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Jazz Beyond Jazz

Howard Mandel's Urban Improvisation

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 in the playoffs — here’s the under-promoted but highly impressive fourth annual Duke Ellington Jazz Festival, Oct. 1 – 7! Balancing Kennedy Center concerts with “jazz in the ‘hoods”  (club and arts center gigs mostly but not only NW), sophisticated globalism with emerging artists, the best of student and local ensembles (Berklee College of Music Latin Jazz All-Stars at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts) as well as a free Sunday afternoon marathon featuring blues songster Taj Mahal, incomparable pianist McCoy Tyner, hot-hot singer Dee Dee Bridgewater, bravura bassist Christian McBride and trombonist Conrad Herwig’s Latin Side Project on the National Mall . . . If it didn’t take months to organize events on this scale, one might suspect the DEJF is a convenient circus to distract us from uproar, uncertainty, faith-based initiatives and existential dread.

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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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