, commissions, and other activities at the Hyde Park Jazz Festival.
  • Jazz Bakery Performance Space (aka The Jazz Bakery) $25,000 Beverly Hills, CA To support concerts and educational activities featuring NEA Jazz Masters.
  • Jazz Foundation of America, Inc. (aka Jazz Foundation of America) $15,000 New York, NY To support curated musical performances as part of the Gig Fund program.
  • Jazz Gallery $25,000 New York, NY To support performance opportunities and a professional development program for emerging jazz artists.
  • Jazz House Kids, Inc. $45,000 Montclair, NJ To support free musical performances and related family-oriented activities at the Montclair Jazz Festival.
  • John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (aka The Kennedy Center) $65,000 Washington, DC To support a series of concerts featuring NEA Jazz Masters and other legendary musicians.
  • Juneau Jazz & Classics, Inc. (aka Juneau Jazz & Classics) $15,000 Juneau, AK To support musical performances and educational activities at the Juneau Jazz & Classics Festival.
  • Kerrytown Concert House, Inc. (aka Kerrytown Concert House) $12,500 Ann Arbor, MI To support the Edgefest experimental music festival.
  • Kuumbwa Jazz Society (aka Kuumbwa Jazz aka KJ) $15,000 Santa Cruz, CA To support a jazz concert series.
  • Living Jazz $10,000 Oakland, CA To support a musical tribute honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • Louisville Orchestra $15,000 Louisville, KY To support guest artist fees and travel for the Festival of American Music.
  • Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild (aka MCG Youth & Arts) $12,500 Pittsburgh, PA To support a jazz concert series featuring artists and orchestras of various styles.
  • Monterey Jazz Festival $35,000 Monterey, CA To support performances, commissions, and related educational and audience engagement activities at the Monterey Jazz Festival.
  • Music at the Anthology, Inc. (aka MATA) $10,000 New York, NY To support the 20th anniversary MATA Festival of new music.
  • Music From China, Inc. (aka Music From China) $10,000 New York, NY To support a commissioning and performance project of contemporary Chinese music.
  • Musical Instrument Museum (aka MIM) $12,500 Phoenix, AZ To support a program for foster children and foster families that offers access to the Musical Instrument Museum along with attendance at musical performances and participation in workshops and other educational activities.
  • Natural History Museum of the Adirondacks (aka The Wild Center) $10,000 Tupper Lake, NY To support The Wild Center’s commissioning of an outdoor music installation by composer Pete M. Wyer.
  • New Music USA Inc (aka New Music USA) $60,000 New York, NY To support new music through online resources at NewMusicBox.org and newmusicusa.org.
  • Outpost Productions, Inc. (aka Outpost) $25,000 Albuquerque, NM To support musical performances, educational and related audience engagement activities at the New Mexico Jazz Festival.
  • Post-Classical Ensemble, Inc. (aka PostClassical Ensemble) $30,000 Washington, DC To support a vocal and choral performance project celebrating the contributions of African-American composer, arranger, and baritone Henry Thacker “Harry” Burleigh (1866-1949).
  • San Diego Symphony Orchestra Association (aka SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY) $20,000 San Diego, CA To support a music festival exploring the connection of rhythm and beat in the human experience.
  • Savannah Music Festival, Inc. (aka Savannah Music Festival) $40,000 Savannah, GA To support the annual Savannah Music Festival.
  • South Dakota Symphony Orchestra (aka SDSO) $12,500 Sioux Falls, SD To support Phase III of the Lakota Music Project.
  • Third Coast Percussion NFP (aka Third Coast Percussion) $10,000 Chicago, IL To support a pilot program of cross-genre collaborations with underrepresented artistic voices.
  • Toledo Orchestra Association, Inc. (aka Toledo Symphony Orchestra) $10,000 Toledo, OH To support the orchestra’s music festival celebrating the contributions of African-American musicians.
  • University of Chicago (aka University of Chicago, UChicago, UofC) $25,000 Chicago, IL To support the presentation of a performance project highlighting the music, influences, and legacy of Hungarian-born composer Gyorgy Ligeti (1923-2006).
  • University of Northern Colorado $20,000 Greeley, CO To support musical performances and educational workshops at the UNC/Greeley Jazz Festival.
  • VocalEssence $35,000 Minneapolis, MN To support the annual WITNESS choral performance project celebrating the contributions of African Americans.

I hasten to repeat — this is a selection out of hundreds of NEA supported programs. Jazz, new and unusual music are also funded, if indirectly, in grants categorized as going to dance, folk and traditional arts, local arts agencies, media arts, museums, presenting and multi-disciplinary works. Every state from Alabama to Wyoming as well as the District of Columbia got funds. Support continued funding for the NEA.
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Jazz Congress, Winter JazzFest, shape of jazz to come

The first Jazz Congress co-hosted by Jazz at Lincoln Center and JazzTimes magazine Jan 11 and 12, 2018 and the 14th annual Winter JazzFest Marathon produced in downtown Manhattan Jan 12 and 13, offered contrasts and prompted crosstalk. It wasn’t like these were conventions of different parties, but different narratives were going down.

The Congress’s sessions included JALC managing and artistic director Wynton Marsalis speaking on race and jazz, women in jazz announcing “yes, we’re here,” and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar keynoting about his love of the music. It was a schmooze fest for managers, publicists, presenters, musicians, writers, photographers, recording company execs and die-hard fans, who enjoyed themselves in JALC’s comfortable and scenic spaces.

The WJF produced by Bryce Rosenbloom’s Boom Collective presented some 100 concerts in 11 venues, showing rather than telling who’s doing what in the marketplace of rhythmic-driven vernacular songs and improvisation. It was flush with fervor, attended by folks with obviously wide-open ears.

Here’s Marsalis despairing that black people don’t support jazz, that the young are ashamed of the swing beat, that black music is willfully ignored by music  conservatories, that white people can’t dance. Pianist/writer Ethan Iverson mostly nods in agreement, announcing that jazz is black music but we’re all Omni-Americans (the late Albert Murray’s admirable assertion).

Jazz And Race: A Conversation – Jazz Congress 2018 from Wynton Marsalis on Vimeo.

No single clip can encompass the creative/political/sonic thrust of 2018 WJF — which after Marathon weekend continued another five days, with star-heavy tributes to Alice Coltrane and Geri Allen, for instance — but here’s a taste from the WJF appearance of singer Jose James at le Poisson Rouge, revisiting Bill Wither’s 1972 folk-rock-r&B hit “Use Me” (which Esther Phillips covered that same year,

and the Portuguese-Australian-Netherlandquintet Mn’Jam Experiment has more recently, with improvised video). A purist might disavow any of these three versions as jazz. Whatever. I like it.

The best WJF sets I heard were —

  • an artfully conceived and unusually well-realized melding of spoken word with unconventional music in “Art and Anthem: For Gwendolyn Brooks,” by WJF artist-in-residence flutist Nicole Mitchell, with pianist Jason Moran, poet Erica Hunt, singer Shana Tucker, bassist Brad Jones and drummer Shirazette Tinnen in brilliant ensemble (Rashida Brumbray also did some emphatic dancing);
  • hot new vocalist Jazzmeia Horn, advancing the approach of Betty Carter, at the commanding center of her tough, blowing band (and with two Grammy nominations for her debut album A Social Call;
  • scabrously sarcastic and nobly tender songs of resistance by Marc Ribot, playing a beat-up old acoustic guitar and ukelele, with loose accompaniment from powerful tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, acidic altoist Briggan Krauss, supporting singer and flutist Domenica Fossati;
  • a 1:30 am – 2:30 am hit by ultra-charged electric bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma’s Brotherzone with electric guitarist Ronnie Drayton and drummer Darryl Burgee, members of the original ’70s Last Poets and their protégé, poet Wadud Ahmad.

Pace Wynton Marsalis, who truly does travel the spaceways trying to stir up mainstream audiences for “jazz” and has been singing his downbeat tune for a while, here was considerable evidence “jazz” is healthy, provided we allow “jazz” to be defined by people interested in (as well as artists exploring) what its variable parameters suggest it might be. “Jazz,” our most immediately engaged of art forms is, from my experience at WJF, my usual perspective in Chicago and global correspondence, responding with openness, daring, unbowed energy and spirit to  social, economic and technological developments in real time, virtually everywhere.

The acts I cite above and others at the Marathon — flutist Jamie Baum’s Septet introducing new material; the Sun Ra Arkestra interacting with its 40- 

year-old soundtrack on the Ra-on-film spectacle Space Is The Place; a clangorous attempt by out-jazz/black rock trio Harriet Tubman plus ringers to update Ornette Coleman’s iconic suite Free Jazz — as a matter of course featured multi-racial/religious/ethnic/gendered personnel. Exception proving the rule: saxophone terror James Carter’s Electrik Outlet, four guys who didn’t get the memo re: backing off on sexual innuendo.

 I walked the Marathon route from the New School’s Tishman Auditorium to Subculture on Bleeker and Lafayette, in New York University territory, and everywhere were audiences of wide age span and diverse ancestry. Perhaps not as many, not as young or diverse, not as easily drawn in as we of the hardcore would like, but it’s not a scene in downturn, either — except maybe financially. Which is, of course, a catastrophe, since even jazz musicians (and jazz journalists) have to eat.

Of course, this was Manhattan during a special week in musical presentation, facing an international audience. The convention of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters — those who book artists for your elite venues — was going on, and globalFEST, and other showcases like the club Birdland’s multi-night stand of Vijay Iyer’s sextet of heavies from his critically hailed ECM album Far From Over were scheduled with this in mind. True, ching-ching-a-ling swing as established in the 1930s was not the predominant WJF beat. But I did hear drumming — by Tyshawn Sorey, Matt Wilson, J.T. Lewis and Ms. Tinnin, check ’em out — that swung hard, informed by Art Blakey, Max Roach, Dannie Richmond, Tony Williams, and others of the tradition.

Jamaaladeen Tacuma, photo by Mitch Myers

I prefer music that takes its momentum from the bottom up, rather than float moodily and ethereally, so that’s what I pursued. There were probably WJF sets that didn’t grip or groove, but everyone I heard was thinking about form and substance, and hoped to engage listeners rather than assume their attentions.

There was music at the Jazz Congress. The JALC’s rotunda stage, with floor-to-ceiling windows viewing Columbus Circle and Central Park, had student groups mostly serving as backdrops. But then the Congress was meant to be a venue for bringing up if not working out issues affecting the music’s current ecosystem. The emphasis was on hot topics and casual bump-intos.

So I heard NPR and DownBeat contributor Michelle Mercer moderate a panel on “Women in Jazz” (as distinct from the one she moderated for the JJA’s Jan. 13 Jazz Media Summit on women in jazz journalism). On it, trumpeter/teacher/activist Ellen Seeling explained what it’s taken to get Marsalis’s Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra to institute blind auditions and published notification for jobs. Trumpeter Ingrid Jensen and writer John Murph commented on their work lives, being mostly positive but reporting fulltime awareness that biases about gender, race, sexual orientation, class, etc. might affect professional relationships. Drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, honored by the Congress with its Bruce Lundvall Visionary Award, spoke of mentoring middle school girls learning to play jazz as well as later — and perhaps even earlier — students.

Abdul-Jabbar, beloved for his basketball prowess and unforced charm, in his keynote address (starting in this video at 42 minutes in), told of loving the music. Nothing new there, but he got a standing ovation. There were also presentations by producers of the NPR/WBGO/Jazz at Lincoln Center radio-and- video show Jazz Night in America and independent programmers forums organized by JazzWeek. It’s good to see people from all across the US — Randall Kline of SFJazz, John Gilbreath of Earshot Jazz in Seattle, Tom Guralnick out of Albuquerque, Terri Pontremoli from Cleveland’s Tri-C Jazz Festival, Mark Christman of Ars Nova Workshop, Philadelphia as well as colleagues from France (journalist/broadcaster Alex Duthil), Zurich (Intakt Records producer Patrick Landolt), Toronto (Jane Bunnett and Larry Cramer), London (John Cummings), Bremen (Peter Schulze of JazzAhead!), and lots of East Coast-based associates.

The Jazz Congress replaced the Jazz Connect conference formerly run by JazzTimes and the Jazz Forward Coalition. Coalition principals such as Don Lucoff (DLMedia, PDX Jazz/Portland OR) and Peter Gordon (Thirsty Ear Records) addressed the Congress, too. A good time was had. And then to hear music in New York City! With jazz of the WJF calibre available to record and tour, listenership could grow, if the sector figured out a business model. For all the talk at the Congress, little of it focused on tapping new income streams. At the JazzFest, the plan was, “We’ll play, you’ll come.” Yeah, if folks find out about it, and the show’s not too far from home.

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Howard Mandel

I'm a Chicago-born (and after 32 years in NYC, recently repatriated) writer, editor, author, arts reporter for National Public Radio, consultant and nascent videographer -- a veteran freelance journalist working on newspapers, magazines and websites, appearing on tv and radio, teaching at New York University and elsewhere, consulting on media, publishing and jazz-related issues. I'm president of the Jazz Journalists Association, a non-profit membership organization devoted to using all media to disseminate news and views about all kinds of jazz.
My books are Future Jazz (Oxford U Press, 1999) and Miles Ornette Cecil - Jazz Beyond Jazz (Routledge, 2008). I was general editor of the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz and Blues (Flame Tree 2005/Billboard Books 2006). Of course I'm working on something new. . . Read More…

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