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...]
Women in jazz journalism on gender issues, in NYC MLK weekend
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. weekend '18 was a big one for jazz in NYC with the first Jazz Congress at Jazz at Lincoln Center, a glorious Winter Jazz Fest, artists showcases at the conference of APAP (the Association of Performing Arts Presenters) and diverse independent venues -- but not least of all the first ever (?!?) panel discussion of gender issues by four women who are professional jazz journalists (documented to vlogger Ms Michal Shapiro). Above, Jordannah Elizabeth Michelle Mercer, of NPR and DownBeat's Hotbox reviewing section, … [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 fervent … [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...]
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...]
Jazz on Millennium Park’s big screen – PoKempner photos
A 40-by-22½-foot LED screen is a dominating feature of the stage in the Pritzker Pavilion of Chicago's Millennium Park, difficult to ignore though many try. Photographer Marc PoKempner does the opposite in his shots from the 39th annual Chicago Jazz Festival: he uses what he (and everybody else) sees to create striking images, in the best tradition of artists in his medium. howardmandel.com Subscribe by Email | Subscribe by RSS | Follow on Twitter All JBJ posts | … [Read more...]
Chicago Jazz Fest expanded review & Deutsch photos
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...]
Great new jazz photography — Dee Kalea’s campaign
Dee Kalea of Creative Music Photography is old school, in that she's created black and white images of jazz musicians in performance, closeup, usually one-to-a-frame. The passion she's captured, however, is timeless. How she became alert to the precise moment of creative rapture, and intimate with the music beyond the musicians themselves, is a story she tells best herself, in her intro and slide show for the Indegogo campaign she's mounted to raise funds for printmaking, support of public presentations and archival preservation of … [Read more...]
Great new jazz photography #2: Lauren Deutsch’s Made in Chicago portfolio
"Made in Chicago" is true of the photography of Lauren Deutsch, and also the name of the four-day-long collaborative jazz festival she's organized in Poznan, Poland for the past 12 years as artistic director (formerly with Wojceich Juszcsak) on behalf of the Jazz Institute of Chicago. The theme of this year's fest was "Freedom." The photos here of Chicago-based musicians (click to enlarge), in which Deutsch tries to capture the sound of the music through camera movement, were taken in May … [Read more...]
Great new jazz photography: Marc PoKempner portfolio from New Orleans
Photos of musicians making music -- visualizations stirred in the photographers by watching sounds manifest -- are exciting, and as different in style as the photographers and musicians themselves. Marc PoKempner 's portfolio from New Orleans of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band with Cuban drummers at the Music Box Village, a non-profit community arts garden, is the first of a series of great new jazz photos I'll post over the next few days. Check back … [Read more...]
Whatever happened to International Jazz Day?
April 30 -- yesterday -- was celebrated as the sixth annual International Jazz Day with a global webcast from Havana, hosted by Will Smith, headlined by pianist Herbie Hancock and including a couple of dozen top notch musicians from the U.S., Russia, Cameroon, France and Korea as well as Cuba. Did you know? Advance publicity and followup coverage has been but a dot on the attention focused on IJD last year, when President Barack Obama hosted a splendiferous Jazz Day in the White House. Considering the leader of the regime replacing Obama's … [Read more...]
Butch Morris’s workbook for spontaneous composition published
The deathbed wish of composer-cornetist Lawrence Douglas "Butch" Morris (1947-2013) was that his detailed documentation of Conduction®, the method he devised to enable spontaneous composition for ensembles of literally any type employing codified hand-signals, be published in hardcover. This has come to pass. On April 24 and May 1, events in New York City will launch The Art of Conduction, an elegant workbook from art-world publisher Karma with photos of Morris and his text, making his innovative work available for use by anyone/everyone, … [Read more...]