Roulette, since 1978 a formerly humble Manhattan-based presenter of avant-garde “intermedia,” has signed a 20-year lease on a former YWCA art deco 600-seat theater in Brooklyn. This Next weekend (Oct. 7, 8, 9) is the space’s three-night benefit “Easy Not Easy,” assigning emerging (read: little known) artists presumably simple scores by such its longtime stalwarts as […]
Henry Threadgill, seer beyond ‘jazz’
In my City Arts column: a new album and Roulette concert with commissioned work from a worldly-wise 65 yr-old NYC/East Village-based composer-bandleader who keeps looking at music — Varese’s and Wagner’s, Scott Joplin’s and Ornette Coleman’s — to find something new. I call Henry Threadgill a prophet in the wilderness, urgently trying to shake us […]
Best American city for jazz? Chicago
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 […]
Today’s the day NYC goes beyond jazz
On September 17,New York kicks off a fall season more highly charged with new creative energies than any in memory. An army of mostly young, skilled, ambitious and devoted musicians is making itself heard in the East Village, Soho, Brooklyn, on the Lower West Side and in the clubs — while benevolence is cast by the first […]
Take an “outside” chance on musical experimentation
My column in May’s City Arts NY urges Adam Rudolph’s conducted Go: Organic Orchestra improvs and the Mixology Fest (both at Roulette) and the 14th annual Vision Festival as ways to break out of conventions and celebrate spring. (In order to read the column, you have to zoom in on “Jazz”). I should have also mentioned […]
Jazz time-out of the year?
A major international jazz festival right now in Washington D.C.? How odd: Is it the End of Times? Are we fiddlin’ while Rome burns? Or could it be a new beginning? Ignore the credit crisis, the vp debates, end-game positioning by the One and the Other, Rosh Hashanah and Eid, Cubs and White Sox both […]