Jazz Beyond Jazz

Howard Mandel's Urban Improvisation

Modern “classical” composition informing Jazz Beyond Jazz


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 wish
more classical critics and fans would deal with avant-garde jazz and
vice-versa. These musics have much in common and it seems a bit arbitrary to
choose one absolutely over the other. Howard, I’d be curious to know how much
you seek out modern classical and what you make of it. 

Well, it’s like this . . . 

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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 – Dee Dee Bridgewater’s Mali project at the Blue Note, Myra Melford‘s new quartet at Roulette, Richard Bona and Lionel Loueke in the Allen Room of Jazz at Lincoln Center, James “Blood” Ulmer with Vernon Reid’s neo-blues band at the Jazz Standard and an evening celebrating the AACM chronicle and music of George E. Lewis at the Kitchen — while different as can be, barely hint at the range of what’s happening here and now.

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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 big tours. 

Singer Dee Dee Bridgewater’s  first-time ever tribute to the late Betty Carter, her mentor, electrified the crowd at Grant Park Friday night — after drummer Thurman Barker led a brilliant set by stalwarts from Chicago’s avant garde-leaning Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), and trombonist Julian Priester soloed throughout original repertoire written by local trombonist T.S. Galloway in honor of the fabled Du Sable High School band director Capt. Walter Dyett. This is not a schedule that could have been imagined by anyone but Chicagoans intimately aware of the Chicago Jazz Fest’s 30-year history. 

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