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Jazz Beyond Jazz

Howard Mandel's Urban Improvisation

NEA doubles down on beyond-jazz with 2016 Jazz Masters

The National Endowment of the Arts has doubled down on celebrating jazz beyond “jazz” — music that has exploded historic parameters or preconceptions of  “jazz” conventions — by naming as 2016 Jazz Masters the saxophonists Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp — both protégés of the late, great John Coltrane — and Gary Burton, an innovator of technique and content who’s embraced pop, country, folk and rock influences, studio experiments and classical finesse in creation of his own original sound, taken up with pleasure by musicians and listeners alike. Doing so, the governmental organization asserts that evolution as well as tradition is central to jazz’s DNA.

Wendy Oxenhorn, executive director of the Jazz Foundation of America is also a newly celebrated Jazz Master, awarded for her peerless advocacy since 2000 of musicians in need. This honor concedes that something other than what the government or market can do is essential in supporting American arts.

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Archie Shepp – Photo DR

Both Sanders, now 75, and Shepp, 78, were ensemble members on Coltrane’s Ascension, arguably the “freest,” (most ambitiously seeking? unbridled? frenetic?) all- forces statement of their mentor’s life. Since Trane’s death in 1967, they’ve each had productive, creative, international careers.

Sanders’ early demonic energies drove the vocabulary of tenor and soprano saxes (and also piccolo!) into screeching, roaring, ripping timbres, unbreeched registers and sustained howls. He’s at his most extreme, in agony or ecstasy for an extraordinary seven minutes on “Crescent” from Offering: Live from Temple University, Trane’s last live recording from November 1966.  But since Sander’s breakthrough album under his own name, Tauhid, of that same year, he’s also generated serenity if not spirituality through “world music”-conscious modal improvisations.

Shepp has, over a career of 50 years, been an insightful, often acerbic social critic and a pioneering university professor as well as an challenging composer-performer. He made his first mark on jazz charging forth with a bristling hard tone and long, twisting lines on “Rufus (Swung His Face At Last To The Wind, Then His Neck Snapped)” — titled in reference to the precipitating tragedy of James Baldwin’s Another Country — splitting tracks with Coltrane on the 1965 album New Thing at Newport.

A participant in the musician-directed October Revolution and short-lived Jazz Composers Guild, his work such as Attica Blues, The Cry of My People and “Steam” have provocatively examined social themes. A man of many parts, Shepp evokes Ellingtonian elegance, maverick academic rigor, the essence of gospel and the blues, African roots and modern life in Paris. My favorite Shepp album — with fantastic arrangements, are they by Roswell Rudd who is just turning 80 and also deserves Jazz Master recognition?) — is The Magic of Ju-Ju.   

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Gary Burton – Berklee College of Music

Burton, 72, has many distinctions. Born and raised in Indiana, he’s one of the first jazz stars to emerge from a formal jazz education context, having attended Boston’s Berklee College of Music in 1960 – ’61 and returning there as an important faculty member and administrator from 1971 to 2004. After working in Nashville early in his career, Burton conveyed some of its rural feeling, sense of space and open vistas in his progressive, small group mid ’60s albums like Tennessee Firebird and Duster. Inspired in part by pianist Bill Evans, Burton essentially invented a lush yet limber technique for vibes and marimbas dexterously using four mallets – which he’s deployed to great effect in duet albums with pianists including Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett.

Burton was an early explorer of overdubbing himself in layers (The Time Machine) and radical editing (“Lofty Fake Anagram“). He recorded with splendid bands including Roy Haynes, Steve Swallow, Carla Bley (on my long-ago favorite, Genuine Tong Funeral — with pseudonymously credited Pharoah?), Bob Moses and guitarists Larry Coryell, Jerry Hahn, Pat Metheny, Julian Lage, pianist Makoto Ozone — often spotlighting musicians on the move. Burton has been one of the first jazz musicians to discuss his homosexuality publicly, and he himself wrote Learning to Listen, an autobiography named 2014 Jazz Book of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association.

Ms. Oxenhorn, since joining the Jazz Foundation in 2000 from her previous heroic job publishing Street News, has built the organization into the most significant and (sadly) necessary national network enabling and/or providing medical, housing, consulting and employment assistance as well as many personal services to an ever-increasing population of jazz people in duress. The JFA has a powerful board, noble founders to remember, a small, dynamic staff and a pantheon of donors, but it is Wendy Oxenhorn who brings them together for the benefit of the culture-makers, hence culture itself.

Nominations for 2017 Jazz Masters can be made by anyone until Dec. 31 2015. Besides Rudd, consideration must be extended to Dee Dee Bridgewater, Ernie Watts, Andrew Cyrille, Reggie Workman, Milford Graves, Ira Sullivan, Amina Claudine Myers, Charles Tolliver, Billy Harper, Oliver Lake, Junior Mance, John Scofield . . . Our country is rich in jazz masters, artists deserving wider recognition and rewarding audiences’ attentions.
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Surprises and stalwarts in an NYC jazz weekend

Five acts, all jazz headliners, in 3 hours at the Jazz Foundation of America’s Loft Jazz Party, plus Chicago drummer-composer Mike Reed’s thrilling People, Places & Things quartet and alto saxist Darius Jones’ trio at Drom in the East Village — bountiful blues, soul, swing, groove, creativity, tradition, big names and newcomers in NYC on Saturday and Sunday. It’s like this all the time in the jazz capital of the universe, but good not to take it for granted.

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Safety net tears: E*Trade ends emergency funds for jazz musicians

A new hole in the safety net for jazz musicians: In an e-mail message sent February 18, Jazz Foundation of America executive director Wendy Oxenhorn reports: 

 Our magnificent E*TRADE Emergency Housing Fund has allowed us to pay rents and mortgages all these years when elderly musicians fell ill, and when Katrina struck. Because of this fund we have never lost anyone to homelessness or eviction in the past 8 years!  What ETRADE did for us all these years was amazing but we have just been told that they can no longer support our program going forward. Without their contribution our Emergency Fund is now at an all time low.  

Jazz musicians in the United States almost never have pensions and seldom get health insurance through employers (I bet that’s the case for most American rap, rock, pop, polka, folk, country and probably the majority of classical musicians, too). At the JFA’s Great Night In Harlem fundraiser held August 29, 2001, R. Jarrett Lilien, then Chief Operating Officer of E*Trade Financial and now President of the Jazz Foundation, announced the establishment of a standing fund to provide assistance to musicians in need. The JFA claims that since Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, more than 3500 musicians have been helped with these monies. With E*Trade bowing out, the JFA seeks a new $150,000 sponsor for its housing fund. 

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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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