Billy Branch watches Sonny Boy (Rice Miller) Williamson II; photo by Alan Frolichstein Nearly 100 Chicagoans (maybe some visitors?) watched Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Junior Wells, Buddy Guy and other heroes of the blues on videos at the Cultural Center Thursday night (5/23/19), with harmonica star Billy Branch and WDCB program host Leslie Keros telling stories and participated in lively interplay with knowing attendees. It was the fifth Digging Our Roots: Chicago's Greatest Hits "listening session" this spring, co-presented by the Jazz … [Read more...]
Guitarist Kenny Burrell shouldn’t be in trouble. But he is.
Guitarist Kenny Burrell -- since the 1950s a prominent, popular and influential jazz innovator, recording ace, bandleader and esteemed educator (prof and director of Jazz Studies at UCLA) -- at age 87 is suffering grievous financial calamity due to health care costs and multiple frauds. His plight is candidly detailed by his wife Katherine at their GoFundMe campaign site, her story verified by The Jazz Foundation of America in its statement supporting the Burrells posted by JazzTimes magazine. Read that, then kick in, please, and demand to know … [Read more...]
Audio-video jazz improv: Mn’Jam Experiment, w/teens
What's really new in improvisational music? Where else can innovation go? Mn'JAM Experiment -- singer Melissa Oliveira and her visual/electronics/turntablist partner JAM -- are daring to mix high-tech audio-with-video media in live performance, and as they say, it's an experiment, in a direction that live performance seems sure to go. Mn'JAM, photo by Charlotte Steunebrink Grounded in jazz fundamentals (call and response, in-the-moment interactions, individualized expression, rhythmic drive, repertoire; she went to Berklee, he to New … [Read more...]
2018 jazz, blues and beyond deaths w/ links
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...]