Celebrating Community
By the time you read this, Bud Powell’s 100th birthday (September 27) will have passed, with a 24-hour broadcast from WKCR and a 25% discount promotion from Blue Note records on the two Powell LPs on their label currently in print. So after blowing out the candles, let’s take a look at how that is a tragedy. Powell was the […]
Every year, the Vision Festival opens with a concert dedicated to one musician who is honored with a Lifetime Achievement award. That’s an evening of three or four sets, each one featuring this figure. In 2023, that was French bassist Joëlle Léandre, one night at Roulette with four sets in four different grouping around her playing and artistry. That, June […]
The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD (6th edition), introduces vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson by pointing out that if he “were a saxophonist, trumpeter, or pianist, he would be regarded as a major figure in modern jazz.” That’s no exaggeration, Hutcherson (who died in 2016) was one of the greatest of all jazz musicians of the post-1959 era. He was an […]
Here in New York City, the jazz capital of the world, hot summer nights mean not just jazz but free jazz. The very idea of Ornette Coleman or Albert Ayler playing at Slugs’ Saloon fills me with the image of musicians on the bandstand in a hot, crowded club, the air conditioning failing to compete with the temperature outside, the […]
Dear Reader: Thanks for turning to this page. If you are a jazz fan, you know why you’re here, and I’m glad to have you. But what I’m writing this month is more specifically directed at the non-jazz fan, or any reader who happened to turn to this page just to continue reading everything in this fine newspaper. For you, […]
Gatekeeping gets a bad rap—and it should! Guarding information and experiences to keep them away from people is generally bad. At the very least, it’s a petty and infantile exercising of very limited and temporary power, trying to create an artificial sense of exclusivity and prestige in a pluralistic, democratic culture—snobbery in other words. At worst, you get self-perpetuating, smug […]
Call it “Rhythm Prejudice,” and blame it on Bach. His genius with harmony and forms like canon and fugue set the foundation of modern Western music and established the keyboard as the basis for both composition and analysis. That has meant that vertical harmony—chords—has been privileged across the board, from garage band rock to academic musicology. It wasn’t always this […]
Transitions are beguiling, that period when a thing is changing into something else. It’s part of nature, of course—it’s the story of the universe—and it’s essential in all the arts. The ephemeral, performing ones, especially dance and music, are all about movement and transitions through time. Not all music is the same, obviously, and the way transitions are handled and […]
Moral panics have been around long before Socrates was forced to commit suicide for corrupting the youth of Athens. Since civilization began, there’s been an endless cycle of social/political/artistic change provoking reaction from those who are fearful of any change whatsoever, or even, in Mencken’s immortal words, “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” The challenge for the […]
Music making is a social activity. Anyone with a laptop and a bedroom can make an album, but there’s limits to that, not the least how far one’s imagination can go without the stimulus of other personalities. When musicians get together to play it’s a social activity, they make something together whether or not they’re in front of an audience. […]