Commenting after my Cecil Taylor postings, correspondent “Jake” reports  Alex Ross “publicly champions Cecil Taylor . ..  lists the rather obscure FMP big band record “Alms/Tiergarten (Spree)” as among his favorite pop/jazz recordings and wrote an appreciation of the maestro (paired with Sonic Youth) in The New Yorker way back in ’98 . I […]
Live in New York, it’s jazz beyond jazz
Presentations of jazz that break all sorts of bounds, pushing far beyond stale conventions — jazz beyond jazz — are so prevalent in Manhattan that the energy expended just being on the scene can leave me too drained to report on the good stuff. Five shows in the past month –Â Dee Dee Bridgewater’s Mali project […]
Benefits of aficionado-programmed fests
The best thing about the Chicago Jazz Festival is that it’s curated by an independent committee of people (mostly from the Jazz Institute of Chicago) who really love music, rather than being overly influenced by promoters, booking agents and managers representing a few big name artists who are trying to fill blank dates during their […]