Howard Mandel

JazzTimes “temporarily suspended,” staff “furloughed”

JazzTimes confirms rumors first reported here the 38-year-old monthly magazine’s deep financial distress requires it to stop publishing. Its management hopes for a brand-sale and re-emergence. But in a longer email to freelance contributors, those same managers adopt a can’t-help-you-pal shrug toward the brand’s freelance contributors.

“The brand and operation will undergo reorganization and restructuring in order to remain competitive in the current media,” according to the brief note on the mag’s website. In the iteration of this message that went out to Jazz Times’ contributors, though, that assertion was followed by words of dread to freelance writers and photographers: “. . . payments for previous assignments remain in limbo, as the JazzTimes ownership seeks the necessary financing.”

Payments In limbo? What would a carpenter, plumber, landlord say? “I’ll take the shelves back.” “Your toilet’s in limbo.” “No rent, you’re out!”

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Jazz Times crisis confirmed

An associate editor of JazzTimes “until a couple of weeks ago when I
was laid off” has confirmed that the magazine is in deep trouble. “There
was some hope of a new buyer coming to the rescue,” he writes, “but as of my last
contact with the guys it wasn’t looking good.” I’d heard previously that the proposed deal fell through.

“Hopefully that will still
happen,” this source continues, “but with the loss of JVC and other advertisers it’s doubtful
the magazine would be able to survive in its present format.” Meanwhile, numerous writers and photographers have contacted me with tales of waiting on payments since last March. These are bad signs. A lot of jazz people are, like my correspondent, hopeful. We’d like Jazz Times to continue, to prosper and flower. More news when I get some. . . good or bad.

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Domino effect of JVC Jazz Fest failure on Jazz Times?

New speculation on the jazz magazine crisis: Having no summer advertorial supplements for JVC Jazz Festivals (which aren’t happening) may have hugely hurt JT‘s seasonal revenues. How could the loss of three consecutive monthly multi-page inserts, all expenses paid for by the client, not shake a publication’s income stream?

Complete disclosure: I edited the JVC Jazz Festival program books in the 1990s, when they were inserts into Tower Records’ free monthly magazine Pulse!, and for a year when JVC America, responsible for the Japanese owned electronics firms’ promotional investment in George Wein’s international jazz fests, switched the contract to Jazziz. Ah, those were the days!

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Blues fans grieve the Queen

Koko Taylor, singer and survivor of the grittiest Chicago blues, died yesterday (June 3) at age 80 following surgery for gastro-intestinal problems. She may be best known for her first hit, “Wang Dang Doodle” which she recorded in 1966 and performed with Little Walter Jacobs on harmonica for the American Blues Festival in Germany in 1967, as featured here on Youtube. But the vocal track on the clip is too far off from the visual, so I prefer this video of a song I can’t identify with raunchy rhymes and for the great good humor with which she talks about work life and growing up as a child of sharecroppers in Shelby, Tennessee.

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Losing a jazz mag?

Rumors abound that JazzTimes magazineÂ is folding — it’s laid off employees, notified writers of waits for May payments, not shipped its June issue to the printers and failed to sell itself to a new publisher. A senior contributor says he was told not to write his next column until asked for it. These are rumors, I stress: I’ve emailed JT’s publisher and editors for confirmation or denial, comment and clarification, without response so far. It wouldn’t be terribly surprising, given the economic drift and hard times for print media. But the demise of JazzTimesÂ would change the game for everybody — musicians, readers writers, advertisers — focused on jazz.

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Cecil and Miles in NYC (and India)

Taylor, the pianist beyond genre (age: 80) and still-groundbreaking music of Davis, the trumpeter/conceptualist (dead 18 years) are at major Manhattan venues this week, continuing to provoke and gratify. Cecil Taylor performs at the Blue Note tonight (Thursday, May 28) while “Miles From India,” mixing veterans of Davis’ electric bands with South Asian improvisers, has a four-night stand at Iridium. And last Monday, Davis’ propheticÂ On The Corner was revisited at Merkin Concert Hall.

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On The Corner program notes, Merkin Hall concert 5/25/09

Miles Davis
intended On The Corner to be a
personal statement, an esthetic breakthrough and a social provocation upon its
release in fall of 1972. He could hardly have been more successful: the album
was all that, though it has taken decades for its full impact to be understood.

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Hurray for the new NEA Jazz Masters

Dean of post-jazz Muhal Richard Abrams, Â doyenne of vocalese Annie RossÂ and George Avakian, who invented jazz albums and reissues, popularized the LP and live recording, are among eight 2010 Jazz Masters named today by the National Endowment of the Arts. New York-based pianists Kenny Barron and Cedar Walton, exploratory reedist Yusef Lateef, big band composer-arranger Bill Holman and vibist Bobby Hutcherson complete the list of the NEA’s new honorees, whoÂ receive $25,000 grants and significant honors starting next January with ceremonies and a concert at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Founded in 1982, theÂ Jazz Masters programÂ has recognized American musicians (and since 2004, non-musician “jazz advocates”) for career-long achievement and pre-eminence and influence. This year’s fellows are highly regarded professionals who have been productive, hailed by critics and love by aficionados for decades, if seldom visited by huge commercial success or mainstream fame. The relative exception is Ms. Ross, who has cut a fashionable figure since her emergence in the late 1950s (as in this clip singing her signature song “Twisted,” later covered by Joni Mitchell)

and participation in the vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks and Ross.Â Her acting career includes a starring role as a saloon singer in Robert Altman’s film Short Cuts (based on stories by Raymond Carver).

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Take an “outside” chance on musical experimentation

My column in May’s City Arts NYÂ urges Adam Rudolph’s conducted Go: Organic Orchestra improvs and the Mixology Fest (both at Roulette) and the 14th annual Vision Festival as ways to break out of conventions and celebrate spring. (In order to read the column, you have to zoom in on “Jazz”).Â

I should have also mentioned guitarist Marc Ribot’s concerts all over town inspired by his 55th birthday, alto saxophonist Roy Nathanson’s Subway Moon cd-book release party (which was May 15) at Joe’s Pub. There’s just so much to do here in the big city. . . .

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JVC Jazz Fest-NY cancellation reported

No major, mainstream, corporate-supported jazz fest will occur in New York City this summer, according to today’s New York Times report confirming my posting of April 15.

Festival Network principal Chris Shields, purchaser in 2007 of the production company headed by George Wein which staged June jazz concerts at major mid-town Manhattan venues for 37 years, blames the economy and his own over-ambitious plans for the suspension (if not demise) of events which kept New York the focus of the jazz world, first with name sponsorship from Newport and Kool cigarettes and for 24 years as the JVC Jazz Festival-New York. The NY jazz fest was one of a baker’s dozen jazz fests supported throughout the U.S. each summer by JVC-America. The company says it is “has chosen to take our promotional activities in a different direction,
and one that will no longer include jazz event sponsorship.”

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Julie Coryell, jazz author, manager, muse

Women in music behind-the-scenes deserve note — and Julie Coryell, who died May 10, was a force in as author of Jazz-Rock Fusion — The People, The Music, published in 1978, and as the inspiration of her then-husband guitarist Larry Coryell starting in the ’60s.

Obituaries of Ms. Coryell call her a singer, actress and songwriter, but many jazz fans first encountered her in a framed portrait that graced the front and back covers of Lady Coryell, Larry’s breakthrough recording of 1969. The couple was also depicted in Adam and Eve-like splendor (with two children ~~who I assume are~~ who are NOT their sons Julian and Murali, both of whom grew up to become guitarists) on Coryell, also released in ’69.
61QCR0XFAXL._SL500_AA240_.jpg

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What do women want (of jazz clubs)?

Why don’t women feel welcome as jazz listeners? My posting hit a nerve with Facebook “friends” and commentors including ArtsJournal’s Mind the Gap blog, which takes up the issue of “comfort when it comes to experiencing art” and rightly understands I was thinking more about “psychic comfort” than anything limited to the physical.

What about it, readers — how much are you willing to suffer to hear what you want?

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Life’s a pitch: Where are the women jazz listeners?

Amanda Ameer, blogger behind artjournal’s Life’s a Pitch, was bummed by the low number of women at pianist Brad Mehldau’s recent Village Vanguard performance (but glad about the audience’s wide age-spread). She cites jazz women instrumentalists as being rare, too. What’s up with this, she wants to know. Send her “the literature on this topic.”

Well, there isn’t any — jazz commentators have to depend upon anecdotal experience and personal observation as basis for their speculations and analysis about jazz audiences, as so many other topics. From my perspective, though, women don’t dislike jazz — throughout my life I’ve been involved with women who like it plenty. Of course, I select all my friends for that trait, but my interactions have also included undergraduate students in my NYU classes on American music over the past 23 years, and my mother who, never before an avid fan, in her early ’80s has taken up jazz appreciation courses (and complains that most of the presentations harken to an ever-more-quickly-receding Swing Era).

The problem is that no one in the jazz world, with the exception of jazz educators, has pleasantly invited women to partake of the music. Rather than being marketed to, women have been neglectfully, perhaps unconsciously, shut out.

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