Hurricane Irene wiped out both days of NYC’s annual Charlie Parker Jazz Fest — but not the avant-garde/glance at the past show of post-Coltranesque Archie Shepp, Israeli-born woodwinder Anat Cohen, hipster pianist Gerald Clayton and one-time busker Madeleine Peyroux available […]
Fearing Hurricane Irene, New York City suspended everything last weekend (Aug 27-28) including the two-day, two-location Charlie Parker Jazz Festival. But not my online video Charlie Parker Jazz fest, a humble video-clip stand-in for live sets by harmonica-and-guitarist Toots Thielemans, saxophonist colossus […]
The National Endowment for the Arts’s final designated Jazz Masters are all worthy: drummer Jack DeJohnette, saxophonist Von Freeman, bassist Charlie Haden, singer Sheila Jordan and trumpeter-educator-organizer-gadfly Jimmy Owens have had long and profoundly influential if not broadly celebrated or financially rewarded creative careers. So much the worse that this 30 […]
Two postings, combined into one, on Gil Scott-Heron, dead at age 62, a poet, prophet and spokesperson of the black urban American experience. A merciless and unsentimental truth-teller when he emerged on the scene in the ’70s, by telling Afro-identified […]
As I’ve detailed in two blog postings elsewhere, the National Endowment for the Arts has proposed in its 2012 budget the end of National Heritage Fellowships and Jazz Masters — both 30 year programs — and Opera Honors (begun only two years ago). […]
According to the family of Tuli Kupferberg, the poet-comic-satirist-cartoonist-street artist-community media star and truth teller who died last week at age 86, the public service at Manhattan’s St. Marks church from noon to 3 pm Saturday 7/17, will have “no […]
Musicologists are now convinced blues icon Robert Johnson’s recordings as released are 20% faster than he performed in two solo sessions in 1936 and 1937. It’s unclear whether they were sped up intentionally (to push their excitement, which seems hardly […]
We’re all watching Treme, the HBO series about New Orleans three months after Katrina, right? It sets a new standard for genuine roots music on tv. Forget about American Idiot — er, Idol, VH1 or even David Sanborn’s late, lamented […]
David Honeyboy Edwards, at age 94 and a half one of a dwindling handful of surviving practitioners of first generation Delta blues, gigged at B.B. King’s Blues Club on NYC’s 42nd St. last week. He held the stage with little […]
Composer, conceptualist and multi-instrumentalist Ornette Coleman, b. March 9 1930, is widely known for “free jazz” — which is routinely depicted as the most abstract and daunting music to emerge from the U.S. But this overlooks Ornette’s deep roots in […]
