Jazz Beyond Jazz

Howard Mandel's Urban Improvisation

Help Pandora — save online radio

The free and highly entertaining online radio website Pandora.com — one of the most readily accessible portals to music you’ll probably enjoy, but never heard before — needs help from all listeners to pressure the Senate to pass a bill supportive of its continuance. At issue is the backbreaking level of royalty payments being urged on this site and others like it by lobbyists for the National Association of Broadcasters, those giant broadcasters (think Clear Channel) who would monopolize the airwaves with formulaic playlists promoting a low-common-denominator monoculture. 

What Pandora offers is better (more open. exploratory, innovative) than that, and in this case surprising supported by the Recording Industry Association of America, the group that’s been suing music downloaders on behalf of the record industry. Ridiculous as that effort is, by standing with Pandora RIAA gets it right. Take a look at Pandora founder Tim Westergren’s blog for details of the grass-roots phone-in campaign that pushed favorable legislation through the House of Reps. — and sign up to protect a free ‘n’ easy way to sample music beyond whatever music you personally already are into, rather than being stuck with whatever top 100 cuts stations figure everyone can deal with. As if we are all one undifferentiated ear!
 

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Presidential politics and jazz: Show of hands

Google “Obama” and “jazz” and this Jazz Beyond Jazz post comes up second! The search engine flatters, so here’s more research on the connection/support of the jazz world for the candidates, and the candidates of jazz (as a fundamental American cultural phenomenon).

This concert seems indicative of most jazz musicians’ preference:

(gen’l admission: $100; vip seats and post-show reception: $250; students/seniors, $50).
Comparable events last week in Cincinnati, Ohio and Oct. 12 in Kansas City MO, with Dick Gregory as keynote speaker on the occasion of his 76th birthday. This afternoon in Brooklyn, Jazz Passenger alto saxophonist/storyteller Roy Nathanson hosts a party at which attendees supporting Obama will call voters in swing-states, making the case. Further such jazz activism seems likely.
Not to be unfair to the other side: Google “McCain” and “jazz” and the top relevant result: the Senator flashing jazz hands.
Political Picture - John McCain

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Bad news from the Northwest: Portland Jazz Fest dies

The demise of the Portland Jazz Festival was announced today by press release from its membership umbrella organization PDX Jazz, cancelling plans for February 2009 due to the pullout by title sponsor Qwest Communications. Despite concerted attempts by festival producer Bill Royston, no other funder stepped up to support the five-year-old festival’s modest budget with high returns, and the result may be due to the U.S.’s overall economic downturn.

The festival — two weeks every February starting in 2004 — filled burgeoning Portland’s boutique hotels, restaurants, wine bars, beer halls and coffee shops with local and regional fans. They came to hear headliners including Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, the SF Jazz Collective, the Bad Plus, Chick Corea and Gary Burton, Charles Lloyd and other impressive artists, along with panel discussions (which last year I helped plan) and enrichment events hosted by Portland State University, among other area institutions. 
As produced by Royston and a small, efficient staff, the Portland Jazz Festival put this city of just over half-a-million on the international jazz map. Its ticketed and free concerts held at venues ranging from restored movie theaters to hotel ballrooms to local bars was accounted a success by enthusiastic audiences, gratified musicians and professional critics brought in from the East Coast and Canada to observe and interact with middle-aged devotees and a rising young crowd.

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Who decides who’s an NEA Jazz Master

The National Endowment of the Arts panel determining recipients of the annual Jazz Masters Fellowships is a small one. In the interest of transparency, the NEA has supplied the names of panelists who chose the class of ’09. It comprises five previously named Fellows, one “layperson,” one independent record producer, and two longtime jazz adminstrator-activists (who both happen to be honorees of the Jazz Journalists Association’s “A Team”).

Of course, if John McCain becomes president, it’s all moot (as Lee Rosenbaum reports, the GOP has no arts policy in its platform, and I remember writing to McCain during the 1980s objecting to his desire to de-fund the NEA). He’s clearly no jazz candidate — whereas Barack Obama spoke at the site of the Detroit Jazz Festival, on Labor Day, and San Francisco musicians are lining up behind him with a fundraising jam in San Francisco, October 13.
But that’s another posting: back to the NEA panelists – 

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Meet the NEA’s new Jazz Masters

The National Endowment for the Arts’ latest class of official “Jazz Masters” includes vocalist and guitarist George Benson, drummer Jimmy Cobb, alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, harmonica and guitar player “Toots” Thielemans, trumpeter Snooky” Young, and recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder.  All estimable choices, each receiving $25,000, opportunities to participate in photo shoots and public appearances and introduction an official ceremony on October 17 at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Plus, Steve Wonder has won the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Music. Fair choices, all. These are professionals whose works sometimes are truly inspired.   

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Chicago hears Ornette Coleman — This is our music

An estimated 20,000 to 30,000 listeners of all ages, genders, races, religions — Americans and visitors from abroad, too — enjoyed the directly expressive, highly personalized music of Pulitzer Prize-winner Ornette Coleman as the finale of the outdoor Chicago Jazz Festival last Sunday night. The attentive, mellow and celebratory audience response, including a standing ovation throughout the 5000 seats nearest the bandshell in Grant Park, suggested that improvisation created without a priori conventions or artificial constraints, which Coleman throughout his remarkable career has alluded to as “free jazz,” “harmolodics” and “sound grammar,” upon easy access and unpressured exposure, is as natural as breathing, feeling and talking. As Coleman declared on one of his recordings almost 50 years ago, This is our music.

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Benefits of aficionado-programmed fests

The best thing about the Chicago Jazz Festival is that it’s curated by an independent committee of people (mostly from the Jazz Institute of Chicago) who really love music, rather than being overly influenced by promoters, booking agents and managers representing a few big name artists who are trying to fill blank dates during their big tours. 

Singer Dee Dee Bridgewater’s  first-time ever tribute to the late Betty Carter, her mentor, electrified the crowd at Grant Park Friday night — after drummer Thurman Barker led a brilliant set by stalwarts from Chicago’s avant garde-leaning Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), and trombonist Julian Priester soloed throughout original repertoire written by local trombonist T.S. Galloway in honor of the fabled Du Sable High School band director Capt. Walter Dyett. This is not a schedule that could have been imagined by anyone but Chicagoans intimately aware of the Chicago Jazz Fest’s 30-year history. 

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Sonny Rollins in Chicago

Sonny Rollins at 78 is still a saxophone collosus, as he demonstrated leading his touring sextet Thursday night to open the Chicago Jazz Festival. His bent posture, shock of white hair and strong features give him the air of an Old Testament prophet, and his stamina may not be all it was when he was younger, but he brought wisdom, humor and intensity to an upbeat and swinging rendition of Irving Berlin’s “Falling In Love Is Wonderful,” sweet warmth  to Ellington’s “In A Sentimental Mood” (backed only by his rhythm section), and for a finale uproarious energy to a bare-bones Chicago blues. Read Neil Tesser’s article in the Chicago Reader for background on how Rollins cleaned up his act in Chicago, circa 1955, which accounts for his affection for the city to this day. 

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Chicago jazz fest in neighborhood clubs

A city’s jazz scene is best measured not by an annual festival — though Sonny Rollins free at the Frank Gehry-designed Pritzker Pavillion in Chicago’s Millennium Park on Thursday night was a fine thing. The real signs of Chicago’s jazz depth and diversity are evident in the unique “club tour” (aka pub crawl), which the Jazz Institute of Chicago cleverly designs to introduce listeners to local musicians playing small venues way outside the downtown Loop.

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World Music redefined by blogs

World Music, a phrase that literally should include all cultures’ sounds but as a genre has become narrowed, softened and commercialized, is being re-invigorated by a new cadre of bloggers with interests in adventure and discovery as well as analytic study, according to Ross Simoninini in the Village Voice Aug 20 – 26 issue. At last, it’s easy to reach beyond those pleasant Putumayo greatest hist packages (“guaranteed to make you feel good”) for fuller access to what’s played and heard all over the globe.

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Jazz fests of August

Free jazz fests across the U.S. mark summer’s glorious end. Manhattan’s Charlie Parker festival (held Saturday Aug. 23 and Sunday 24 in Marcus Garvey park uptown and Tompkins Square Park downtown), the Chicago Jazz Festival (which formally starts Thursday Aug 28 with Sonny Rollins at downtown Grant Park’s Petrillo bandshell) and the Detroit International Jazz Festival (celebrating Detroit-Philadelphia music connections, Aug 29 – Sept. 1 on multiple stages along the river at Hart Plaza and down the street at Campus Martius Park) and smaller events such as the Fox Jazz Festival in Menasha, Wisconsin have become traditions. 

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Pandora radio on deathbed?

The wonderful web radio giant Pandora.com — and lesser web radio sites, too — are reportedly about to be done in by per-song performance royalty rates doubled last year by a federal panel. Pandora’s founder says he’ll have to shut it down soon if the terms can’t be changed. Read the whole story in the Washington Post, and wonder who has it in for the free dissemination of music that we don’t know but might like anyway.  

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