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Jazz Beyond Jazz

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...]

Digging Our Roots videos, speakers inspire engagement

May 25, 2019 by Howard Mandel

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 Institute of Chicago and Jazz Journalists Association. Full disclosure: I sit on the JIC … [Read more...]

Jazz community upends Englewood’s bad rep

September 20, 2017 by Howard Mandel

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...]

Chicago Jazz Fest expanded review & Deutsch photos

September 5, 2017 by Howard Mandel

My DownBeat review of the 39th annual Chicago Jazz Festival held over Labor Day weekend in and spilling out of Millennium Park, highlights the best I heard -- including the specially organized big band led by trumpeter Jon Faddis, making big fun from his mentor Dizzy Gillespie's fresh-as-fire arrangements dating 60 to 70 years back. (Gotta wonder what a music fan raised on the past decades' pop, country and rap but who never heard anything like this would make of the power of 16 players so synced in rhythm, tune and spirit, partying with … [Read more...]

Jazz/Improv Chicago: Wide-ranging talents, free fests, PoKempner pix

August 28, 2017 by Howard Mandel

Chicago's jazz/improvised music scene contains multitudes, last week ranging from the wild yet earnest Liberation Music Collective to veteran piano sophisticate Michael Weiss in trio, as two of Marc PoKempner's photos document (and more of his vision, focused on links between local music and politics -- Obama included -- is on exhibit titled "Harold's Got the Blues" for the next month at the restaurant Wishbone). The Liberation Music Collective, a young ensemble led by bassist-vocalist-lyricist Hannah Fidler and trumpeter-conductor Matt … [Read more...]

Dr. Richard Wang, enabler of AACM experimentalists, RIP

October 12, 2016 by Howard Mandel

In his first college teaching job at Wilson Junior College during the early 1960s, trumpeter Dick Wang encountered a cadre of exploratory young Chicago musicians who would soon form the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians). He encouraged them. He introduced Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman and Malachi Favors, Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, Ari Brown and others to the writings of Paul Hindemith and Arnold Schoenberg; he instituted weekly a "head-knocking" jam sessions for these players, and cheered on their efforts to … [Read more...]

A Great Migration suite from trumpeter Orbert Davis: Audio interview

August 23, 2016 by Howard Mandel

Orbert Davis -- trumpeter, composer and leader of the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, has been commissioned by the Jazz Institute of Chicago to write and perform a suite about the Great Migration for the 38th annual free Chicago Jazz Festival. "Soul Migration," for octet, will be heard Sept 1 at 8 pm in Millennium Park's Pritzker Pavillion. With the composition in progress, Orbert spoke about it with me at his home studio, demonstrating with some synthesized samples and even improvising a theme. Thanks to Collin Ashmead-Bobbit for recording the … [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...]

Announcing eyeJAZZ.tv & Happy 45th b’day AACM

November 22, 2010 by Howard Mandel

eyeJAZZ.tv, a wave of guerrilla video music-news clips being initiated by the Jazz Journalists Association, has posted its first example -- my brief production from last week's 45th birthday concert of the AACM featuring composer-saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, flutist and AACM chair Nicole Mitchell (no relation) and saxophonist Ari Brown, at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. … [Read more...]

Best American city for jazz? Chicago

September 20, 2009 by Howard Mandel

I'm a Chicago homie -- long removed but never really gone -- so don't expect objectivity, but a recent visit proved my native metropolis is #1 in America and maybe everywhere for its active, creative, meaningful, almost-economically-viable, neighborhood-rooted, exploratory and world class jazz. I say this even as my dearly adopted New York City kickstarts as freshly energized a fall season as any I recall.Jazz is the lifeblood of Chicago in a way it ain't in NYC, at least not right now. Jazz-soul-blues is Chicago's street music. Chicago's … [Read more...]

Michelle Obama refutes jazz as boys’ club

June 23, 2009 by Howard Mandel

There are "powerful reasons . . .we ought to consider" for why musicians and listeners "tend to be a brotherhood," according to a self-described "middle-aged white male swing-to-bopper." He's identifying, not justifying . . .Then the First Lady upsets the paradigm. She brings her daughters to the gig.I've got pressing deadlines, but luckily several lengthy, thoughtful responses to recent blog postings, so here's one of a series by correspondents of Jazz Beyond Jazz. Paul Lindemeyer ia a multi-talented reeds musician/big band … [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...]

Recent Comments

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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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