Jazz Beyond Jazz

Howard Mandel's Urban Improvisation

Do you jazz? Yes, eyeJAZZ!

A quick glimpse of a jazz club, a chat with fans going into or leaving the show, a word with a musician coming offstage or maybe at practice — these bits of real life can be captured today in high quality video and audio equipment that’s readily at hand — mobile phones and HD pocket camcorders will do. With its eyeJAZZ.tv initiative — funded by the MidAtlantic Arts Foundation’s Jazz.NEXT project through generous support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation providing basic equipment and online training in shooting, editing, distributing and fundamentals of journalistic practices and standards to 30 successful applicants — the Jazz Journalists
Association (of which I’m pres) means to flood the web with such visions, or at least increase its population of quickly edited news clips that tell clear stories, showing great music live and well in real time, wider-spread than you might imagine, just waiting to be enjoyed.EYEjazz transparent logo.png

Apply to participate in the eyeJAZZ program now, filling out the application here. The JJA introduces eyeJAZZ formally at its “New Media for New Jazz” conference session Friday, Jan 7 at the New York Sheraton (NYC) 2:30 pm, Conference Room C — attend at no charge). Learn to get up close to musicians the better to get direct answers to questions you have about how they do it — as I asked flutist Nicole Mitchell, resulting in this clip — 

  
 
It’s easy! It’s fun! The one above was shot on a Kodak Zx1 camera using an internal mike, no extra lighting, and edited in iMovie. Got a jazz vision? Make eyeJAZZ.tv of it. Watch the widget below . . . 

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Jazz conventions, conferences, celebrations, memorial Jan 6 – 11

The jazz world convenes in two U.S. cities this weekend, as high school and college bands + directors gather at the JEN Conference in New Orleans, jazz presenters focus themselves at the APAP convention in New York City and jazz journalists get together on topics vital to better and continued music coverage at the JJA’s “New Media for New Jazz” conference, in APAP-provided spaces at the Sheraton New York, Jan 7 – 11. Concurrently, 60 new jazz ensembles  showcase in five NYC Greenwich Village clubs for Winter Jazzfest, the NEA celebrates its newly enrolled Jazz Masters at Jazz at Lincoln Center (with live streaming! — see below) and the entire community mourns/celebrates at the memorial service for Dr. Billy Taylor at Riverside Church.

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Mike Zwerin, jazz journalist, musician, bon vivant dies at 79

A trombonist in Miles Davis’ Birth of the Cool band, memoirist whose The Parisian Jazz Chronicles set a standard for wit and candor in self-examination, and writer for the International Herald Tribune and Bloomberg News, Mike Zwerin died April 2 in Paris, where he’d lived since 1969. Recipient in 2009 of the Jazz Journalists Association’s Lifetime Achievement in Jazz Journalism Award, Mike was an inspiration ever since I read his reports from the jazz scene in the Village Voice in the 1960s, and I’m glad to say I got to know him as a friend.

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Arts Presenters meet Jazz Journalists

The Jazz Journalists Association has scheduled a multi-faceted professional conference for Jan 8 – 12 in NYC, concurrent with the Association of Performing Arts Presenters annual conference (which is producing a Special Focus on Jazz), the two-night multi-venue Winter Jazzfest, one-night but multi-stage globalFEST, and the Nat’l Endowment of the Arts’s presentation of 2010’s Jazz Masters. It’s the first time the JJA (of which I’m president) has worked in conjunction with APAP and the NEA to bring the people who disseminate music news together with those who seek to make it.

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Jazz best lists of 2009

Chicago Trib cultural critic Julia Keller decries year-end “best of” lists for their “chilly, retrospective nature,”for  their by-definition 12-month perspectives trumping spontaneous enthusiasm, and for their reinforcement of consensus. Nonsense. Here are three opportunities to see what jazz critics are recommending as 2009’s hot recordings, and there’s some consistency, but most of the choices are highly individualistic and certainly reflect musical currents of right now — 

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Jazz journalism and the NAJP’s arts journalism summit

The Jazz Journalists Association, of which I’m president, has hope to produce a nationwide conference on media transitions and how currently active professionals cope with them. Today’s National Arts Journalism Program’s summit raises many of the issues and even more questions that challenge my colleagues and I. So I’m going to do some live blogging here, posting a succession of comments while in the lecture hall of Columbia U’s j-school with about a dozen other journalists, watching the summit taking place at the USC Annenberg Center in LA. Here we go, starting with my reaction to the first hour of the summit’s content (the tech’s working pretty well!)  

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Les Paul’s tongue

In 2004, photog Gene Martin asked the guitarist/inventor who’d just received the Jazz Journalists Association’s “A Team” award for activists, advocates, altruists, aiders and abettors of jazz, to pose for a portrait. . .

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Les Paul’s tongue ©Gene Martin

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Zx1 pocket camera stars at 2009 Jazz Awards!

I love My Youtube! — now hosting video clips from my handy new Kodak go-anywhere device of jazz celebs, players and presenters at the Jazz Journalists Association’s 13th annual Jazz Awards party at the Jazz Standard (NYC) June 16, shot by debuting cinematographer R. Mandel.

Brief bits of Hank Jones, the Charles Tolliver Big Band, Jane Bunnett‘s Spirits of Havana, flutist Frank Wess, trombonist Roswell Rudd, Blue Note’s Bruce Lundvall, singers Mark Murphy and Kurt Elling. A worthy Jazz Foundation pitch and SESAC toasts all the nominees! So easy to edit I’m going to re-view early Godard for jump-cut tips. So easy to upload I’m going to rethink reporting, interviewing and self-publishing strategies and techniques.

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Happy and sad news updates

Jazz Beyond Jazz was named Blog of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association at the Jazz Awards on Tuesday — and Tina Marsh, driving force of Austin creative music, died that day, too.

I’m immersed in follow-up on both these and related issues, but details and new posts are guaranteed. As 91-year-old Hank Jones said upon receiving the JJA’s award as Pianist of the Year, “This Award is an incentive to do better .”
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Announcing 13th annual JJA Jazz Awards nominees and gala

The Jazz Journalists Association — of which I’m president — has announced finalist nominees in 42 categories of excellence in jazz music, recording, presenting and journalism at a new website, www.JazzJournalists.org — which also  details who’s playing at the Jazz Standard (NYC) cocktail barbeque where winners will be announced on June 16, 3 – 6 pm. and lets you buy tickets to the event.

What’s a Jazz Award? I’m deep into it, but why should you care?

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Recent NEA grants-getters win again in Arts Recovery act

The National Endowment of the Arts’ first program of the Obama “Recovery Act” focuses on the preservation of jobs in the arts. But it upholds an adage quoted by Billie Holiday in “God Bless the Child“: “Them that’s got shall get.” Applicants must be organizations that have received NEA grants during the immediately prior four years (since 2006). The NEA’s announcement is crystal clear:

[R]ecogniz[ing] that the nonprofit arts industry is an important sector of the economy the Arts Endowment has designed a plan to expedite distribution of critical funds for the national, regional, state, and local levels for projects that focus on the preservation of jobs in the arts. . . This program will be carried out through one-time grants to eligible nonprofit organizations. . . All applicants must be previous NEA award recipients from the past four years. . . 


This decision is understandable enough; the NEA may want to ensure that organizations it has supported already aren’t going to fold, rendering its previous assistance irrelevant, and if it wants to put money to work quickly, organizations that have already been vetted in the grants-awarding process are surer bets than those organizations needing to be scrutinized from scratch. Nor do I carry any brief against the NEA’s actions during the second term of President George W. Bush — NEA Chairman Dana Gioia was one of the most successful leaders of the Endowment in its distinguished history, turning around Congressional hostility that somehow surfaced during the term of President George H.W. Bush, managing against inestimable odds to promote literacy, Shakespeare, arts journalism and, yes, jazz. 

But from the point of view of a mostly volunteer administrator of a non-profit arts organization that after 20 years of self-supporting activities is just now making its first bid for grant funding to the NEA (the Jazz Journalists Association, of which I’m president, is applying this month for $s to produce a major conference on jazz journalism early in 2010) it’s disconcerting that as far as salaries for hard-pressed non-profits go, newcomers may not apply. Maybe the NEA’s next initiative could encourage new groups and new arts jobs? Wouldn’t that empower change? And disprove the second line of Billie’s “God Bless the Child” couplet: “Them thats not shall lose”?

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