Gowanus, a Brooklyn neighborhood so unlovely it’s been named an EPA superfund site, 
is Ground Zero now for music lofts, as reported in my new City Arts-New York column. In a half dozen or so artist-run spaces — including IBeam, Douglas Street Collective, Littlefield, the Brooklyn Lyceum and Issue Project Room — available for presentation and rehearsal of hard-core experimental sounds, dance, video and performance art, the programming is typically spiky, ambitious and unsentimental.
NEA ends Jazz, Folk, Opera awards for “full range of American artists”
National Endowment for the Arts’ FY-12 budget eliminates a 30-year-old Jazz Masters Awards program, and special recognition with National Heritage Fellowships and Opera honors, in favor of Artist of the Year Awards available for the entire spectrum of performing artists (all forms of music and theater as one). Here’s the NEA’s statement, issued through a spokesperson, regarding its “modification of honorifics,” in response to some issues I alluded to yesterday, which seem sure to reverberate with diverse effects throughout the U.S.’s far-flung and various jazz communities.
NEA wants to end Jazz Masters program
The National Endowment of the Arts’ FY-12 Appropriations Request has just been posted, and cuts $21 million to return to its 2008 funding level. Among program “modifications”: the establishment of “American Artists of the Year awards,” which will “remove specific reference to Jazz, Folk, and Opera” and give discipline awards annually in two categories:
- Performing Arts: Dance/Music/Opera/Musical Theater/Theater
- Visual Arts: Design/Media Arts/Museums/Visual Arts (including crafts)
This evidently means the end of the Jazz Masters Fellowships, which have been conferred upon 123 people since it began in 1982. Jazz Masters have also been documented by the Smithsonian Institution’s Oral History Project, and have received tour support for live performances.
Esperanza who? Grammy’s Best New Artist (and more)
Best New Artist of the Year, according to the Grammys, is Esperanza Spalding, a 26-year-old jazz bassist and singer whose most recent album is titled Chamber Music Society. What!? or should the question be, How?! Full congrats, she’s as bright a rising star as has emerged from jazz by virtue of her charm and chops since 2006 — when Junjo, her first CD, was released. She beat out some kid named Justin Bieber, whose fans are enraged.
Black History Month Post-?-Racial String Bands
The Carolina Chocolate Drops are at least as entertaining as the 19th minstrel shows they cop songs and style from — and just as confounding to any strict analysis of American attitudes about what’s called “race” — as noted in my new column in City Arts – New York.
Tragedy of bike-riding cabaret activist Mary Cleere Haran
Mary Cleere Haran – promotional photo, no copyright infringement intended
Cabaret is a forum for the classic American pop song — and the death of singer Mary Cleere Haran, hit by a car coming out of a driveway while she was riding her bike in Deerfield Beach, Fla., robs the world of an activist who interpreted, updated and preserved those brilliant, melodious standards. The genre and milieu in which she worked isn’t my preferred entertainment, but there’s no denying the centrality in sophisticated contemporary culture of the words and music of Rodgers and Hart and Hammerstein, Cole Porter, Frank Loesser, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer and the many others celebrated by Haran, age 58, who wrote and produced shows and contributed significantly to television documentaries about the stars and songs of the U.S. in the mid 20th Century. Though there are performers as devoted to sustaining this legacy of wit and glamor as she, when an artist as deeply into their speciality it taken from the stage in their prime, that specialty is severely wounded, too.
Jazz-beyond-rock: Tony Williams addressing today’s emergency
Spectrum Road — electric guitarist Vernon Reid, bassist Jack Bruce, keyboardist John Medeski and drummer Cindy Blackman — playing high energy, high volume music at the Blue Note (NYC) this weekend inspired by the jazz-rock amalgam the late, great Tony Williams created 40 years ago, seems utterly cutting edge. Or is it just my old ears, getting deaf to quieter subtleties?
Prince plays the blues – Chocolate Drops, Wynton, Clapton, too
The blues is big-time pop again — processed to a triumphant apotheosis by Prince at Madison Square Garden as I detail in my new City Arts column — (but did it ever go away? Here’s the Artist with James Brown and Michael Jackson in 1983)
— reinvigorated in acoustic revivalist and hybrid form by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who kick off a three-month US tour at Lincoln Center’s American Songbook Series on Wednesday, Feb 2 —
How does Keith Jarrett come to Carnegie Hall? Alone.
In my latest column in City Arts – New York, I share a few thoughts about the solo piano improvisations of Keith Jarrett. The headline’s not mine, I don’t get it — but the music he performs at Carnegie Hall Jan. 16 may be transcendent, as far beyond jazz as his last album of solo concerts, Paris/London (Testament)Â or as with jazz as his duets with Charlie Haden, Jasmine.
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NEA Jazz Masters concert on ustream, NEA gives 1/4 mil for gigs
Collage from NEA Arts.gov
Last night’s NEA Jazz Masters concert at Jazz at Lincoln Center was ustreamed — for the first time allowing the world to see live, free and forever America’s official ceremony knighting the duly experienced, accomplished and original wise-people who create and perpetuate America’s living vernacular music.Â
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It was great to actually be there, too –Â amid a throng of jazz’s most powerful public and private supporters — beside those who make the music, those who present, teach, promote, record, fund, think, write, broadcast, book, manage and counsel it. The jazz “community” (not much more an “industry”) may be commercially embattled, but an unofficial and amorphous coalition of jazz activists has nonetheless succeed in lifting the art form to world-wide adoption and status undreamed of one or two generations ago.Â
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The mood of celebration was so heady that NEA chairman Rocco Landesman’s announcement of $250,000 in grants for 15 non-profits to support live performance nationwide was almost overlooked.
Journalist, yes. “Jazz” journalist — why?
Hank Shteamer, writer-on-music at Time Out New York and blogger at Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches, writes “I am not a jazz journalist” in response to “The State of Jazz Journalism Now and Immediate Prospects” town hall meeting at the Jazz Journalists Association’s “New Media for New Jazz” conference yesterday (Jan 8). He doesn’t deny that he loves jazz and writes about it, but considers putting the title off an insistence for diversity. I’m president of the JJA and a jazz journalist — among other things. My response to him follows; not meaning to be defensive or ghettoize myself (I’ll take assignments on anything! Anything!) I hope to explain just why.
Do you jazz? Yes, eyeJAZZ!
A quick glimpse of a jazz club, a chat with fans going into or leaving the show, a word with a musician coming offstage or maybe at practice — these bits of real life can be captured today in high quality video and audio equipment that’s readily at hand — mobile phones and HD pocket camcorders will do. With its eyeJAZZ.tv initiative — funded by the MidAtlantic Arts Foundation’s Jazz.NEXT project through generous support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation providing basic equipment and online training in shooting, editing, distributing and fundamentals of journalistic practices and standards to 30 successful applicants — the Jazz Journalists
Association (of which I’m pres) means to flood the web with such visions, or at least increase its population of quickly edited news clips that tell clear stories, showing great music live and well in real time, wider-spread than you might imagine, just waiting to be enjoyed.
Apply to participate in the eyeJAZZ program now, filling out the application here. The JJA introduces eyeJAZZ formally at its “New Media for New Jazz” conference session Friday, Jan 7 at the New York Sheraton (NYC) 2:30 pm, Conference Room C — attend at no charge). Learn to get up close to musicians the better to get direct answers to questions you have about how they do it — as I asked flutist Nicole Mitchell, resulting in this clip —
It’s easy! It’s fun! The one above was shot on a Kodak Zx1 camera using an internal mike, no extra lighting, and edited in iMovie. Got a jazz vision? Make eyeJAZZ.tv of it. Watch the widget below . . .
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Big fun news: Santana weds Blackman, Herbie & Wayne play
The rare notable jazz wedding to celebrate: Beyond-jazz, rock & Latin guitarist Carlos Santana to drummer Cindy Blackman, who’s had a
Artists’ promotional photos
great recording year, issuing Another Lifetime, her smashing tribute to the late Tony Williams) and driving Organ Monk, Greg Lewis’s trio album that made my top 10.
Santana’s best albums after the first one always have had a outward reach — Abraxis, Caravanserai, his spiritualized rave up Love, Devotion and Surrender with John McLaughlin and organist Larry (Khalid Yasin) Young, and 1990’s Swing of Delight, featuring ex-Miles men Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter (who made music at the wedding), Ron Carter and, yes, Tony Williams. Carlos and Cindy — play hard and prosper!
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