Celebrating Community
“We came up from the subway / On the music midnight makes / To Charlie’s bass and Lester’s saxophone / In taxi horns and brakes.” – Joni Mitchell Take the 1 train to Christopher Street and walk uptown on Seventh Avenue South for a few blocks and you end up in a rough triangle marked by Smalls, Mezzrow, and the […]
The musicians are doing their all, but the zoom-type media experience is just not working for jazz. Jazz has an in-the-moment feedback that streaming can’t support. Catch a live performance and the musicians (if it’s safe for two or more to got together) can be seen responding to each other, but there’s nothing they can get from the viewers, nor […]
The sad state of the days means that pianist Mike Longo will, for at least a good period of time, be remembered more for being the first American jazz musician to succumb to the COVID-19 virus than for the what he did musically, and how it added to the world. Dorothy Longo, his wife for 32 years, reported his death […]
This is not about listening to jazz at home, which is how we’ve done it for most of the last 100 years. The radio, the stereo, 78s, LPs, cassettes, CDs, what else is there to say about them? They deliver music to our ears, and while that may not be the best way to experience jazz, it’s the most convenient […]
When everyone is making it up on the spot, who’s the composer? This is a question every time an album track has a composer credit, or when a musician on the bandstand announces that “this was written/composed by” so-and-so. If you listen to jazz at all, you’ve heard one or more musicians play a tune (usually a song form of […]