main: April 2010 Archives

Lovers of jazz, jazz beyond jazz, jazz before jazz are all watching Treme, right? The HBO series about New Orleans three months after Katrina sets a new standard for celebrating America's roots music where this should happen -- on tv.

Composer Steve Reich said, "Without John Coltrane, there would be no minimalism." The topic was Hall Overton, the man who arranged Monk's music, treating jazz as contemporary "classical" composition. The occasion was a panel discussion sprung from an exhibit at the NY Public Library of the Performing Arts about the Jazz Loft hosted by photographer W. Eugene Smith from 1955-1964 (this is Smith's shot of Overton with Monk in the Loft).

Trumpeter Herb Alpert's foundation kicks in $500,000 to sustain a failing Harlem arts school -- more philanthropy from the Tijuana Brassman hailed by Jazz Journalists Association last year for his great good works. Why aren't there more like Herb?

Finalists for the 14th annual Jazz Awards presented by the Jazz Journalists Association are up at JJAJazzAwards.org. See and hear who critics like. These are our Pulitzer Prizes.

A $30 million gift to the Metropolitan Opera - the Harlem School of the Arts closes for lack of 1/60th that amount. Pretty clear what big private funders value, and it's not the American vernacular or immediately next generation of artists. There's hardly anything jazzy about this post.

A trombonist in Miles Davis' Birth of the Cool band, memoirist whose The Parisian Jazz Chronicles set a standard for wit and candor in self-examination, and writer for the International Herald Tribune and Bloomberg News, Mike Zwerin died April 2 in Paris, where he'd lived since 1969. Recipient in 2009 of the Jazz Journalists Association's Lifetime Achievement in Jazz Journalism Award, Mike was an inspiration ever since I read his reports from the jazz scene in the Village Voice in the 1960s, and I'm glad to say I got to know him as a friend.