I’ve been writing for this blog since its inception, more than a year ago.  I’ve decided it’s time for a rest, or maybe a change.  Sometimes a rest is a change.  I hope you have enjoyed what I have written.  Or, if not enjoyed, at least found yourself thinking about the subject at hand.  Thank you for reading, and thank you to Princeton Record Exchange for providing this forum.  I have tried when and where I could to argue for the necessity of keeping the art known as jazz fresh, vibrant, indeed revolutionary, as it has always been at its best, but now seems in danger of ossifying under commercial pressure.   There is no point to jazz’s survival, if that survival is one of only dreary “repertory” renditions, tired variations on tired themes, and endless reissues of many-times-reissued before albums.  I have directed criticism at public radio and TV for its timid cowering to commercial and organizational pressure, its abysmal failure to offer content with “the shock of the new,” its dereliction of cultural duties that are its real reason for existence.  Endless Yanni offerings, or pallid cocktail jazz, are not valid exercises of their public trust.  Instead, public programming should stop acting like an also-ran commercial network, and start being a cultural change-maker.  They do it much better in Europe.  Read the rest of this entry »

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Once upon a time, dinosaurs roamed the land. These behemoths had it their way.  They consumed vast amounts of food.   They trampled and trod upon whatever came before them.  They did not have to adapt, and so they did not.  When a planetary disaster struck, they were helpless and quickly headed towards oblivion. 

            So too the way of the behemoth jazz festival, most notably that espoused and produced by George Wein and a host of follow-the-leader wannabes.  I refer you to the New York Times report of May 19, 2009, “New York Loses Its Jazz Festival.”  According to the article,  “[...] for the first time in 37 years, there will be no major summer jazz festival in New York. Nor will there be related series in Miami or Chicago, as the concert company behind them is suffering a financial crisis.”  Apparently, Festival Productions, the company once owned by impresario Wein, which he sold to a group led by Chris Shields, is out of money and out of steam.   Last year, Festival Productions produced 17 jazz festivals around the world; this year none.  Read the rest of this entry »

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92 in the shade.   An emblem of heat.  The title of Tom McGuane’s modern classic novel.  Phoenix was not quite that cool.  It might have been all of a balmy 98 in the shade on my last trip there.  102 in the sun.  Carless, and on foot, I was in search of LPs.  Vinyl.  Jazz vinyl.  I scored my first vinyl at Grandiose, on East Pierce,  a hip boutique with records, clothing and art.  There I picked up a sealed copy of Stuff Smith’s  Black Violin on MPS.  I also picked up a double-LP on Arista Freedom (a short-lived but great label), Ornette Coleman’s The Great London Concert, recorded 1965, with David Izenzon, Charles Moffett and a small classical ensemble.  I hadn’t seen this one before, and was glad to get it.  There was also a nice copy of Jimmy Lyons’ “Some Other Afternoon” on BYG, but I already had that, so left it for the next vinyl hunter.   In search or more vinyl, I was directed to Wax ‘n Trax, further along on Central Avenue, at Camelback; too far to walk.  I would need to take the light rail train that runs along Central.  As I attempted to finagle a ticket from the station dispenser, as the sun beat mercilessly down,  and my hot sweaty hand clutched my bag of vinyl treasures, the question occurred to me: what is the melting point of vinyl? Read the rest of this entry »

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It was the second day of a business trip to Phoenix, in the never-more-aptly named “Valley of the Sun,” where the temperature hovered around 100* and the sun and heat felt like a hair dryer blowing in your face.  I had used my post-business “happy hour” scouting some local record stores (a story for another post).  Heat-struck and foot-worn, I was consoling myself with a pizza and beer, when my cell phone signaled a text message.  It was a ten second clip of German free jazz avatar Peter Brotzmann  performing that night at D.C club Velvet Lounge, sent by a friend to offer a small degree of consolation for having missed the performance.  Opening that little video clip in the desert night was like a visitation from another world, as if an old Norse god, perhaps Wotan himself,  decided to offer a glimpse of an unseen world for just a fleeting moment; unlike the place I inhabited at the moment, this one was dark, mysterious, loud, seemingly violent and stormy , yet compelling.  It lifted my spirit and increased my expectation for Brotzmann’s next performance at Wind Up Space in Baltimore, this past Saturday.  Read the rest of this entry »

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Although I grew up on rock, in what many believe was the “classic” era of rock (the 60s), I am now far more immersed in the jazz scene than I am in rock.  Don’t get me wrong:  I still can be engaged and moved and excited by rock music, especially if it pushes the boundaries:  boundaries of “good taste,” boundaries of commercial expectations; boundaries that bug the status quo.  But very little of what I hear on what remains these days of commercial rock radio meets these criteria.  The market now is all for and about “tweens,” the kiddies to teen market that just adores “Hannah Montana,” Justin Timberlake, and a host of other lip-synched, drum-synthed,  generic  popsters, who come and go with amazing rapidity.  Yes, there is a market for alt- and prog-rock, but it, like jazz, has been pushed to the margins, and its audience forced to hunt for the music.  Maybe just as well.  As has been proven time and again, the commercial process, like the ancient gods, destroys what it first makes great.  So what does my little screed have to do with today’s blog?  Not much, I’ll admit, except that my post today deals with a rock album, and what I think is a great modern rock album, a classic really, that can stand, if not quite with “Sgt. Peppers,” at least with the Rolling Stones’  “Their Satanic Majesties Request.”  (OK, I realize I’m likely in the minority on the latter pick).  Read the rest of this entry »

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No, not “Thing,” that disembodied hand that creeped you out in “The Addams Family.”  No, “The Thing” I’m talking about is the kick-butt Scandinavian free jazz trio, with Swede Mats Gustafsson on tenor sax, and Norwegians Ingebrigt Håker Flaten on bass, and Paal Nilssen-Love on drums.  The band has been touring the U.S. behind its new album, “”Bag It,” and a new CD box set.  These guys are as much influenced by the Ramones, Sex Pistols, and The Clash, as they are by Coltrane, Ornette,  and Albert Ayler.  When you go, you know it is going to be loud, intense and full of high-voltage energy.  I could feel that energy traveling way down to DC, enough so to make me drop what I was doing and make the two and a half hour trek to club Kung Fu Necktie (no, I have no idea either what the name means) on North Front Street, in Philadelphia, this past Friday night.     Read the rest of this entry »

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My order from Clean Feed came in yesterday.  In case you’ve been misled by those pop-jazz magazine polls into thinking the usual suspects (Blue Note, Verve, ECM) are actually issuing jazz recordings of real artistic interest, let me fill you in:  Clean Feed, a label based, perhaps rather improbably, out of Portugal,  is among the new leaders in creative improvised music.  The label, started in 2001, has performed brilliantly, and features some superb artists:  Anthony Braxton, Evan Parker, Tony Malaby, Steve Lehman, Charles Gayle, Paul Dunmall, and many other artists who are continuing to advance the art of creative improvised music.  Where the industry “giants” look for the next Norah Jones clone, or pop star in need of a jazz “makeover,” Clean Feed is still about the “sound of surprise.”   Blue Note used to be like this, but it has lost its way, depending upon a stream of reissues and pop crossovers to fill its roster and beholden to a corporate titan to adhere to the bottom line.  Blue Note is now part of the “industrial-musical complex.”    Anyway, the first two Clean Feeds out of the shipping box and into the CD player were Tony Malaby’s TAMARINDO, and Evan Parker’s A GLANCING BLOW. Read the rest of this entry »

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It arrived on the scene inconspicuously, without fanfare.  It had been on my want list for ages.   I only came across it online while I was looking for something else.  I found out it was released on February 24, 2009 in its current incarnation.  A welcome arrival, indeed.  What am I talking about (you may well ask)?   I am referring to the Rudy Van Gelder series release on Blue Note of trombonist Grachan Moncur III’s  laconically titled Some Other Stuff, recorded July 6, 1964 at RVG’s studio in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, and released initially in 1965 on Blue Note.  It is one of the great “inside -outside” albums produced by Blue Note.   For some reason, previous issues of this album on both LP and CD had proved hard to come by.  Even repeated trips to our dearly beloved PREX failed to turn up a copy.  I mulled purchasing the Moncur 3-CD box set on Mosaic just to get it, but I had all the other albums contained on the set and was loathe to pay the asking price just to complete my Moncur collection.  Now the Moncur set is out of print (and already commanding high asking prices), but here was the individual album that I sought, complete with Reid Miles original and enigmatic cover art, and with an added annotation by Bob Blumenthal.   It did not take long to hit “Buy,” and pop it into the CD player on arrival.  Read the rest of this entry »

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The title of the new The Bad Plus (hereafter TBP) CD on Heads Up, “For All I Care,”  is as ambiguous, ambivalent, and inscrutable as the rest of the album.  Perhaps the band is telling us that it cares for all types of music and things and people, that its approach is determinedly egalitarian and universal.  Or maybe it is telling us, defensively, in advance, and in anticipation of the usual TBP criticism, that it doesn’t much care what we think of the album, that they are going to do what they want, not what we want them to do. I suppose that it is both of these things.  They want us to hear them; they’re not terribly interested in hearing us.  For example, their blog, DO THE MATH, demonstrates their wide interests in things musical and cultural; however, they long since stopped accepting comments from readers on their posts.  It’s a High Modernist conception of the artist as creative and aloof, and perhaps more, creative because they are aloof.   No matter, for in “For All I Care,” they have created an album that challenges and connects. Read the rest of this entry »

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The liner notes to his recent CD, “Sketch,” put it bluntly:  “David Schnitter is the jazz world’s forgotten messenger, a marvelous musician who just happened to be in the right place before the right time.”  Except I would amend that statement to read:  “…in the right place after the right time.”   For Schnitter was not just a “jazz messenger,” but a “Jazz Messenger,” one of the members of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, a graduate of Blakey’s famed College of Hard Bop, that saw such other alumni as Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, Jymie Merritt, Cedar Walton, Curtis Fuller, and Bobbie Timmons.  I went to Twins Jazz last night to hear Schnitter and to see if the jazz message was still being delivered.  Read the rest of this entry »

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The rain has played a soggy ostinato to my recent jazz adventuring.  A cold, hard rain fell as I set forth for Baltimore Saturday to catch the Marilyn Crispell/Gerry Hemingway duo performance at An Die Musik.  The Beltway was choked with traffic and fender benders littered the highway shoulders.  “Surely,” my Inner Couch Potato protested, “it would be better to stay home, slumber on the couch, listen to a record.”   But I have learned that regret is a stronger motivator than reluctance, and I would have regretted missing this performance by these two Guggenheim Fellows and alumni of Anthony Braxton’s famed Quartet. Read the rest of this entry »

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It’s that time of the year, when professional basketball teams, under the aegis of the NCAA, play out the ritual basketball frenzy known as March Madness.  Oh sure, they represent various colleges (64 to be exact), but this is Big Business; perhaps, one of the few big businesses still making a go of it in our recession-racked economy.  There will be the usual cheers, jeers and slam dunks to enliven one’s viewing.  We have a few of our own. Read the rest of this entry »

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I was flat, under the weather, not inclined to move from the couch.  All week long, co-workers were shuffling about, afflicted with flu, colds, sneezing, coughing- you get the picture.  Some of those flu bugs seemed to have jumped ship and joined me.  On top of that, even the weather was flat: cold, damp, with rain and sleet in the forecast.  Plenty of excuses to stay home.   But the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble was playing at An Die Musik in Baltimore, and I knew I had to go.  It was a night “wondrous strange.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Literally just back from an enjoyable but tiring road trip to New York City; I-95 seems to still be spooling out in front of me as I write this.  I decided Friday to take an impromptu road trip to visit my daughter in college in Brooklyn (the new hip place in New York), my brother in Joisey (New Jersey to you), buy a few records, and take in the Saturday Art for Art Show at The Living Theater on the Lower East Side.   Left Friday night and was back in DC for lunch on Sunday.  The trip  is a blur of images, sights, sounds, tastes:  delicious pizza at Pompilio’s in Westwood, NJ, traffic jams noon and midnight in NYC; LPs and more LPs; and blasts of passionate free jazz, and the sinuous movement of skilled dancers.  Read the rest of this entry »

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Regular readers of this blog know that I have had some tussles with public radio in the past, most notably my ongoing critique with the disappointingly bland programming of WBGO (Newark, NJ).  Most recently, and closer to home, that is, my local jazz-public affairs station, WPFW, Washington, DC,, I have encountered some rather more serious reasons why I –and you– might want to look a little deeper into our public radio stations before we give them any more of our money–especially in this era when everyone else-from bankrupt banks to greedy CEOs– seem to want it also.  The question I wanted to answer was whether or not these stations handle the money they receive with the care and prudence which we expect them to handle it.  The answers I found were alarming.  Read the rest of this entry »

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So, are you into Iraqi jazz fusion yet?  Or maybe you never heard of it?  I had a chance to listen to it last night (Saturday, Feb 7) at the Smithsonian’s Freer Museum Meyer Auditorium, in a performance by Amir El Saffar’s Two River Ensemble, with El Saffar on trumpet, santur, and voice, Rudresh Mahanthappa on alto sax, Nasheet Waits, drums, Carlos De Rosa, bass, and Jason Adasiewicz, vibraphone.  The place was packed– and your intrepid blogger was almost shut out. Read the rest of this entry »

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Quick, name a top female saxophone player.   Quick, name a female tenor sax player in the free jazz, creative improvised music arena.  If nothing immediately leaps to mind, don’t feel too bad; unfortunately, it’s really not a crowded category.  I’m not sure what the reasons are for that state of affairs.  But it did add a bit of an edge to my interest to check out Danish saxophonist Lotte Anker, performing with Swiss pianist Sylvie Courvoisier, and Japanese electronics improviser Ikue Mori, the latter two now based in New York, while Anker remains based in her native Copenhagen.  I caught them this past Saturday at An Die Musik in Baltimore, last stop on their U.S. tour behind the release of their new CD, Alien Huddle.  Previous stops included Noo Yawk and Philly, and I had heard good reports on the show.  I was not disaapointed; in fact, the show continues to resonate with me. Read the rest of this entry »

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Strange Interlude:  no live jazz this weekend. Looking forward to some good shows the next couple of weeks and will report on them of course.  In the meantime, some stray thoughts for your edification.

The recession has hit our friends at Downbeat.  The February 2009 issue has so little content it ought to come with a rebate coupon.  The cover story, “75 Great Guitarists” offers thumbnail (pinky nail?) sketches of, well, 75 guitarists.  This exercise in cloying nostalgia serves no valid purpose except to, once again, exploit the legends of Wes Montgomery and others to cover the lack of serious thinking and reporting that so  depressingly characterizes our mainstream jazz magazines.  Let’s have a good wallow in nostalgia, shall we?  Read the rest of this entry »

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On a frigid Friday, I set out from Our Nation’s Capital to the City of Brotherly Love to attend the Marshall Allen-Han Bennink concert, part of the Ars Nova Workshop series.  Leaving the DC area took on the trappings of departing from one of those doomed cities one finds in sci-fi movies, like “Escape from New York.”  Massive security procedures for the Inauguration have turned DC into a bunker complex:  bridges and roads closed; transit system overwhelmed and confused; people warned to stay away.  I needed a change of scene.  Read the rest of this entry »

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