Jazz beyond Jazz: March 2008 Archives
Further Ornette sightings: the prophet of life-beyond-conventions returns on Friday to New York's Town Hall, where he's suffered and triumphed throughout his career.
A one-time-only revisitation of the late Eric Dolphy's masterpiece at Merkin Concert Hall in NYC fulfilled the promise and hope of jazz repertory concerts, and proved the enduring, enriching quality of jazz-beyond-jazz compositions.
"They want the oil/but they don't want the people," Jayne Cortez declaimed over and over again, her inflections expressing frank assessment, sheer disbelief, scathing cynicism and many nuances in between, without ever stipulating who "they" or "the people" are. She didn't have to, we all knew. It was Saturday night at Sistas' Place, a storefront coffeehouse in the black Brooklyn neighborhood Bedford-Stuyvesant, where poetry reflects the inseparability of the personal and the political.
In Portland, Ornette Coleman and his drummer son Denardo sat for an hour-plus public interview with me. We talked about music, sound, love, death, race relations, progress and/or the lack of, language, the alphabet -- Ornette's frequent topics.
Here's the whole thing, as an audio file recorded by KMHD-FM.
The resident blogger is flattered that so many readers stick up for the rights of reviewers to do what they do. He's also amused at one reader's suggestion that John Zorn regards professional opinions so highly he'd prefer to suppress them.
John Zorn asked writers not to review his performance opening the season at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, though he was pleased we wanted to attend. How can/should an arts journalist comply?
