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Howard Mandel's Urban Improvisation

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Black Chicago music fest producers: The costs of “free”

June 2, 2019 by Howard Mandel

Chicago offers, surprisingly enough, many opportunities to catch exciting, accomplished and emerging music across genres, with oodles of concerts free of charge, meaning they have to funded by others than attendees. Our extraordinary summer events season launched last weekend with the city-sponsored, all-free 34th Annual Chicago Gospel Festival in Millennium Park and I'm psyched for the 36th Annual Chicago Blues Festival next weekend (planning to somehow dart off to the Printers Row Lit Fest, simultaneously at the opposite end of the Loop) as … [Read more...]

Youssou N’Dour on stage & screen, PoKempner photos

September 14, 2017 by Howard Mandel

Photo-journalist Marc PoKempner's images from the Chicago Jazz Fest, as featured in my previous post, and these from Senegalese superstar Youssou N'Dour's rousing who two weeks earlier, exhibit how he's dealing straightforwardly and creatively with the screen backing musicians at the Pritzker Pavilion of Millennium Park. Giving us eyefuls to enjoy. Here's what we can see -- as PoKempner proves, without post-production; the double images are the videographers' superimpositions -- when visually-conscious, kinetic performing artists are … [Read more...]

Flyover country? Nonsense in jazz, politics, crime fiction

March 23, 2017 by Howard Mandel

There's no such thing as "flyover country" -- except in the minds of careless or ignorant people who ought to know better. For instance: Jazz lives throughout the US and the world, not only in New York City; Illinois presidential race voters chose Hilary Clinton by a wide margin (due largely to Democratic bastion and jazz hub Chicago) although the man who beat her nationally does not seem to have much on-the-ground experience with anywhere except his own properties, and yes, the capital of the Midwest has crime fiction writers to boast … [Read more...]

Patti Smith’s New Year’s Eve vow: “We must not behave!”

January 1, 2017 by Howard Mandel

Ushering in 2017 with Patti Smith and band at Chicago's Park West New Year's Eve was inspiriting for us of a certain age and artsy disposition. Grey-haired but loose and limber -- funny, fierce, profane and poetically incantatory -- Smith celebrated her 70th birthday in the city of her origin as if for all boomers and our progeny. At the Riviera Theatre on Dec. 30 she performed the whole of Horses, her winning 1975 debut album; on the 31st, backed by her four-man Nuggets, she offered a mixed bag including Debbie Reynold's plaintive "Tammy," … [Read more...]

Chicago’s free summer music cornucopia – Deutsch, PoKempner photos

July 20, 2016 by Howard Mandel

With a 10th annual Latin Jazz festival produced in the neighborhood Humboldt Park by the Jazz Institute of Chicago and dynamite downtown concerts with headliners such as Nigerian juju star King Sunny Adé and Afro-Cuban progressive Eddie Palmieri put on by DCASE, the city's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, Chicago's free summer music programs are well underway. Add the Museum of Contemporary Arts' weekly Tuesdays on the Terrace shows, conceded that Chicago's unparalleled Blues Fest is already over (as is Taste of Chicago, … [Read more...]

Daley bad for Windy City’s music?

September 9, 2010 by Howard Mandel

Contrary to my paean to Richard M. Daley's support of Chicago's music and arts, Chicago Tribune rock-crit Greg Kot writes of the Mayor's treatment of the local music scene as a "second class citizen." It's true the City has messed with club venues -- Marguerite Horberg of  established the multi-genre Hot House years back and now runs the progressive culture initiative Portoluz regaled me last weekend with tales of fire inspectors evacuating theaters mid-show over petty infractions and other harrassments; Kot reminds us of Chi's … [Read more...]

You’ve heard live jazz ? Tweet using #jazzlives

August 26, 2009 by Howard Mandel

Let's prove jazz lives. Tweet about live performances using hashmark #jazzlives, detailing who and when in 140 characters.Jazz fests rage across America in the next couple of weeks starting Aug. 29-30 with NYC's Charlie Parker fest, picking up Sept 4 through 6  -- Tanglewood, Chicago, Detroit, the Angel City Jazz Fest, LA's Sweet & Hot Music Festival,  the Vail Jazz Party, Philadelphia's Tony Williams Scholarship Jazz Festival plus some fests with jazz-influenced acts, rhythms and improv such as Jazz Aspen Snowmass, Seattle's Bumbershoot, … [Read more...]

hail Studs Terkel, Jazz Age Chicagoan

October 31, 2008 by Howard Mandel

A talker and listener, actor-dj-writer-oral historian, good humored realist and pragmatic idealist, Studs Terkel (1912 - 2008) stands as an American cultural patriot, who enjoyed as rich if not untroubled a life as genuinely democratic artist might hope for over the course of the 20th century -- earning Roger Ebert's thumbs up as greatest Chicagoan. Studs was hugely enthusiastic about music, loving blues as well as jazz, gospel, rootsy folk, the Great American Songbook, the soundtrack of the labor and Civil Rights movement, classical stuff too … [Read more...]

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…

About Jazz Beyond Jazz

What if there's more to jazz than you suppose? What if jazz demolishes suppositions and breaks all bounds? What if jazz - and the jazz beyond, behind, under and around jazz - could enrich your life? What if jazz is the subtle, insightful, stylish, … [Read More...]

@JazzMandel

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Interviews & Articles

ESP Disks — origins of jazz beyond jazz

Reviewing a sleeping giant, ESP Disks before its early '00s revival  Howard Mandel c 1997, published in issue 157, The Wire It was a time before psychedelics. Following the seismic cultural disruptions of the mid '50s, rock 'n' roll had hit a … [Read More...]

William Parker, my DownBeat feature from 1998

Howard Mandel c 1998/published by DownBeat, July 1998, under headline Beneath the Underdog (the editor's reference to Charles Mingus's autobiography): There's an anchor for New York's downtown free jazz and improv "wild bunch": his name is William … [Read More...]

Matthew Shipp, my feature for The Wire, 1998

[contextly_auto_sidebar id="IFeXJPobvykRyuU4dU68FilRPv0EE8oC"] This is a complete version of the feature on pianist Matthew Shipp I wrote for The Wire, published in February, 1998 Is this the face of New York's jazz avant now? Pianist Matt … [Read More...]

Rashied Ali (1935 – 2009), multi-directional drummer, speaks

A 1990 interview with drummer Rashied Ali, about his relationship with John Coltrane. … [Read More...]

On The Corner program notes, Merkin Hall concert 5/25/09

Miles Davis intended On The Corner to be a personal statement, an esthetic breakthrough and a social provocation upon its release in fall of 1972. He could hardly have been more successful: the album was all that, though it has taken decades for its … [Read More...]

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