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Jazz Beyond Jazz

Howard Mandel's Urban Improvisation

NEA supports jazz and US arts nationwide

The NEA funds traditional American cultural activities such as mule-cart tours of Green River Utah besides free hi-def webcasts of Jazz at Lincoln Center concerts – NEA Arts.gov/no copyright infringement is intended

The National Endowment of the Arts, arguably the most misunderstood and beleaguered doing-good office of the federal gov’t (excluding the NEH, EPA, Consumer Financial Bureau, Civil Rights Division of the Justice Dept., and a few others) has issued its 2017 funding report, highlighting that its monies (monies from we US taxpayers) flow to communities in all 50 states and five territories.

Included is support for 36 jazz-related projects, most generated in the usual cities but also to entities based in Baton Rouge LA; Hartford CT; Pinecrest and Tallahassee FLA; Geneva, Rochester, Saratoga Springs and West Park NY; Bethlehem, Easton and Hershey PA, and Burlington VT.

Most of the biggest grants — such as the $55k to the Thelonious Monk Foundation of Jazz’s “Peer-to-Peer Jazz Education” tour of public performing arts high schools in San Diego, Fargo and Sioux Falls; $50k to Newark Public Radio (that’s WBGO) to produce and broadcast “Jazz Night in America,” $50k to Jazz at Lincoln Center for production of hi-def, freely accessed concert webcasts — benefit audiences beyond the immediate local sphere of the receiving organizations.  The smallest grants ($10k) go to performance series in the smaller cities, and production of ambitious recorded projects by NEA Jazz Master Anthony Braxton.

Here for download is the complete list of jazz projects – Jazz Awards 2017 FINAL — some of which mix chamber music, dance and poetry with music.

Having just named the four NEA Jazz Masters (pianist Joanne Brackeen, guitarist Pat Metheny, vocalist Dianne Reeves, advocate/producer Todd Barkan) to be inducted in 2018, the Arts agency is looking ahead, despite being targeted for extinction by the federal budget proposal. As posted on its grant webpage:

The President’s FY 2018 budget proposes the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts, with a request for $29 million intended to be used for the orderly shutdown of the agency. This budget request is a first step in a very long budget process. We continue to accept grant applications for FY 2018 at our usual deadlines and will continue to operate as usual until a new budget is enacted by Congress.

The fight over the budget proposal is expected to last months, until FY 2018 begins on Oct. 1, 2017. If you value what the NEA does, tell all your Congress-people to restore operating funds to the NEA (and NEH and Corporation for Public Broadcasting) as well as resist cuts in the safety net provided by the US government (elected by US citizen tax-payers) for the ill, elderly and impoverished. Urge friends to do the same.

howardmandel.com
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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 administration, it’s no surprise our government did not note the event — though after all, it represents one of the most successful exports, cultural or otherwise, ever coming from America.

As explained by Irina Bokova, director-general of UNESCO which produces IJD in organizational collaboration with the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, “Jazz is great music because it carries strong values. Jazz is about freedom, about dignity and civil rights. . . Through jazz, we improvise with others, we live better together, in dialogue, in respect.” So maybe it’s better to keep the music at arms length from the current political heavies. After all, the U.S. no longer has voting rights in UNESCO, since we are $300 million in arrears for our dues since 2011, though Obama and John Kerry, his Secretary of State, in 2015 urged Congress to restore funding the United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture, now 70 years old.

Regardless of political issues, the music performed in the beautiful Gran Teatro de la Habana Alicia Alonso (billed as the oldest theater in Latin America) exemplified jazz’s virtues and reinforced the importance of Afro-Cuban influences on jazz, which we commonly think of as born in that Caribbean capital, New Orleans. Opening with a renditions of Dizzy Gillespie’s “Manteca” (co-written by Cuban conguero Chano Pozo and big band arranger Gil Fuller), the concert had multiple highlights including Esperanza Spalding’s bass obbligato to  Youn Sun
Nah’s smoldering vocal on
“Besame Mucho” (which also featured an affecting solo by violinist Regina Carter), electric bassist-vocalist-bandleader Richard Bona’s lively number, Cuban vocalist Bobby Carcasses’s scat chorus, a tribute to Cuba’s native changui style (from the province of Guantanamo), electric bassist Marcus Miller’s role in diverse combos, and the extraordinary Cuban pianists Chucho Valdes and Gonzalo Rubalcaba duetting on and beyond “Blue Monk.” Congrats to music director John Beasley, who sat with me in 2013 for an NPR interview about what’s involved putting this all together.

IJD 2017 event map

IJD events were this year held in 190-some countries on all seven continents. The star-studded global webcast has been, of course, the most prominent event right along, though its advance planning is evidently so complex that announcement of where it’s taking place seems to come later and later. This year the information that Havana was the site didn’t come until April 10 — short lead time for many news organizations. As I write this post, neither DownBeat nor JazzTimes has a report from yesterday. Nothing in the New York Times, Washington Post, the LA Times or the Guardian. There’s bit from the PRNewswire published by Market Watch, a note on the blog of KNKX (Seattle) and an overview on eNews Channel Africa which mentions the attendance at the concert of Miguel Diaz-Canel, Cuba’s vice president of Cuba’s State Council and a rumored potential successor to President Raul Castro, scheduled to leave office in February 2018

With Irina Bokova’s second term as UNESCO director-general coming to an end and our federal support (even by lip service) of the initiative dim compared to Obama’s warm welcome of it in 2016, one might worry that IJD will lose crucial support.   Let’s hope not, as it has indeed been a beacon of enlightened international creativity and collaboration. Herbie Hancock, in his closing remarks, vowed we will see an IJD again next April 30. Eager for details! Tell us where sufficiently in advance and we’ll spread the word.

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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…

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