Way out northwest last weekend for the Experience Music Project’s 7th Annual Pop Conference, I also visited Earshot Jazz fest and concert producer John Gilbreath doing his weekly late night show “Jazz Theater” on KEXP.org. 

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Who presents and supports the articulation of ambitious thinking about American vernacular music? The Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum (Seattle’s answer to NYC’s American Museum of Natural History?) holds its seventh annual Pop Conference April 10 – 13, with dozens of scholars, journalists and musicians giving 20-minute run-throughs of their specialities on panels regarding the overall theme “Shake, Rattle: Music, Conflict and Change.”  I’m among the presenters, offering “Jazz Beyond Jazz: Breakthroughs and Coalitions” in a discussion moderated by Nate Chinen, music reviewer for the New York Times, columnist for Jazz Times. The panel is unfortunately (in my view) titled “Freedom Then.” What about now?

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It’s a sad day when an established stage for national and local jazz closes, as JazzWest.com’s Wayne Saroyan reports will happen to Jazz at Pearl’s in San Francisco’s North Beach (right across the street from City Lights Books ) at the end of April. One such closing does not signal a trend; small independent venues come and go. San Francisco does have its newly opened Yoshi’s in the historically fascinating Fillmore district.

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.
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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.

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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?

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An arts journalism/literary detour: Alain Robbe-Grillet deserves better than the clip job and interview bites the New York Times’s Rachel Donadio afforded him on the editorial page last weekend. His cinematic and, yes, avant-garde jazz-like (fractured, abstracted, jagged, nagging, rhythmically repetitious, cool to the point of cruel) writing style and his frequent themes (the impossibility of certain knowledge and danger of pursuing it, the eroticism of violence and chill of eroticism) were breakthroughs in the ’50s but moreover exert obvious continuing influence on mystery writing and movies today.

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(slightly corrected version)

Conductor of improvisation Lawrence Douglas “Butch” Morris is an East Village charmer, now-too-infrequent cornetist and internationally-known instigator of large ensemble music made spontaneously in real time by free-from-convention individuals. During a radio interview for the NPR show News & Notes, Butch identifies himself as a jazz musician not by superficial “style” but by inherent lineage, values, procedures and preferences.

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Five unusually sunny days and a sumptuous solo performance by Cecil Taylor before at least 2000 absorbed listeners marked the first weekend of the fourth annual Portland Jazz Festival. Deconstructions by musicians and critics of the words “swing,” “jazz,” “sound” and “music” demonstrated this was a high ol’ time. What should we call it? Propulsive compositional improvisation?

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jazz-beyond-jazz fans (that’s yours truly!) exult in Ornette Coleman, Myra Melford’s Be Bread, the Bad Plus and the overall Portland Jazz Festival

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