Chicago presenters of jazz and new music, and journalists from Madrid to the Bay Area, vocalist Kurt Elling, trumpeter Orbert Davis and pianist Lafayette Gilchrist discussed how they've transcended coronavirus-restrictions on live performances with innovative methods to sustain their communities of musicians and listeners, as well as their own enterprises were in two Zoom panels I moderated last week . The Show Goes On - Online on February 18 convened Chris Anderson of the Fulton Street Collective, trumpeter Davis of Chicago Jazz … [Read more...]
Love movies, jazz, and thinking about them? A treat
Movies, jazz and reading remain my favorite solitary diversions, and Fresh Air critic Kevin Whitehead enables immersion in all three with Play The Way You Feel: The Essential Guide to Jazz Stories on Film, his entertaining, provocative, deeply informed look at some 120 flicks and a handful of tv shows relating tales that mirror or inform American culture. From The Jazz Singer (1928), long cited as the first motion picture with sound (it wasn't exactly, but launched the form) to Bolden, a too-little distributed imagining of the first … [Read more...]
Four months of jazz adaptation, resilience, response to epidemic
In early March - only four months ago - I flew between two of the largest U.S. airports, O'Hare and JFK, to visit New York City. I stayed in an East Village apt. with my daughter and a nephew crashing on her couch. We ate barbecue at a well-attended Jazz Standard performance by drummer Dafnis Prieto's sextet, and the next day I went to a celebration of Ornette Coleman's birthday, his demise five years ago and his ongoing spirit, hosted by his son Denardo at the Coleman's midtown loft. Noted improvisers David Murray, Graham Haynes, … [Read more...]
Revered jazz elders, deceased: portraits by Sánta István Csaba
As a generation of jazz elders leaves our world -- some hastened by the pandemic -- their faces as photographed by Sánta István Csaba become even more luminous, haunting, iconic. Originally from Transylvania and currently living in Turin, the northern Italian area with heaviest covid-19 infections, Sánta reports that he is healthy, employed at the reception desk of a nearby school, and has recently been honored with a Hungarian Press Photo Award. However, with the lockdown, that Awards ceremony has been indefinitely postponed. … [Read more...]
Future Jazz past: Hal Willner, circa 1992
The death of funny, smart, idiosyncratic, unique music producer Hal Willner at age 64 saddens me. We were East Village neighbors in the go-go '90s, flush with ideas to try in the future. Here's my entry about him from Future Jazz (Oxford U Press, 1999). CONCEPT PRODUCER AS VISIONARY "My projects happen mostly by accident," claims Hal Willner, soundtrack producer of Robert Altman's films including Short Cuts, based on short stories by the late American "dirty realist" writer Raymond Carver and Kansas City, a paean to jazz during … [Read more...]
Jazz vs. lockdown: Blogs w/ vid clips defy virus muting musicians
Jazz doesn't want to stay home and chill -- so members of the Jazz Journalists Association launched on Monday, 3/15/2020, JazzOnLockdown: Hear It Here, a series of curated v-logs featuring performance videos of musicians whose gigs have been postponed or cancelled due to coronavirus concerns. The initial JOL post, by Madrid blogger Mirian Arbalejo (of MissingDuke.com) is dedicated to Marcelo Peralta, Argentine born/Spanish resident saxophonist-composer-arranger who is reportedly the first jazz musician to succumb to the illness. The … [Read more...]
Mardi Gras’ lewd Krewe, Marc Pokempner’s photos
Krewe du Vieux Carré puts on the most satirical and scatalogical of New Orlean's pre-Mari Gras parades, says photo-journalist Marc PoKempner, whose images © here provide convincing evidence. PoKempner writes: "Our dysfunctional evil-clown-in-chief figured prominently in this years’ Krewe du Vieux parade and the immediately following krewedelusion -- an annual outpouring of satirical, political, scatological and outrageous imagery that can always be counted on to top the charts of the crude, lewd and rude. At once the most topical and most … [Read more...]
Chicago Jazz fest images, echoes
The 41st annual Chicago Jazz Festival has come and gone, as I reported for DownBeat.com in quick turnaround. I stand by my lead that the music was epic -- cf. Marc PoKempner's beautiful image of the Art Ensemble of Chicago at Pritzker Pavillion, facing east towards Mecca just before their African percussion-driven orchestral set. And epochal, yes: the Art Ensemble is 50 years old, as discussed in my radio piece for NPR's Here and Now). Such longevity is remarkable for any jazz or improvisational unit but the more so as the AEC in its … [Read more...]
Transcending Toxic Times with street poetry & music
My DownBeat article about Transcending Toxic Times, the compulsively listenable, critically political album by the Last Poets produced by electric bassist/composer Jamaaladeen Tacuma, includes a lot of quotes from my interviews with him and poet Abiudon Oyewale. I reproduced some of the searing imagery/lyrics on the recording, and provided background on how these men have been calling out American mendacy and hypocrity for half-a-century, as black street seers emerging in the late 1960s -- before poetry jams, signifyin' djs or rappers -- … [Read more...]
Dr. John, Back in the Day and Blindfolded
Dr. John the Night Tripper -- Mac Rebbanack, New Orleans' musical fabulist, dead June 6 at age 77 -- dazzled me at one of the first rock shows I recall attending, at Chicago's Aragon Ballroom circa 1969. I was then enthralled by Gris-gris, his murky, obscure and carnivalesque debut album, having never heard anything like it (and I still haven't -- thanks perhaps to the great, less- heralded producer Harold Battiste). I was thrilled to Blindfold Test Mac for DownBeat in 1984. He came to listen in my grubby East Village apartment. Years … [Read more...]
Black Chicago music fest producers: The costs of “free”
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...]
Digging Our Roots videos, speakers inspire engagement
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 Institute of Chicago and Jazz Journalists Association. Full disclosure: I sit on the JIC … [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...]