Roscoe Mitchell — internationally renown composer, improviser, ensemble leader, winds and reeds virtuoso who has pioneered the use of “little instruments” and dramatic shifts of sonic scale in the course of becoming a “supermusician . . .someone who moves freely in music, but, of course, with a well established background behind . . .”* reveals […]
Jazz Autumn: Returns, galas and even awards
If all “jazz” shares a single trait, it’s that nothing will stifle it. Adjusting to covid-19 strictures, Chicago (just for instance) in the past two months has been site of: A stellar Hyde Park Jazz Festival; Herbie Hancock’s homecoming concert at Symphony Center; audiences happily (for the most part – no reported incidents otherwise) observing […]
City of Chicago, music promoter
Lollapalooza 2021 had some 385,000 attendees (without significant Covid-19 outbreak, fortunately) but featured little of host Chicago’s indigenous talent or styles. And that’s just wrong, declared Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events commissioner Mark Kelly, launching the month-long Chicago in Tune “festival” at a reception August 19. Here’s the still-evolving event calendar of hundreds […]
Legacies of Music Makers
The deaths of multi-instrumentalist Joseph Jarman, best known as the face-painted shaman of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Alvin Fielder, re-conceptualizing drummer, remind us that artists’ contributions to music extend beyond recordings and awards. Read my essay at NPR Music, commissioned by Nate Chinen of WBGO, on the enduring legacies of Jarman and Fielder, […]
Hyde Park Jazz Fest, summer’s last dance (photos)
Chicago’s Hyde Park Jazz Festival in the first days of fall (Sept. 23 & 24th) which were unusually hot, is an exceptional event, curated for creative artistry, local and otherwise, drawing a highly diverse crowd to a fair that mixes popular and specialized performances at a range of boutique venues. Produced by an independent 501c3, the 11-year-old Hyde […]
Jazz warms Chi spots: Hot House @ Alhambra Palace, AACM @ Promontory
There are good arguments for building venues just for jazz. But speaking of arts communities in general: Most are moveable feasts, fluid, transient, at best inviting to newcomers to the table. It’s demonstrable that when jazz players and listeners alight at all-purpose spaces such as Chicago’s Alhambra Palace, where Hot House produced the trio of saxophonist David Murray, bassist […]
Dr. Richard Wang, enabler of AACM experimentalists, RIP
In his first college teaching job at Wilson Junior College during the early 1960s, trumpeter Dick Wang encountered a cadre of exploratory young Chicago musicians who would soon form the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians). He encouraged them. He introduced Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman and Malachi Favors, Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, Ari Brown […]
Journalist, yes. “Jazz” journalist — why?
Hank Shteamer, writer-on-music at Time Out New York and blogger at Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches, writes “I am not a jazz journalist” in response to “The State of Jazz Journalism Now and Immediate Prospects” town hall meeting at the Jazz Journalists Association’s “New Media for New Jazz” conference yesterday (Jan 8). He doesn’t deny that […]
Announcing eyeJAZZ.tv & Happy 45th b’day AACM
eyeJAZZ.tv, a wave of guerrilla video music-news clips being initiated by the Jazz Journalists Association, has posted its first example — my brief production from last week’s 45th birthday concert of the AACM featuring composer-saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, flutist and AACM chair Nicole Mitchell (no relation) and saxophonist Ari Brown, at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art.
AACM at 45: “Creative Musicians” span generations, U.S., globe
The AACM — Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians — continues after 45 years to encourage highly original, edgy and exciting artists — as I detail in my new City Arts column. Examples in New York City: reedist/composer Henry Threadgill’s Zooid performs tonight and tomorrow at Roulette; trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith’s 22-piece Silver Orchestra and the […]
Fred Anderson, Chicago jazz hero, appreciated
As a teenager in pursuit of the avant garde, I took tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson, who died June 24 at age 81, as a hero upon first hearing him in 1966. It was at a Unitarian Church-run coffee house in downtown Evanston near Northwestern U., and attention clearly had to be paid to the long, fierce, unreeling, knotty […]
AACM pianist & singer give away CD at NYC show
Steve Colson, pianist/composer and band leader, with vocalist Iqua Colson — a couple members of American experimental music‘s cutting edge AACM for some 35 years — give a rare performance quartet Saturday night (Feb 6) at NYC’s Thalia theater in Symphony Space. Everyone who attends gets the Colsons’ new CD, The Untarnished Dream, for free. One-time promotion? Start of […]
Chicago’s quirky hero of blues and jazz in NYT
Bob Koester, owner-operator of Delmark Records and the Jazz Record Mart, is celebrated in the New York Times’ Arts & Leisure section today. He’s documented and marketed South and West Side soul, AACM innovation, trad jazz and the Mississippi Delta blues revival. I’m among the many music fans who grew up in his sway — and include […]