Cecil Taylor, March 15, 1929 – April 5, 2018, photo by Sánta István Csaba Not a happy post, but a useful one: here are the hundreds of musicians and music industry activists who died in 2018, as compiled by photographer-writer Ken Franckling for the Jazz Journalists Association. Ken scoured local newspapers, the Jazzinstitut Darmstadt newsletter, AllAboutJazz.com, Wikipedia, the New York Times, Legacy.com, Rolling Stone, Variety, JazzTimes.com, blogs, listserves, Facebook pages and European publications. Links to their fuller … [Read more...]
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, Alvin Fielder, drums 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, both founding members of the still thriving Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) NY and Chicago). Joseph Jarman, bass flute … [Read more...]
Extraordinary Popular Delusions, Chicago free improv all-stars
Jim Baker, keys& synth; Brian Sandstrom, bass; Steve Hunt, drums; Ed Wilkerson, saxes, didgeridoo, oud, Mars Williams, reeds and toys -- photo by Marc PoKempner Keyboardist and synthesizer specialist Jim Baker has led the collective quartet Extraordinary Popular Delusions playing every Monday night in obscure Chicago venues for the past 13 years. My article on EPD, which features saxophonists Mars Williams and Edward Wilkerson Jr. (they switch off), multi-instrumentalist (bass, guitar, trumpet) Brian Sandstrom and percussionist/drummer … [Read more...]
Luminous PoKempner pix of Sun Ra’s celestial music
Marshall Allen, ageless 94, leads the Sun Ra Arkestra If you liked Black Panther, listen to the music that introduced and embodies Afro-Futurism. Photojournalist Marc PoKempner captured a bit of the celestial magic of the Sun Ra Arkestra (est. circa 1954) during its November touchdown in New Orleans's Music Box Village. This picturesque venue is an assembly of little houses which MPoK says "each has some sound producing capability - bells, chimes, horns, drums." (Above: Marshall Allen, Arkestra leader since 1995. All photos here Marc … [Read more...]
Labor Day jazz fests, starting with Chicago’s
The 40th annual Chicago Jazz Festival, four days free to all of unfettered, usually joyous music held in beautiful downtown Millennium Park, started last night with stars of of the local scene celebrating "Legends and Lions". Add "Ancient to the Future" to set the tone for a weekend of exciting, civically-supported music here -- and similar outpourings of jazz and blues -- America's vernacular musics -- are offered throughout the U.S. this Labor Day weekend. A quick search turns up music fests in the next days from Augusta, Georgia (Labor … [Read more...]
Synth and-sushi bar, Chicago (future jazz, present tense)
K-rAd freely improvised and spontaneously composed an original, pulsing, burbling, chiming, floating and ripping, multi-layered, deep and flowing funky-bassed, percussion-lively suite over about three hours last night (7/25/18), using his elaborate, sound-unbound Euro-rack synthesizer setup to stir, smooth and spice social interactions in a seemingly unlikely Chicago venue for such a thing. Down an alley, through a back door (see the bright red arrow) down in a basement of Sushi Dokku in Chicago's fashionable W. Randolph Street dining … [Read more...]
Cecil Taylor, dead at 89, as celebrated when he’d turned 80
The brilliant, challenging, perplexing and incomparable pianist/improviser/composer Cecil Taylor died April 5, 2018, at age 89. Here's what I wrote of him to celebrate his 80th birthday: Cecil Taylor, unique and predominant, 80 years old 3 27 09 Cecil Taylor is the world's predominant pianist by virtue of his technique, concept and imagination, and one of 20th-21st Century music's magisterial modernists. A figure through whose challenges I investigate the avant garde in Miles Ornette Cecil -- Jazz Beyond Jazz, he turned 80 on March 25 (or … [Read more...]
Jazz and beyond projects with 2018 NEA funding support
Given all the noise, the National Endowment for the Arts' $25 mil for arts, literature and education announced Feb. 7 may have been overlooked. But these funds and the projects they support, nationwide, should be noted. From more than $3 million going to initiatives strictly labeled "Music" (exclusive of "Musical Theater" or "Opera") here's my subjective selection of 50 grants referencing "jazz" and beyond. The largest amounts among them go to Carnegie Hall to celebrate Philip Glass's 80th birthday ($85k and there's a second grant on … [Read more...]
International Jazz RIPs, 2017
Photographer-writer-author Ken Franckling has painstakingly compiled a compendium of more than 400 jazz artists and associates from around the world who died in 2017, with links to obituaries of most of them. Posted at JJANews.org. It's a striking document and useful resource, though Franckling says, sadly, "The list seems to get depressingly longer each year." Maybe that's because jazz itself -- at least as so recorded and promoted -- is now more than 100 years old and the post-WWII generations that gave the art form its … [Read more...]
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 Park Jazz Festival receives some support from the University of Chicago's Office of Civic Engagement, and has co-founders in principals from the Hyde Park Jazz Society but relies … [Read more...]
Jazz community upends Englewood’s bad rep
The 18th annual free Englewood Jazz Festival in south side Hamilton Park last Saturday (9/16) affirmed the best of Chicago's grassroots culture, promoting an opposite image of this challenged neighborhood as a dangerous place -- unless one fears powerful, creative music that speaks as directly as dance rhythms to its family of listeners. Produced on behalf of the Live the Spirit Residency by saxophonist Ernest Dawkins -- current AACM Chicago chairperson, Park District music teacher and every-Sunday star at Norman's Bistro, who led … [Read more...]
My Q&A for Blues@Greece & Spirit of Jazz Award
Jazz, blues, American literature and where I'd go for a day in a time machine are topics I address in an email interview with Michalis Limnios who blogs at Blue@Greece. I post this item out of sheer vanity, reinforced by my being presented with a Spirit of Jazz Award tomorrow (9/16) by the Englewood Jazz Festival, taking place from noon to 6 pm on Chicago's South Side in Hamilton Park, not far from where I grew up. Performers include saxophonist and organizer Ernest Dawkins, singers Dee Alexander and Carolyn Fitzhugh, the Live the Spirit … [Read more...]
Youssou N’Dour on stage & screen, PoKempner photos
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...]