Jazz Beyond Jazz

Howard Mandel's Urban Improvisation

Reasons to be cheerful: Wynton books Ornette

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. 

This booking might seem like a point of departure for JALC, which has a reputation for being tradition- rather than innovation-minded, but it really isn’t. The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra performed its members’ original arrangements of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Coleman’s music in January 2004. Here’s Wynton soloing on Ornette’s tune “Free” from an LCJO concert in Salt Lake City:
 
 

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Wein’s jazz fest without JVC Corp

Calling all jazz sponsors: that’s the message producer George Wein released today (March 17) in search of corporate support for his proposed 55th anniversary Newport Jazz Festival.
So doing, Wein also announced the end of a 24-year association with JVC Corp., the electronics manufacturer that has been title sponsor of fests formerly staged by Wein’s company Festival Productions in New York, Chicago, LA, Concord CA, Miami and Paris. If JVC has pulled out of sponsoring jazz fests — and not just disassociating with Wein — the effect will be widespread. No details on any of these events happening in 2009 have yet surfaced, although Holland’s North Sea Jazz Festival 2009 website still bears a JVC sponsor logo.

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Happy Birthday, Fred Anderson

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. 

A founding member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, Anderson stayed home when the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, Leo Smith and even motivating AACM co-founder Muhal Richard Abrams left for greener pastures. Anderson has always been unassuming to the point of self-deprecation: he didn’t record under his own name the U.S. until The Missing Link in 1979. But long before then he was positively community-minded, able again and again to find places for himself and musicians he mentored to play and be heard, which has been neither easy nor financially lucrative.

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PBS fundraising week: jazz & soul tv abounds

What gets New Yorkers to watch and/or contribute to PBS? Jazz, blues, r&b — American vernacular music, of course.

I assume it’s time for WLIW‘s spring fundraiser, for instance, because “New York Public Television” has scheduled for one evening (March 11) of prime time the smooth r&b couple Ashford and Simpson in performance at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency; photogenic trumpeter Chris Botti

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.

This tv show, produced between the album’s two recording sessions, has kerchief-wearing Davis leading John Coltrane, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb through “So What” (but not Cannonball Adderley and Bill Evans, who also were key to the music’s success). Shot in black and white with an air of intensity and reverence, the show also includes Davis’ great friend and collaborator Gil Evans gently conducting a chamber orchestra. It has been available on various video collections for years, and of course can be viewed on YouTube, too.

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Recent NEA grants-getters win again in Arts Recovery act

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. . . 


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. 

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”?

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George Wein to produce Newport jazz & folk fests

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.

Wein, age 83, a pianist and memoirist as well as impresario, has put on jazz and folk fests in Newport, and an array of other jazz fests across the U.S. and in Europe, with sponsorship of JVC U.S.A., a division of the audio and video gear manufacturer owned by Victor Company of Japan for 25 years (prior to that the fests had other corporate sponsors). But the press release makes no mention of JVC or of the Festival Network, LLC, the company that resulted from Wein’s merger of his Festival Productions with Shoreline Media in 2007, now reported to be in deep financial distress.

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Blunt notes from casual CD listening — reactions, not reviews

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? 

Years ago when I was reviewing recordings regularly for such publications as Down Beat, The Chicago Daily News, Illinois Entertainer, the Village Voice, Music & Sound Output, Audio and Jazziz, I would listen closely and many, many times while writing, trying to get far into the music so as to do justice to efforts artists had put enormous personal energy into. The comments that follow are based on much less attentiveness than that; my judgements were hasty and my notes are blunt. But from my experience working as a teenager in Chicago’s Jazz Record Mart, hanging around various public radio stations over four decades and having informal listening sessions with friends and colleagues, this casual way of encountering new releases is more typical than concentration and immersion. So for what it’s worth, I’m posting what I wrote for my Facebook “friends” for my blog readers to see, too. Take what follows as reactions and responses, rather than reviews. 

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Big Ears in the White House: Obama’s boomer soul, and predecessors

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?

                                               

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Jajouka-beyond-jazz, public interviews and local acts at Portland fest

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.”

Such comments didn’t keep the fest’s Friday night jam session from having a tap-dancing alto  sax player who calls himself Shoehorn (photo slideshow here by R. Andrew Lepley) do a tune,
 Shoehorn.jpg
or audiences from sitting raptly for arch cabaretiste Patricia Barber, the Spirits of Havana quintet led by Canadian sax-and-flutist Jane Bunnett, electric guitarist Pat Martino‘s organ trio. Out of such disparate entertainments, festivity is born.

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Safety net tears: E*Trade ends emergency funds for jazz musicians

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.  

Jazz musicians in the United States almost never have pensions and seldom get health insurance through employers (I bet that’s the case for most American rap, rock, pop, polka, folk, country and probably the majority of classical musicians, too). At the JFA’s Great Night In Harlem fundraiser held August 29, 2001, R. Jarrett Lilien, then Chief Operating Officer of E*Trade Financial and now President of the Jazz Foundation, announced the establishment of a standing fund to provide assistance to musicians in need. The JFA claims that since Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, more than 3500 musicians have been helped with these monies. With E*Trade bowing out, the JFA seeks a new $150,000 sponsor for its housing fund. 

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Portland jazz fest hails Blue Note, cancels Cassandra

The PDX Jazz Festival in Portland, Oregon last week began to garner good reviews for its programs, many of which celebrate the 70th anniversary of the founding of Blue Note Records. Yet as the first major jazz festival of 2009, it may be the canary in the coalmine regarding effects of the economic downturn. Last fall Alaska Airlines rescued the fest from folding after its major funder, Seattle-based Qwest Communications, pulled out, having been one of the decade’s 25-worst performing S&P 500 Index stocks. Now, according to PDX Jazz artistic director Bill Royston, severely disappointing ticket sales forced his cancellation of a major show scheduled for Friday 2/20 headlined by singer Cassandra Wilson, with pianist Jason Moran‘s band as an opening act.

“I’ve never cancelled a show before in 30 years,” Royston told me, continuing, “Other than sales, which are somewhat down across the boards, we’re doing fine.”

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Al Green and Sonny Rollins, now and then

Al Green, age 62, won two Grammy awards last week  — Best R&B Performance by a Duo for “Stay with Me (By the Sea)” and Best Traditional R&B Vocal Performance for “You’ve Got The Love I Need” — and of course out-classed Justin Timberlake on the televised award program singing his 1972 classic “Let’s Stay Together.” 

Sonny Rollins, 78, won Record of the Year in the VIllage Voice’s 3rd annual jazz critics’ poll, with Road Shows Vol. 1  (which made my 2008 10-best list) and resumes touring in April with concerts in Arkansas, Miami and California.  
Picture of: Road Shows, Vol. 1  Both Green and Rollins are captured at the earlier career peaks by documentarian Robert Mugge — who I spoke to recently — in his movies The Gospel According to Al Green and Sonny Rollins, Saxophone Colossus, from 1984 and 1986 respectively, newly available on DVD by Acorn Media. 

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Eddie Palmieri sets Jazz at Lincoln Center afire

Eddie Palmieri, the genius and prophet of Afro-Caribbean jazz, showed Herbie Hancock, maybe Wynton Marsalis and certainly the roaring audience at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Hall a thing or three last weekend. His band La Perfecta II, reconstituting the instrumentation and compositions for mambo, cha-cha and pachanga dancing Palmieri introduced in 1961, blew the lid off the joint as I’ve heard no other band do since it opened in 2004, establishing Latin music’s clavé rhythm for all time at the core of what Marsalis likes to call “the house that swing built.” 

Swing they did, La Perfecta, swing hard, with style, precision and vengeance much more driving, cool and fiery than anything else taken for swing today. If only the Rose Hall seats could have been pushed aside for dancing. Swing, swivel, dip, cut, twist, step, shift, glide, gesture — faster, faster, faster — in perfect syncopation with the polyrhythmic percussion, the riffing trombones and trumpet, the steely-plucked trés and full-bodied but sparely applied flute.
Palmieri at the piano – age 73, dapper in suit and yellow tie, busy cueing his horns, supporting his elegant yet impassioned male singers, goosing the tempo kept by his deft young bassist and veteran conga player, breaking into unpredictably funky or classical, flowing or staggered keyboard solos — is probably the last surviving bandleader in America today who makes “swing” transcend its historic import to render big band virtuosity, intensity and density at highest speeds more immediate than tomorrow’s pop. His music isn’t  contemporary, it’s immediate, and thus timeless.
He expands on an extraordinary American idiom — check out this clip from a Fania All-Stars session of Palmieri, the “Sun of Latin Music” with fellow keyboardists Larry Harlow and Papo Lucca, Johnny Pacheco playing flute and Ismael Quintana singing lead: 

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