Wayne Shorter's philosophical mind and abstract jazz
Posted on Sun, Jan. 30, 2005
Wayne Shorter's philosophical mind and abstract jazz
By ZAN STEWART
NEWHOUSE NEWS SERVICE
'Footprints: The Life and Music of Wayne Shorter'
by Michelle Mercer (Jeremy P. Tarcher, 301 pages, $24.95)
In describing the remarkable saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter, Czech bassist Miroslav Vitous - a founder, with Shorter and Joe Zawinul, of the pioneering jazz/fusion band Weather Report - once said, "Wayne, he is like the wind."
It's an intriguing statement, worth considering. Acclaimed for his singular compositions and his potent performances, with Miles Davis, Art Blakey and with Weather Report, Shorter is quick to move from one place to another - musically, in his witty-to-warm-to-serious conversation, undoubtedly in thought. His ideas can be hard to decipher, enigmatic, but can also smack you right in the face. He's a highly philosophical, gifted artist with the power to affect lives.
Whether Shorter ever heard Vitous' description, he would probably find it fitting. He embraces the word and the ideas it suggests, naming his second daughter Iska, "Wind" in the Nigerian Hausa language, and calling one of his tunes "Wind."
Vitous' metaphor also rings true in Michelle Mercer's comprehensive, if uneven, biography, "Footprints: The Life and Music of Wayne Shorter." Based on interviews with Shorter, his colleagues and his personal circle and on arduous research, the book helps us understand this complex, important American musician.
"Footprints" follows Shorter from his earliest memories growing up in Newark, N.J., where he was born in 1933, to his current status as a jazz icon revered by musicians and fans alike. If for years Shorter was not a major name and needed to be exposed, as Davis told him shortly before his death in 1991, he is now, and Mercer's book will surely further that exposure.
Shorter didn't begin his study of music until the relatively late age of 15. Music touched Shorter first via film soundtracks; from hearing Count Basie, Tommy Dorsey and Thelonious Monk on radio programs his father listened to; and from catching Basie, Stan Kenton, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and others at the Adams Theater, when he cut class from Newark Arts High.
It was at Arts High that Shorter, then a clarinet student, joined a class in music theory in the middle of the school year - and scored 100 percent on his final exam. "I walked home with a new awareness of music, with a vague but deeply felt sense that music was the direction I was supposed to go in," he recalls.
Soon, Shorter was a saxophonist, playing around Newark. He began composing during his mid-'50s stint as a music education major at New York University; by then his saxophone prowess had earned him the sobriquet "The Newark Flash."
During his tenures with Blakey (1959-64) and Davis (1964-70), and on the Blue Note albums made during that period, Shorter wrote many of the numbers that are now part of the jazz repertoire. These include "Speak No Evil," "Children of the Night," "Infant Eyes" and "Footprints."
Mercer tracks Shorter's 1970-85 Weather Report years - he called the band "a soundtrack of the imagination" - and devotes an overly long section to "Native Dancer," Shorter's 1974 Columbia album with Brazilian singer-composer Milton Nascimento.
Shorter's brief late-'70s-'80s forays as a cameo soloist on non-jazz recordings and occasional performances with Mitchell, Santana and Steely Dan are examined.
Also documented are Shorter's unique electronic-orchestral albums for Columbia (1985-87) and Verve (1995). The musical survey ends with two Verve albums - "Footprints Live!" (2002) and "Alegria" (2003).
Between the musical material, Mercer weaves Shorter's personal story. His wide-ranging, filmic imagination can be fascinating; no wonder his artistic endeavors have been so varied. He's a shy man, often reticent, though neither he nor Mercer ever really explains why.
Shorter's conversion to Nichiren Buddhism, and the tremendous impact it has had on his life, is explored in depth. Shorter has had tragedies, and these are not shied away from. Iska suffered brain damage after a tetanus shot when she was 3 months old, and his second wife, Ana Maria, died aboard TWA Flight 800 when it crashed off Long Island in 1996. In both cases, Shorter's practice of Buddhism helped him to get past sorrow and stay steady. As he explains his beliefs, his ultimately upbeat moods seem quite apropos, even admirable.
Mercer can write lucid, flowing prose, as in this description of a Shorter band performance: "Their passages denied expectations of the usual musical techniques, such as crescendo and decrescendo, and tension and release."
But too often she undermines the book's impact with loose transitions, florid statements and cliches. For example, she refers to the "sprawling cruelty" of Stravinsky's dynamic "Rite of Spring."
And there are numerous errors, small but annoying: Newark's McCarter Highway is called "MacArthur"; John Coltrane's album "A Love Supreme" is called a song.
Still, if you're interested in a man who is "like the wind," then this book is the place to find the story.
Sunday, January 30, 2005
Monday, January 24, 2005
Thursday, January 20, 2005
The New York Times > Arts > Music > Pieces of Jazz History Head to Auction Block
The New York Times > Arts > Music > Pieces of Jazz History Head to Auction Block
The New York Times
January 20, 2005
Pieces of Jazz History Head to Auction Block
By BEN RATLIFF
There is Charlie Parker's King alto saxophone, with mother-of-pearl keys, his primary horn in the 1950's. There is Benny Goodman's clarinet, John Coltrane's soprano and tenor saxophones, Gerry Mulligan's baritone. Thelonious Monk's tailored jacket. A ribald 27-page letter from Louis Armstrong to his manager. One of Ornette Coleman's notebooks from the late 1950's, with his practice exercises and, on one of the last pages, one of his greatest compositions, "Focus on Sanity," written in pencil. Home movies of Coltrane shoveling snow outside his house in Philadelphia in the late 1950's. Charlie Parker concert recordings made by his wife, Chan, and high school book reports by Monk.
On Feb. 20 at the Allen Room in Jazz at Lincoln Center's Rose Hall, Guernsey's Auction House will put all these items, and many others, on the block at a special jazz auction. Previews will be held on Feb. 18 and 19, but Guernsey's would not estimate how much the auction will make.
"It would be folly to try to come up with a number," said Guernsey's owner, Arlan Ettinger. Very few of the lots have reserves - the secret minimum prices agreed upon by the sellers and the house. Nor is the house listing estimates in its catalog.
Jazz artifacts have been auctioned before, through Christie's and Sotheby's, but there has been no single auction of this size entirely dedicated to jazz. And though there have been jazz collectors of one kind or another since the 1930's, it seems to have taken many of the families of jazz's royalty this long to dislodge the once mundane items, long buried in closets, that now have great value not only to jazz aficionados but also to the larger community of collectors.
But just because these memorabilia are now turning up at a public auction does not mean they will end up in public hands, at least not right away.
Instruments and sheet music have entered the collections of institutions like the Smithsonian and the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University - the country's greatest academic center for jazz studies - which preserve them and make them available for scholars. (The city of Kansas City, Mo., owns one of Parker's plastic alto saxophones, sold at auction by Sotheby's in 1995 for around $140,000, and it has become the centerpiece of the town's American Jazz Museum. The University of Wisconsin owns the bass that belonged to the great Ellington bassist Jimmy Blanton and occasionally lets students play it.) But institutions, which have limited budgets and often rely on donations by the artists' families to acquire material, may not have the money to buy many of the items at Guernsey's auction.
Instead the pieces may be bought by collectors of modest means who dearly cling to their scraps of history, perhaps without giving them proper care. Or they might be acquired by wealthy collectors who eventually lose interest in them and, after death, release them to museums.
"If I were to guess," Mr. Ettinger said, "sooner or later, the majority of this material will end up in museums. But it could take a decade."
In the Smithsonian's collection lie reams of unpublished Duke Ellington music, Lionel Hampton's vibraphone and Ella Fitzgerald's entire archive, among thousands of other items. In nearly every case, the material was donated.
"We'd love to have some of these things in this auction," said John Edward Hasse, the Smithsonian's curator of American music. "But we don't get a penny from the federal budget for acquisitions. So we rely heavily on the good will, generosity and public spiritedness of musicians and their families."
Alice Coltrane, the widow of John Coltrane, is the source for much of the Coltrane material in the auction, including the saxophones and paperwork. In a telephone interview yesterday, she said she had been approached by several museums in the past, including the Smithsonian, but the circumstances had never seemed right for her to donate material.
"We got a letter about this auction in New York," she explained, "and I had never before considered anything like that. All of the instruments that we have are kept here in our family. But once I thought it through, I thought it would be O.K. if we presented some of the memorabilia."
Some of the proceeds, she explained, will go to the John Coltrane Foundation, a fund that has supported young jazz musicians for 18 years by giving them scholarships to music schools. Some will go to Jowcol, the Coltrane publishing company; some to her own charities, including churches and hospitals in Los Angeles and Detroit, the Red Cross, and a small school for orphaned children in Puttaparthi, India, near Madras. She still expects at some point, she said, to strike a deal with the Smithsonian.
One auction piece from Ms. Coltrane's house in California - the original sheet-music sketches for Coltrane's 1964 suite "A Love Supreme," among the most important works in jazz - bears explicit notes and markings in Coltrane's hand. ("Make ending attempt to reach transcendent level"; "Rising harmonies to a level of blissful stability at end"; "Last chord to sound like final chord of 'Alabama.' ") These two pages, which have never been seen by scholars, aren't just a curio: they will affect scholarship.
Many objects are more important than they seem at first glance, revealing something about an artist's early interests, his psychology or the culture of the times. Also in the Coltrane collection is a fifth-grade school scrapbook, solemnly emblazoned in cut-out block letters with the words "Negro History Book," which indicates who made an impression on him in the 1930's. In it, he copied out poems by Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson, and pasted pictures of black entertainers like the Dancing Nicholas Brothers, Marian Anderson and Fletcher Henderson, as well as the etiquette teacher Charlotte Hawkins Brown.
In Monk's school essay books, from 1933 (he was 15), there is a book report on "A Tale of Two Cities," an essay in an exquisite, old-fashioned serif-spangled hand about why Boys' Life is his favorite magazine, and one on the topic of good newspaper journalism. And in the left cuff of one of his tailored jackets, sewn in gold thread, is the phrase "Crepé Scole With Nellie." It refers, via a misspelling, to his tune "Crepuscule With Nellie," written for his wife, Nellie. That Monk would stash a secret phrase to himself in a hidden place says something about the hidden compartments of his character and his great affection for his wife.
"My hope is that the purchasers are the more sharing institutions and collectors," said the jazz historian Phil Schaap, who helped Guernsey's evaluate the objects. "Things tended to go more to repositories until recently. Which means, to me, the suggestion that repositories don't have the money to buy these things." He paused. "The pageantry of it, though, is pretty impressive," he said. "It's all going to be in one room."
The New York Times
January 20, 2005
Pieces of Jazz History Head to Auction Block
By BEN RATLIFF
There is Charlie Parker's King alto saxophone, with mother-of-pearl keys, his primary horn in the 1950's. There is Benny Goodman's clarinet, John Coltrane's soprano and tenor saxophones, Gerry Mulligan's baritone. Thelonious Monk's tailored jacket. A ribald 27-page letter from Louis Armstrong to his manager. One of Ornette Coleman's notebooks from the late 1950's, with his practice exercises and, on one of the last pages, one of his greatest compositions, "Focus on Sanity," written in pencil. Home movies of Coltrane shoveling snow outside his house in Philadelphia in the late 1950's. Charlie Parker concert recordings made by his wife, Chan, and high school book reports by Monk.
On Feb. 20 at the Allen Room in Jazz at Lincoln Center's Rose Hall, Guernsey's Auction House will put all these items, and many others, on the block at a special jazz auction. Previews will be held on Feb. 18 and 19, but Guernsey's would not estimate how much the auction will make.
"It would be folly to try to come up with a number," said Guernsey's owner, Arlan Ettinger. Very few of the lots have reserves - the secret minimum prices agreed upon by the sellers and the house. Nor is the house listing estimates in its catalog.
Jazz artifacts have been auctioned before, through Christie's and Sotheby's, but there has been no single auction of this size entirely dedicated to jazz. And though there have been jazz collectors of one kind or another since the 1930's, it seems to have taken many of the families of jazz's royalty this long to dislodge the once mundane items, long buried in closets, that now have great value not only to jazz aficionados but also to the larger community of collectors.
But just because these memorabilia are now turning up at a public auction does not mean they will end up in public hands, at least not right away.
Instruments and sheet music have entered the collections of institutions like the Smithsonian and the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University - the country's greatest academic center for jazz studies - which preserve them and make them available for scholars. (The city of Kansas City, Mo., owns one of Parker's plastic alto saxophones, sold at auction by Sotheby's in 1995 for around $140,000, and it has become the centerpiece of the town's American Jazz Museum. The University of Wisconsin owns the bass that belonged to the great Ellington bassist Jimmy Blanton and occasionally lets students play it.) But institutions, which have limited budgets and often rely on donations by the artists' families to acquire material, may not have the money to buy many of the items at Guernsey's auction.
Instead the pieces may be bought by collectors of modest means who dearly cling to their scraps of history, perhaps without giving them proper care. Or they might be acquired by wealthy collectors who eventually lose interest in them and, after death, release them to museums.
"If I were to guess," Mr. Ettinger said, "sooner or later, the majority of this material will end up in museums. But it could take a decade."
In the Smithsonian's collection lie reams of unpublished Duke Ellington music, Lionel Hampton's vibraphone and Ella Fitzgerald's entire archive, among thousands of other items. In nearly every case, the material was donated.
"We'd love to have some of these things in this auction," said John Edward Hasse, the Smithsonian's curator of American music. "But we don't get a penny from the federal budget for acquisitions. So we rely heavily on the good will, generosity and public spiritedness of musicians and their families."
Alice Coltrane, the widow of John Coltrane, is the source for much of the Coltrane material in the auction, including the saxophones and paperwork. In a telephone interview yesterday, she said she had been approached by several museums in the past, including the Smithsonian, but the circumstances had never seemed right for her to donate material.
"We got a letter about this auction in New York," she explained, "and I had never before considered anything like that. All of the instruments that we have are kept here in our family. But once I thought it through, I thought it would be O.K. if we presented some of the memorabilia."
Some of the proceeds, she explained, will go to the John Coltrane Foundation, a fund that has supported young jazz musicians for 18 years by giving them scholarships to music schools. Some will go to Jowcol, the Coltrane publishing company; some to her own charities, including churches and hospitals in Los Angeles and Detroit, the Red Cross, and a small school for orphaned children in Puttaparthi, India, near Madras. She still expects at some point, she said, to strike a deal with the Smithsonian.
One auction piece from Ms. Coltrane's house in California - the original sheet-music sketches for Coltrane's 1964 suite "A Love Supreme," among the most important works in jazz - bears explicit notes and markings in Coltrane's hand. ("Make ending attempt to reach transcendent level"; "Rising harmonies to a level of blissful stability at end"; "Last chord to sound like final chord of 'Alabama.' ") These two pages, which have never been seen by scholars, aren't just a curio: they will affect scholarship.
Many objects are more important than they seem at first glance, revealing something about an artist's early interests, his psychology or the culture of the times. Also in the Coltrane collection is a fifth-grade school scrapbook, solemnly emblazoned in cut-out block letters with the words "Negro History Book," which indicates who made an impression on him in the 1930's. In it, he copied out poems by Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson, and pasted pictures of black entertainers like the Dancing Nicholas Brothers, Marian Anderson and Fletcher Henderson, as well as the etiquette teacher Charlotte Hawkins Brown.
In Monk's school essay books, from 1933 (he was 15), there is a book report on "A Tale of Two Cities," an essay in an exquisite, old-fashioned serif-spangled hand about why Boys' Life is his favorite magazine, and one on the topic of good newspaper journalism. And in the left cuff of one of his tailored jackets, sewn in gold thread, is the phrase "Crepé Scole With Nellie." It refers, via a misspelling, to his tune "Crepuscule With Nellie," written for his wife, Nellie. That Monk would stash a secret phrase to himself in a hidden place says something about the hidden compartments of his character and his great affection for his wife.
"My hope is that the purchasers are the more sharing institutions and collectors," said the jazz historian Phil Schaap, who helped Guernsey's evaluate the objects. "Things tended to go more to repositories until recently. Which means, to me, the suggestion that repositories don't have the money to buy these things." He paused. "The pageantry of it, though, is pretty impressive," he said. "It's all going to be in one room."
Friday, January 07, 2005
The Village Voice > Hiphop Turns 30 Whatcha celebratin' for?
by Greg Tate
January 4th, 2005 3:23 PM
The Numbers Beyond the Bling
In the streets of America, people are worse off, and more of them are in jail
By Ward HarkavyWe are now winding down the anniversary of hiphop's 30th year of existence as a populist art form. Testimonials and televised tributes have been airing almost daily, thanks to Viacom and the like. As those digitized hiphop shout-outs get packed back into their binary folders, however, some among us have been so gauche as to ask, What the heck are we celebrating exactly? A right and proper question, that one is, mate. One to which my best answer has been: Nothing less, my man, than the marriage of heaven and hell, of New World African ingenuity and that trick of the devil known as global hyper-capitalism. Hooray.
Given that what we call hiphop is now inseparable from what we call the hiphop industry, in which the nouveau riche and the super-rich employers get richer, some say there's really nothing to celebrate about hiphop right now but the moneyshakers and the moneymakers—who got bank and who got more.
Hard to argue with that line of thinking since, hell, globally speaking, hiphop is money at this point, a valued form of currency where brothers are offered stock options in exchange for letting some corporate entity stand next to their fire.
True hiphop headz tend to get mad when you don't separate so-called hiphop culture from the commercial rap industry, but at this stage of the game that's like trying to separate the culture of urban basketball from the NBA, the pro game from the players it puts on the floor.
Hiphop may have begun as a folk culture, defined by its isolation from mainstream society, but being that it was formed within the America that gave us the coon show, its folksiness was born to be bled once it began entertaining the same mainstream that had once excluded its originators. And have no doubt, before hiphop had a name it was a folk culture—literally visible in the way you see folk in Brooklyn and the South Bronx of the '80s, styling, wilding, and profiling in Jamel Shabazz's photograph book Back in the Days. But from the moment "Rapper's Delight" went platinum, hiphop the folk culture became hiphop the American entertainment-industry sideshow.
No doubt it transformed the entertainment industry, and all kinds of people's notions of entertainment, style, and politics in the process. So let's be real. If hiphop were only some static and rigid folk tradition preserved in amber, it would never have been such a site for radical change or corporate exploitation in the first place. This being America, where as my man A.J.'s basketball coach dad likes to say, "They don't pay niggas to sit on the bench," hiphop was never going to not go for the gold as more gold got laid out on the table for the goods that hiphop brought to the market. Problem today is that where hiphop was once a buyer's market in which we, the elite hiphop audience, decided what was street legit, it has now become a seller's market, in which what does or does not get sold as hiphop to the masses is whatever the boardroom approves.
The bitter trick is that hiphop, which may or may not include the NBA, is the face of Black America in the world today. It also still represents Black culture and Black creative license in unique ways to the global marketplace, no matter how commodified it becomes. No doubt, there's still more creative autonomy for Black artists and audiences in hiphop than in almost any other electronic mass-cultural medium we have. You for damn sure can't say that about radio, movies, or television. The fact that hiphop does connect so many Black folk worldwide, whatever one might think of the product, is what makes it invaluable to anyone coming from a Pan-African state of mind. Hiphop's ubiquity has created a common ground and a common vernacular for Black folk from 18 to 50 worldwide. This is why mainstream hiphop as a capitalist tool, as a market force isn't easily discounted: The dialogue it has already set in motion between Long Beach and Cape Town is a crucial one, whether Long Beach acknowledges it or not. What do we do with that information, that communication, that transatlantic mass-Black telepathic link? From the looks of things, we ain't about to do a goddamn thing other than send more CDs and T-shirts across the water.
But the Negro art form we call hiphop wouldn't even exist if African Americans of whatever socioeconomic caste weren't still niggers and not just the more benign, congenial "niggas." By which I mean if we weren't all understood by the people who run this purple-mountain loony bin as both subhuman and superhuman, as sexy beasts on the order of King Kong. Or as George Clinton once observed, without the humps there ain't no getting over. Meaning that only Africans could have survived slavery in America, been branded lazy bums, and decided to overcompensate by turning every sporting contest that matters into a glorified battle royal.
Like King Kong had his island, we had the Bronx in the '70s, out of which came the only significant artistic movement of the 20th century produced by born-and-bred New Yorkers, rather than Southwestern transients or Jersey transplants. It's equally significant that hiphop came out of New York at the time it did, because hiphop is Black America's Ellis Island. It's our Delancey Street and our Fulton Fish Market and garment district and Hollywoodian ethnic enclave/empowerment zone that has served as a foothold for the poorest among us to get a grip on the land of the prosperous.
Only because this convergence of ex-slaves and ch-ching finally happened in the '80s because hey, African Americans weren't allowed to function in the real economic and educational system of these United States like first-generation immigrants until the 1980s—roughly four centuries after they first got here, 'case you forgot. Hiphoppers weren't the first generation who ever thought of just doing the damn thang entreprenurially speaking, they were the first ones with legal remedies on the books when it came to getting a cut of the action. And the first generation for whom acquiring those legal remedies so they could just do the damn thang wasn't a priority requiring the energies of the race's best and brightest.
If we woke up tomorrow and there was no hiphop on the radio or on television, if there was no money in hiphop, then we could see what kind of culture it was, because my bet is that hiphop as we know it would cease to exist, except as nostalgia. It might resurrect itself as a people's protest music if we were lucky, might actually once again reflect a disenchantment with, rather than a reinforcement of, the have and have-not status quo we cherish like breast milk here in the land of the status-fiending. But I won't be holding my breath waiting to see.
Because the moment hiphop disappeared from the air and marketplace might be the moment when we'd discover whether hiphop truly was a cultural force or a manufacturing plant, a way of being or a way of selling porn DVDs, Crunk juice, and S. Carter signature sneakers, blessed be the retired.
That might also be the moment at which poor Black communities began contesting the reality of their surroundings, their life opportunities. An interesting question arises: If enough folk from the 'hood get rich, does that suffice for all the rest who will die tryin'? And where does hiphop wealth leave the question of race politics? And racial identity?
Picking up where Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement left off, George Clinton realized that anything Black folk do could be abstracted and repackaged for capital gain. This has of late led to one mediocre comedy after another about Negroes frolicking at hair shows, funerals, family reunions, and backyard barbecues, but it has also given us Biz Markie and OutKast.
Oh, the selling power of the Black Vernacular. Ralph Ellison only hoped we'd translate it in such a way as to gain entry into the hallowed house of art. How could he know that Ralph Lauren and the House of Polo would one day pray to broker that vernacular's cool marketing prowess into a worldwide licensing deal for bedsheets writ large with Jay-Z's John Hancock? Or that the vernacular's seductive powers would drive Estée Lauder to propose a union with the House of P. Diddy? Or send Hewlett-Packard to come knocking under record exec Steve Stoute's shingle in search of a hiphop-legit cool marketer?
Hiphop's effervescent and novel place in the global economy is further proof of that good old Marxian axiom that under the abstracting powers of capitalism, "All that is solid melts into air" (or the Ethernet, as the case might be). So that hiphop floats through the virtual marketplace of branded icons as another consumable ghost, parasitically feeding off the host of the real world's people—urbanized and institutionalized—whom it will claim till its dying day to "represent." And since those people just might need nothing more from hiphop in their geopolitically circumscribed lives than the escapism, glamour, and voyeurism of hiphop, why would they ever chasten hiphop for not steady ringing the alarm about the African American community's AIDS crisis, or for romanticizing incarceration more than attacking the prison-industrial complex, or for throwing a lyrical bone at issues of intimacy or literacy or, heaven forbid, debt relief in Africa and the evils perpetuated by the World Bank and the IMF on the motherland?
All of which is not to say "Vote or Die" wasn't a wonderful attempt to at least bring the phantasm of Black politics into the 24-hour nonstop booty, blunts, and bling frame that now has the hiphop industry on lock. Or to devalue by any degree Russell Simmons's valiant efforts to educate, agitate, and organize around the Rockefeller drug-sentencing laws. Because at heart, hiphop remains a radical, revolutionary enterprise for no other reason than its rendering people of African descent anything but invisible, forgettable, and dismissible in the consensual hallucination-simulacrum twilight zone of digitized mass distractions we call our lives in the matrixized, conservative -Christianized, Goebbelsized-by-Fox 21st century. And because, for the first time in our lives, race was nowhere to be found as a campaign issue in presidential politics and because hiphop is the only place we can see large numbers of Black people being anything other than sitcom window dressing, it maintains the potential to break out of the box at the flip of the next lyrical genius who can articulate her people's suffering with the right doses of rhythm and noise to reach the bourgeois and still rock the boulevard.
Call me an unreconstructed Pan-African cultural nationalist, African-fer-the-Africans -at-home-and-abroad-type rock and roll nigga and I won't be mad at ya: I remember the Afrocentric dream of hiphop's becoming an agent of social change rather than elevating a few ex-drug dealers' bank accounts. Against my better judgment, I still count myself among that faithful. To the extent that hiphop was a part of the great Black cultural nationalist reawakening of the 1980s and early '90s, it was because there was also an anti-apartheid struggle and anti-crack struggle, and Minister Louis Farrakhan and Reverend Jesse Jackson were at the height of their rhetorical powers, recruitment ambitions, and media access, and a generation of Ivy League Black Public Intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic had come to the fore to raise the philosophical stakes in African American debate, and speaking locally, there were protests organized around the police/White Citizens Council lynchings of Bumpurs, Griffiths, Hawkins, Diallo, Dorismond, etc. etc. etc. Point being that hiphop wasn't born in a vacuum but as part of a political dynamo that seems to have been largely dissipated by the time we arrived at the Million Man March, best described by one friend as the largest gathering in history of a people come to protest themselves, given its bizarre theme of atonement in the face of the goddamn White House.
The problem with a politics that theoretically stops thinking at the limit of civil rights reform and appeals to white guilt and Black consciousness was utterly revealed at that moment—a point underscored by the fact that the two most charged and memorable Black political events of the 1990s were the MMM and the hollow victory of the O.J. trial. Meaning, OK, a page had been turned in the book of African American economic and political life—clearly because we showed up in Washington en masse demanding absolutely nothing but atonement for our sins—and we did victory dances when a doofus ex-athlete turned Hertz spokesmodel bought his way out of lethal injection. Put another way, hiphop sucks because modern Black populist politics sucks. Ishmael Reed has a poem that goes: "I am outside of history . . . it looks hungry . . . I am inside of history it's hungrier than I thot." The problem with progressive Black political organizing isn't hiphop but that the No. 1 issue on the table needs to be poverty, and nobody knows how to make poverty sexy. Real poverty, that is, as opposed to studio-gangsta poverty, newly-inked-MC-with-a -story-to-sell poverty.
You could argue that we're past the days of needing a Black agenda. But only if you could argue that we're past the days of there being poor Black people and Driving While Black and structural, institutionalized poverty. And those who argue that we don't need leaders must mean Bush is their leader too, since there are no people on the face of this earth who aren't being led by some of their own to hell or high water. People who say that mean this: Who needs leadership when you've got 24-hour cable and PlayStations. And perhaps they're partly right, since what people can name and claim their own leaders when they don't have their own nation-state? And maybe in a virtual America like the one we inhabit today, the only Black culture that matters is the one that can be downloaded and perhaps needs only business leaders at that. Certainly it's easier to speak of hiphop hoop dreams than of structural racism and poverty, because for hiphop America to not just desire wealth but demand power with a capital P would require thinking way outside the idiot box.
Consider, if you will, this "as above, so below" doomsday scenario: Twenty years from now we'll be able to tell our grandchildren and great-grandchildren how we witnessed cultural genocide: the systematic destruction of a people's folkways.
We'll tell them how fools thought they were celebrating the 30th anniversary of hiphop the year Bush came back with a gangbang, when they were really presiding over a funeral. We'll tell them how once upon a time there was this marvelous art form where the Negro could finally say in public whatever was on his or her mind in rhyme and how the Negro hiphop artist, staring down minimum wage slavery, Iraq, or the freedom of the incarcerated chose to take his emancipated motor mouth and stuck it up a stripper's ass because it turned out there really was gold in them thar hills.
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January 4th, 2005 3:23 PM
The Numbers Beyond the Bling
In the streets of America, people are worse off, and more of them are in jail
By Ward HarkavyWe are now winding down the anniversary of hiphop's 30th year of existence as a populist art form. Testimonials and televised tributes have been airing almost daily, thanks to Viacom and the like. As those digitized hiphop shout-outs get packed back into their binary folders, however, some among us have been so gauche as to ask, What the heck are we celebrating exactly? A right and proper question, that one is, mate. One to which my best answer has been: Nothing less, my man, than the marriage of heaven and hell, of New World African ingenuity and that trick of the devil known as global hyper-capitalism. Hooray.
Given that what we call hiphop is now inseparable from what we call the hiphop industry, in which the nouveau riche and the super-rich employers get richer, some say there's really nothing to celebrate about hiphop right now but the moneyshakers and the moneymakers—who got bank and who got more.
Hard to argue with that line of thinking since, hell, globally speaking, hiphop is money at this point, a valued form of currency where brothers are offered stock options in exchange for letting some corporate entity stand next to their fire.
True hiphop headz tend to get mad when you don't separate so-called hiphop culture from the commercial rap industry, but at this stage of the game that's like trying to separate the culture of urban basketball from the NBA, the pro game from the players it puts on the floor.
Hiphop may have begun as a folk culture, defined by its isolation from mainstream society, but being that it was formed within the America that gave us the coon show, its folksiness was born to be bled once it began entertaining the same mainstream that had once excluded its originators. And have no doubt, before hiphop had a name it was a folk culture—literally visible in the way you see folk in Brooklyn and the South Bronx of the '80s, styling, wilding, and profiling in Jamel Shabazz's photograph book Back in the Days. But from the moment "Rapper's Delight" went platinum, hiphop the folk culture became hiphop the American entertainment-industry sideshow.
No doubt it transformed the entertainment industry, and all kinds of people's notions of entertainment, style, and politics in the process. So let's be real. If hiphop were only some static and rigid folk tradition preserved in amber, it would never have been such a site for radical change or corporate exploitation in the first place. This being America, where as my man A.J.'s basketball coach dad likes to say, "They don't pay niggas to sit on the bench," hiphop was never going to not go for the gold as more gold got laid out on the table for the goods that hiphop brought to the market. Problem today is that where hiphop was once a buyer's market in which we, the elite hiphop audience, decided what was street legit, it has now become a seller's market, in which what does or does not get sold as hiphop to the masses is whatever the boardroom approves.
The bitter trick is that hiphop, which may or may not include the NBA, is the face of Black America in the world today. It also still represents Black culture and Black creative license in unique ways to the global marketplace, no matter how commodified it becomes. No doubt, there's still more creative autonomy for Black artists and audiences in hiphop than in almost any other electronic mass-cultural medium we have. You for damn sure can't say that about radio, movies, or television. The fact that hiphop does connect so many Black folk worldwide, whatever one might think of the product, is what makes it invaluable to anyone coming from a Pan-African state of mind. Hiphop's ubiquity has created a common ground and a common vernacular for Black folk from 18 to 50 worldwide. This is why mainstream hiphop as a capitalist tool, as a market force isn't easily discounted: The dialogue it has already set in motion between Long Beach and Cape Town is a crucial one, whether Long Beach acknowledges it or not. What do we do with that information, that communication, that transatlantic mass-Black telepathic link? From the looks of things, we ain't about to do a goddamn thing other than send more CDs and T-shirts across the water.
But the Negro art form we call hiphop wouldn't even exist if African Americans of whatever socioeconomic caste weren't still niggers and not just the more benign, congenial "niggas." By which I mean if we weren't all understood by the people who run this purple-mountain loony bin as both subhuman and superhuman, as sexy beasts on the order of King Kong. Or as George Clinton once observed, without the humps there ain't no getting over. Meaning that only Africans could have survived slavery in America, been branded lazy bums, and decided to overcompensate by turning every sporting contest that matters into a glorified battle royal.
Like King Kong had his island, we had the Bronx in the '70s, out of which came the only significant artistic movement of the 20th century produced by born-and-bred New Yorkers, rather than Southwestern transients or Jersey transplants. It's equally significant that hiphop came out of New York at the time it did, because hiphop is Black America's Ellis Island. It's our Delancey Street and our Fulton Fish Market and garment district and Hollywoodian ethnic enclave/empowerment zone that has served as a foothold for the poorest among us to get a grip on the land of the prosperous.
Only because this convergence of ex-slaves and ch-ching finally happened in the '80s because hey, African Americans weren't allowed to function in the real economic and educational system of these United States like first-generation immigrants until the 1980s—roughly four centuries after they first got here, 'case you forgot. Hiphoppers weren't the first generation who ever thought of just doing the damn thang entreprenurially speaking, they were the first ones with legal remedies on the books when it came to getting a cut of the action. And the first generation for whom acquiring those legal remedies so they could just do the damn thang wasn't a priority requiring the energies of the race's best and brightest.
If we woke up tomorrow and there was no hiphop on the radio or on television, if there was no money in hiphop, then we could see what kind of culture it was, because my bet is that hiphop as we know it would cease to exist, except as nostalgia. It might resurrect itself as a people's protest music if we were lucky, might actually once again reflect a disenchantment with, rather than a reinforcement of, the have and have-not status quo we cherish like breast milk here in the land of the status-fiending. But I won't be holding my breath waiting to see.
Because the moment hiphop disappeared from the air and marketplace might be the moment when we'd discover whether hiphop truly was a cultural force or a manufacturing plant, a way of being or a way of selling porn DVDs, Crunk juice, and S. Carter signature sneakers, blessed be the retired.
That might also be the moment at which poor Black communities began contesting the reality of their surroundings, their life opportunities. An interesting question arises: If enough folk from the 'hood get rich, does that suffice for all the rest who will die tryin'? And where does hiphop wealth leave the question of race politics? And racial identity?
Picking up where Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement left off, George Clinton realized that anything Black folk do could be abstracted and repackaged for capital gain. This has of late led to one mediocre comedy after another about Negroes frolicking at hair shows, funerals, family reunions, and backyard barbecues, but it has also given us Biz Markie and OutKast.
Oh, the selling power of the Black Vernacular. Ralph Ellison only hoped we'd translate it in such a way as to gain entry into the hallowed house of art. How could he know that Ralph Lauren and the House of Polo would one day pray to broker that vernacular's cool marketing prowess into a worldwide licensing deal for bedsheets writ large with Jay-Z's John Hancock? Or that the vernacular's seductive powers would drive Estée Lauder to propose a union with the House of P. Diddy? Or send Hewlett-Packard to come knocking under record exec Steve Stoute's shingle in search of a hiphop-legit cool marketer?
Hiphop's effervescent and novel place in the global economy is further proof of that good old Marxian axiom that under the abstracting powers of capitalism, "All that is solid melts into air" (or the Ethernet, as the case might be). So that hiphop floats through the virtual marketplace of branded icons as another consumable ghost, parasitically feeding off the host of the real world's people—urbanized and institutionalized—whom it will claim till its dying day to "represent." And since those people just might need nothing more from hiphop in their geopolitically circumscribed lives than the escapism, glamour, and voyeurism of hiphop, why would they ever chasten hiphop for not steady ringing the alarm about the African American community's AIDS crisis, or for romanticizing incarceration more than attacking the prison-industrial complex, or for throwing a lyrical bone at issues of intimacy or literacy or, heaven forbid, debt relief in Africa and the evils perpetuated by the World Bank and the IMF on the motherland?
All of which is not to say "Vote or Die" wasn't a wonderful attempt to at least bring the phantasm of Black politics into the 24-hour nonstop booty, blunts, and bling frame that now has the hiphop industry on lock. Or to devalue by any degree Russell Simmons's valiant efforts to educate, agitate, and organize around the Rockefeller drug-sentencing laws. Because at heart, hiphop remains a radical, revolutionary enterprise for no other reason than its rendering people of African descent anything but invisible, forgettable, and dismissible in the consensual hallucination-simulacrum twilight zone of digitized mass distractions we call our lives in the matrixized, conservative -Christianized, Goebbelsized-by-Fox 21st century. And because, for the first time in our lives, race was nowhere to be found as a campaign issue in presidential politics and because hiphop is the only place we can see large numbers of Black people being anything other than sitcom window dressing, it maintains the potential to break out of the box at the flip of the next lyrical genius who can articulate her people's suffering with the right doses of rhythm and noise to reach the bourgeois and still rock the boulevard.
Call me an unreconstructed Pan-African cultural nationalist, African-fer-the-Africans -at-home-and-abroad-type rock and roll nigga and I won't be mad at ya: I remember the Afrocentric dream of hiphop's becoming an agent of social change rather than elevating a few ex-drug dealers' bank accounts. Against my better judgment, I still count myself among that faithful. To the extent that hiphop was a part of the great Black cultural nationalist reawakening of the 1980s and early '90s, it was because there was also an anti-apartheid struggle and anti-crack struggle, and Minister Louis Farrakhan and Reverend Jesse Jackson were at the height of their rhetorical powers, recruitment ambitions, and media access, and a generation of Ivy League Black Public Intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic had come to the fore to raise the philosophical stakes in African American debate, and speaking locally, there were protests organized around the police/White Citizens Council lynchings of Bumpurs, Griffiths, Hawkins, Diallo, Dorismond, etc. etc. etc. Point being that hiphop wasn't born in a vacuum but as part of a political dynamo that seems to have been largely dissipated by the time we arrived at the Million Man March, best described by one friend as the largest gathering in history of a people come to protest themselves, given its bizarre theme of atonement in the face of the goddamn White House.
The problem with a politics that theoretically stops thinking at the limit of civil rights reform and appeals to white guilt and Black consciousness was utterly revealed at that moment—a point underscored by the fact that the two most charged and memorable Black political events of the 1990s were the MMM and the hollow victory of the O.J. trial. Meaning, OK, a page had been turned in the book of African American economic and political life—clearly because we showed up in Washington en masse demanding absolutely nothing but atonement for our sins—and we did victory dances when a doofus ex-athlete turned Hertz spokesmodel bought his way out of lethal injection. Put another way, hiphop sucks because modern Black populist politics sucks. Ishmael Reed has a poem that goes: "I am outside of history . . . it looks hungry . . . I am inside of history it's hungrier than I thot." The problem with progressive Black political organizing isn't hiphop but that the No. 1 issue on the table needs to be poverty, and nobody knows how to make poverty sexy. Real poverty, that is, as opposed to studio-gangsta poverty, newly-inked-MC-with-a -story-to-sell poverty.
You could argue that we're past the days of needing a Black agenda. But only if you could argue that we're past the days of there being poor Black people and Driving While Black and structural, institutionalized poverty. And those who argue that we don't need leaders must mean Bush is their leader too, since there are no people on the face of this earth who aren't being led by some of their own to hell or high water. People who say that mean this: Who needs leadership when you've got 24-hour cable and PlayStations. And perhaps they're partly right, since what people can name and claim their own leaders when they don't have their own nation-state? And maybe in a virtual America like the one we inhabit today, the only Black culture that matters is the one that can be downloaded and perhaps needs only business leaders at that. Certainly it's easier to speak of hiphop hoop dreams than of structural racism and poverty, because for hiphop America to not just desire wealth but demand power with a capital P would require thinking way outside the idiot box.
Consider, if you will, this "as above, so below" doomsday scenario: Twenty years from now we'll be able to tell our grandchildren and great-grandchildren how we witnessed cultural genocide: the systematic destruction of a people's folkways.
We'll tell them how fools thought they were celebrating the 30th anniversary of hiphop the year Bush came back with a gangbang, when they were really presiding over a funeral. We'll tell them how once upon a time there was this marvelous art form where the Negro could finally say in public whatever was on his or her mind in rhyme and how the Negro hiphop artist, staring down minimum wage slavery, Iraq, or the freedom of the incarcerated chose to take his emancipated motor mouth and stuck it up a stripper's ass because it turned out there really was gold in them thar hills.
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Apocalypse Now
Janetgate 2004: Black sexuality awaits its Foucault—but three books fill the gap for now
Friday, December 31, 2004
BBC > Jazz giant Artie Shaw dies at 94
One of the most famous American band leaders of the swing era, the clarinettist Artie Shaw, has died.
He died at his home in Los Angeles at the age of 94.
His 1938 recording of the Cole Porter tune Begin the Beguine helped make him one of the most famous and highly-paid musicians in the US at the time.
A self-declared perfectionist, Shaw was married eight times. His wives included Hollywood actresses Lana Turner, Ava Gardner and Evelyn Keyes.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go /pr/fr/-/2/hi /entertainment/4136505 .stm
He died at his home in Los Angeles at the age of 94.
His 1938 recording of the Cole Porter tune Begin the Beguine helped make him one of the most famous and highly-paid musicians in the US at the time.
A self-declared perfectionist, Shaw was married eight times. His wives included Hollywood actresses Lana Turner, Ava Gardner and Evelyn Keyes.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go /pr/fr/-/2/hi /entertainment/4136505 .stm
Tuesday, December 07, 2004
Investors.com > World-Class New York City Jazz Performance Center Turns Up the Volume with LightPointe Optical Wireless Solutions
2004 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- LightPointe, a designer and manufacturer of optical wireless products based on free-space optics (FSO) technology, today announced that Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City has deployed LightPointe's optical wireless bridge to extend high-speed connectivity to the organization's newly opened Frederick P. Rose Hall.
Under the leadership of artistic director and renowned jazz musician and composer Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center is the largest not-for-profit arts organization dedicated to jazz. The $128 million, 100,000 square foot Frederick P. Rose Hall opened in midtown Manhattan in October to support the continued development of jazz music through a year-round schedule of education, performance and broadcast events.
In completing the new building, Jazz at Lincoln Center executives sought a solution to extend the reach of an existing 100 Mbps network from its administrative offices, located across the street from the performance facility. While they needed high-speed bandwidth to ensure access to the organization's ticketing software, custom databases and email, they eliminated the possibility of deploying fiber-optic cable because of rights-of-way challenges and time delays. Microwave radio technology also was ruled out due to spectrum licensing and liability concerns. Jazz at Lincoln Center's service provider, a tier-one provider in Manhattan, then recommended LightPointe's FlightLite(TM) Gigabit Ethernet optical wireless bridge, a high-capacity, license-free solution that uses beams of light to transmit voice, data and video through the air-without any of the installation challenges of fiber or microwave.
Fred Murphy, associate director of information technology for Jazz at Lincoln Center, calls FlightLite the most reliable part of his entire network. "The FlightLite has performed flawlessly during our inaugural events at Rose Hall this fall," Murphy said. "Without LightPointe, I don't know how we'd be able to provide Ethernet-class connectivity to our staff at the new facility. We had ruled out all other options, including T1 lines, which at 1.5 Mbps, simply didn't provide the bandwidth we need to operate a world-class business," he added.
Through the FlightLite optical wireless bridge, staffers at the new performance hall gain seamless access to business-critical enterprise applications, including Microsoft Exchange Server, a Voice over IP (VoIP) telephone system, Patron Edge ticketing software and ArtsVision database. In addition to providing necessary connectivity, the LightPointe installation is projected to produce a return on investment in approximately three years.
Bob Preston, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for LightPointe, said Jazz at Lincoln Center's selection of LightPointe is indicative of a growing trend in enterprise connectivity. "More and more companies are turning to optical wireless to extend the reach of their high- performance networks across campus environments," he said. "Where T1 links or 802.11 solutions once sufficed, today there is an increased demand for high- speed data, voice and video transport. Optical wireless meets this challenge while also providing robust security, economical price-per-bit and ease of installation."
To date, LightPointe has sold more than 2,500 optical wireless bridges in more than 60 countries to leading enterprises and mobile wireless service providers. In addition to the best-selling FlightLite line, LightPointe offers the FlightSpectrum(TM) with fixed four-beam operation; FlightStrata(TM), the flagship product with advanced multi-beam tracking, optical beam shaping and speeds up to 1.25 Gbps; and the FlightApex(TM), the highest-capacity optical wireless product on the market with multi-beam technology and connectivity speeds up to 2.5 Gbps.
About Jazz at Lincoln Center
Jazz at Lincoln Center is a not-for-profit arts organization dedicated to jazz. With the world-renowned Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, and a comprehensive array of guest artists, Jazz at Lincoln Center advances a unique vision for the continued development of the art of jazz. Its productions include concerts, national and international tours, residencies, weekly national radio and television programs, recordings, publications, an annual high school jazz band competition and festival, a band director academy, a jazz appreciation curriculum for children, advanced training through the Julliard Institute for Jazz Studies, music publishing, children's concerts, lectures, adult education courses, film programs, and student and educator workshops. Under the leadership of Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis, President & CEO Hughlyn F. Fierce, Executive Director Derek E. Gordon, Chairman of the Board Lisa Schiff and Jazz at Lincoln Center Board and staff, Jazz at Lincoln Center will produce hundreds of events during its 2004-05 season. This is the inaugural season in Jazz at Lincoln Center's new home -- Frederick P. Rose Hall -- the first-ever performance, education, and broadcast facility devoted to jazz.
About LightPointe
LightPointe designs and manufactures high-speed optical wireless products based on free-space optics (FSO) technology for cost-effective bridging in enterprise and carrier networks. LightPointe products have been deployed in more than 60 countries, and the company is recognized worldwide for the highest standards of quality and service. To learn more, please visit www.lightpointe.com.
SOURCE LightPointe
Jeff Bean of LightPointe, +1-858-643-5319, or
jbean@lightpointe.com, or Sue Hetzel of HetzelMeade Communications,
+1-760-434-9927, or sue@hetzelmeade.com
http://www.lightpointe.com
Under the leadership of artistic director and renowned jazz musician and composer Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center is the largest not-for-profit arts organization dedicated to jazz. The $128 million, 100,000 square foot Frederick P. Rose Hall opened in midtown Manhattan in October to support the continued development of jazz music through a year-round schedule of education, performance and broadcast events.
In completing the new building, Jazz at Lincoln Center executives sought a solution to extend the reach of an existing 100 Mbps network from its administrative offices, located across the street from the performance facility. While they needed high-speed bandwidth to ensure access to the organization's ticketing software, custom databases and email, they eliminated the possibility of deploying fiber-optic cable because of rights-of-way challenges and time delays. Microwave radio technology also was ruled out due to spectrum licensing and liability concerns. Jazz at Lincoln Center's service provider, a tier-one provider in Manhattan, then recommended LightPointe's FlightLite(TM) Gigabit Ethernet optical wireless bridge, a high-capacity, license-free solution that uses beams of light to transmit voice, data and video through the air-without any of the installation challenges of fiber or microwave.
Fred Murphy, associate director of information technology for Jazz at Lincoln Center, calls FlightLite the most reliable part of his entire network. "The FlightLite has performed flawlessly during our inaugural events at Rose Hall this fall," Murphy said. "Without LightPointe, I don't know how we'd be able to provide Ethernet-class connectivity to our staff at the new facility. We had ruled out all other options, including T1 lines, which at 1.5 Mbps, simply didn't provide the bandwidth we need to operate a world-class business," he added.
Through the FlightLite optical wireless bridge, staffers at the new performance hall gain seamless access to business-critical enterprise applications, including Microsoft Exchange Server, a Voice over IP (VoIP) telephone system, Patron Edge ticketing software and ArtsVision database. In addition to providing necessary connectivity, the LightPointe installation is projected to produce a return on investment in approximately three years.
Bob Preston, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for LightPointe, said Jazz at Lincoln Center's selection of LightPointe is indicative of a growing trend in enterprise connectivity. "More and more companies are turning to optical wireless to extend the reach of their high- performance networks across campus environments," he said. "Where T1 links or 802.11 solutions once sufficed, today there is an increased demand for high- speed data, voice and video transport. Optical wireless meets this challenge while also providing robust security, economical price-per-bit and ease of installation."
To date, LightPointe has sold more than 2,500 optical wireless bridges in more than 60 countries to leading enterprises and mobile wireless service providers. In addition to the best-selling FlightLite line, LightPointe offers the FlightSpectrum(TM) with fixed four-beam operation; FlightStrata(TM), the flagship product with advanced multi-beam tracking, optical beam shaping and speeds up to 1.25 Gbps; and the FlightApex(TM), the highest-capacity optical wireless product on the market with multi-beam technology and connectivity speeds up to 2.5 Gbps.
About Jazz at Lincoln Center
Jazz at Lincoln Center is a not-for-profit arts organization dedicated to jazz. With the world-renowned Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, and a comprehensive array of guest artists, Jazz at Lincoln Center advances a unique vision for the continued development of the art of jazz. Its productions include concerts, national and international tours, residencies, weekly national radio and television programs, recordings, publications, an annual high school jazz band competition and festival, a band director academy, a jazz appreciation curriculum for children, advanced training through the Julliard Institute for Jazz Studies, music publishing, children's concerts, lectures, adult education courses, film programs, and student and educator workshops. Under the leadership of Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis, President & CEO Hughlyn F. Fierce, Executive Director Derek E. Gordon, Chairman of the Board Lisa Schiff and Jazz at Lincoln Center Board and staff, Jazz at Lincoln Center will produce hundreds of events during its 2004-05 season. This is the inaugural season in Jazz at Lincoln Center's new home -- Frederick P. Rose Hall -- the first-ever performance, education, and broadcast facility devoted to jazz.
About LightPointe
LightPointe designs and manufactures high-speed optical wireless products based on free-space optics (FSO) technology for cost-effective bridging in enterprise and carrier networks. LightPointe products have been deployed in more than 60 countries, and the company is recognized worldwide for the highest standards of quality and service. To learn more, please visit www.lightpointe.com.
SOURCE LightPointe
Jeff Bean of LightPointe, +1-858-643-5319, or
jbean@lightpointe.com, or Sue Hetzel of HetzelMeade Communications,
+1-760-434-9927, or sue@hetzelmeade.com
http://www.lightpointe.com
Saturday, November 20, 2004
Big News.Com > Judge dismisses musician's claim over use of his name
Friday November 19, 2004
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) A federal judge Friday dismissed a lawsuit by a 69-year-old jazz musician from Yarmouth against a Japanese company whose chain of clothing stores bears his name.
The ruling was the latest legal setback for Cecil McBee, a Grammy-winning bass player who has spent nine years and several hundred thousand dollars on court battles in Japan and Maine.
McBee claimed that Delica Inc., owner of the chain of some three dozen stores in Japan that sell trendy clothing to teenage girls, took his name without permission.
The company said it was sheer coincidence that its boutiques and the musician shared the same name. In court papers, Delica suggested that it chose the name for its pleasant sound.
McBee's lawsuit sought to force the chain to either stop using his name or to provide him with compensation. His lawyer had suggested a formula based on a percentage of sales, which amount to roughly $100 million a year.
Rejecting the recommendation of a magistrate judge, U.S. District Judge Gene Carter concluded that the court lacks jurisdiction in the case because any damage awards would conflict with Japanese trademark law.
McBee's lawyer, Robert Newton, said he anticipates an appeal.
Newton said McBee was ``quite disappointed, but he's a strong individual and we've always recognized that this case was difficult.''
``We stayed true to the belief that because of the globalization of the marketplace, there has to be a venue somewhere in which this man can get justice,'' the lawyer said.
Todd Holbrook, who represented Delica, said his client will be pleased to learn that its long legal battle has been won. ``It's justice delayed, but it's justice nonetheless,'' he said.
During his 40-year career, McBee has toured globally and performed with such jazz greats as Benny Goodman and Miles Davis. He received his Grammy in 1989 for his contribution to ``Blues for John Coltrane.''
From: http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/redir.php?jid=43b2b79e5fcf16ff&cat=f8c1fc641c28ce0a
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) A federal judge Friday dismissed a lawsuit by a 69-year-old jazz musician from Yarmouth against a Japanese company whose chain of clothing stores bears his name.
The ruling was the latest legal setback for Cecil McBee, a Grammy-winning bass player who has spent nine years and several hundred thousand dollars on court battles in Japan and Maine.
McBee claimed that Delica Inc., owner of the chain of some three dozen stores in Japan that sell trendy clothing to teenage girls, took his name without permission.
The company said it was sheer coincidence that its boutiques and the musician shared the same name. In court papers, Delica suggested that it chose the name for its pleasant sound.
McBee's lawsuit sought to force the chain to either stop using his name or to provide him with compensation. His lawyer had suggested a formula based on a percentage of sales, which amount to roughly $100 million a year.
Rejecting the recommendation of a magistrate judge, U.S. District Judge Gene Carter concluded that the court lacks jurisdiction in the case because any damage awards would conflict with Japanese trademark law.
McBee's lawyer, Robert Newton, said he anticipates an appeal.
Newton said McBee was ``quite disappointed, but he's a strong individual and we've always recognized that this case was difficult.''
``We stayed true to the belief that because of the globalization of the marketplace, there has to be a venue somewhere in which this man can get justice,'' the lawyer said.
Todd Holbrook, who represented Delica, said his client will be pleased to learn that its long legal battle has been won. ``It's justice delayed, but it's justice nonetheless,'' he said.
During his 40-year career, McBee has toured globally and performed with such jazz greats as Benny Goodman and Miles Davis. He received his Grammy in 1989 for his contribution to ``Blues for John Coltrane.''
From: http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/redir.php?jid=43b2b79e5fcf16ff&cat=f8c1fc641c28ce0a
Thursday, November 18, 2004
Big News > Newsweek > Olu Dara raps about son Nas
Olu Dara raps about son Nas
Hip-hop Poppa
Nas’s new single subverts the hip-hop fatherhood paradigm—with a little help from his dad, Olu Dara
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Brian Braiker
Newsweek
Updated: 3:59 p.m. ET Nov. 16, 2004Nov. 16 - Rap megastar Nas has described his style as “bold, daring, brave and honest.” His double album “Street Prophet” won’t come out till later this month, but fans have already gotten a taste of his lyrical derring-do on “Bridging the Gap,” the record’s first single: “Yeah daddy,” he shouts out to his father, “love you, boy.”
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The song is a collaboration with—and mini-paean to—his old man, jazz and blues musician Olu Dara. “My pop told me be your own boss/keep integrity at every cost,” he rhymes. Dara returns the favor by singing “I told him as a youngster he’ll be the greatest man alive.” The song, aside from its hackneyed Muddy Waters sample, is fun, raucous and in a similar vein to Nas’s 2003 single “I Can” (“B-Boys and girls, listen up/You can be anything in the world, in God we trust/An architect, doctor, maybe an actress/But nothing comes easy/ it takes much practice”).
Dara, who plays cornet and sings on the new single, has worked with his son before, notably on Nas’s breakthrough classic “Illmatic.” A New York jazz fixture in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, Dara says he was constantly bringing Nas to shows and showing him around the studio. The two, he says, were inseparable and he never saw it as anything but natural. But, for better or worse, the tight father-son bond is an anomaly in rap, which—when it does broach the topic—portrays fathers as deadbeat baby-daddies.
Dara, whose own albums include the soulful roots gumbo of “In the World: From Natchez to New York” and “Neighborhoods,” recently spoke with NEWSWEEK’s Brian Braiker about the message behind his son’s new single, his own take on rap in general and what he thought of controversial comments made earlier this year by comedian Bill Cosby. Excerpts:
This isn’t the first time you guys have worked together.
I was on one song on his first album, “Illmatic.” I was on the song “Life is a Bitch.” He asked me to come and rap, but I didn’t want to be the oldest rapper in the world. So I opted to play a little on one song. The next time we played together was on my first album, where he does some spoken word. And on his album “God’s Son” I played some. We made music together when he was young in the house. So it’s like doing it the way we used to do it in the house—that’s how easy it feels.
Are you working on anything yourself?
When this settles down, I’ll go back into the studio.
You do some theater, too.
In a couple weeks I’m going down to George Mason University to put up a play with Diane McIntyre about the anniversary of Brown v. [Board of Education]. Usually I would be in it, but I don’t have time. I am going to go down there and compose the music and musically direct it. I’m busy working with my band too. We just left New Orleans.
Do you see this single as a message song or just a celebration of your own relationship?
Initially, I just thought about it as a relationship between father and son. It wasn’t anything unusual for me. But I’m finding out it’s kind of an anomaly to most people in the world. Why? I don’t know. Maybe fathers and sons are not as close as I thought they were. So maybe it is a wholesome message since people think it’s unusual.
It must be fun to do this with him.
We always did. He and I have never had a minor dispute. I may have had to chastise him when he was 7 years old. But our relationship has been very healthy throughout, from the beginning. In hindsight, I remember getting comments from the women in the neighborhood saying how special it was to see a man with his son walking around every day. I think that’s really when I started realizing that it’s an unusual sight to see. I find that with most men of all races it’s hard to see fathers and sons [together].
What’s your take on Bill Cosby’s comments about raising kids in the black community when he railed against “the young males who become fathers and [are] not held responsible, the young women having children and moving back in with their mothers and grandmothers?"
Well, he’s in the ivory tower. A lot of times you see wealthy people who escape the hard life of the ghetto, they become separated from that. He’s basically detached, which is why he can make those statements. He’s been away from that kind of thing for a long time. Only a detached person would have nerve enough to say anything like that. That’s just my own take.
Do you think the way you raised Nas encouraged him to do the positive songs like this and “I Can?”
That song [came out of] an overt conversation about 10 or 12 years ago with his grandmother, my mother, who told him to make sure that before he finished his career that he would make a song for kids. That’s the one thing he would have to do to really make a dent in the family, get appreciation from the family.
You’re a jazz and blues man. Do you listen to rap?
Oh sure, I knew a lot of the rappers during the embryonic stages of hip-hop in New York, Queens and places like that. I watched them get it rolling before it was popular. I love to dance, so rap attracted me first because of the way they use the music. I like the medium tempos they use. You listen to something like “Lean Back” by Fat Joe and if you dissect his song you hear European classical violins, you hear indigenous sounds in the back, you hear the blues beat. They actually mix four or five different genres on one song.
What about the harshness or violence of some of the more outré lyrics?
If you’re older, like me, you’ve heard it [before]. Those lyrics are not going to surprise you
So it doesn’t bother you to hear some of your son’s tougher lyrics when they come out of his own mouth?
Look, I’ve been to movies that are deeper than that. I can go and watch “Godfather” I, II and III and not only hear it but see it. I can see blood and guts, you know? It’s only something that gets people talking about it because it’s from the young black culture. One guy who interviewed me said “I don’t like gangsta rap; I don’t like what they’re saying.” And yet he was a fan of “Halloween” I, II and III. He liked Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney. He didn’t mind the scene in the Godfather when they messed up the man’s daughter-in-law. But people have a way of singling out hip-hop. One day I’m going to write something about the psychology of the criticism of hip-hop.
And you can vouch for how true-to-life the lyrics are that pertain to Nas’s childhood in songs like “Poppa was a Playa”—which is a warts-and-all portrait of you?
He portrays accurate things in his lyrics. If he speaks anything about me or his mother or anything like that, that stuff is right. It’s on. That’s it.
Hip-hop Poppa
Nas’s new single subverts the hip-hop fatherhood paradigm—with a little help from his dad, Olu Dara
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Brian Braiker
Newsweek
Updated: 3:59 p.m. ET Nov. 16, 2004Nov. 16 - Rap megastar Nas has described his style as “bold, daring, brave and honest.” His double album “Street Prophet” won’t come out till later this month, but fans have already gotten a taste of his lyrical derring-do on “Bridging the Gap,” the record’s first single: “Yeah daddy,” he shouts out to his father, “love you, boy.”
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The song is a collaboration with—and mini-paean to—his old man, jazz and blues musician Olu Dara. “My pop told me be your own boss/keep integrity at every cost,” he rhymes. Dara returns the favor by singing “I told him as a youngster he’ll be the greatest man alive.” The song, aside from its hackneyed Muddy Waters sample, is fun, raucous and in a similar vein to Nas’s 2003 single “I Can” (“B-Boys and girls, listen up/You can be anything in the world, in God we trust/An architect, doctor, maybe an actress/But nothing comes easy/ it takes much practice”).
Dara, who plays cornet and sings on the new single, has worked with his son before, notably on Nas’s breakthrough classic “Illmatic.” A New York jazz fixture in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, Dara says he was constantly bringing Nas to shows and showing him around the studio. The two, he says, were inseparable and he never saw it as anything but natural. But, for better or worse, the tight father-son bond is an anomaly in rap, which—when it does broach the topic—portrays fathers as deadbeat baby-daddies.
Dara, whose own albums include the soulful roots gumbo of “In the World: From Natchez to New York” and “Neighborhoods,” recently spoke with NEWSWEEK’s Brian Braiker about the message behind his son’s new single, his own take on rap in general and what he thought of controversial comments made earlier this year by comedian Bill Cosby. Excerpts:
This isn’t the first time you guys have worked together.
I was on one song on his first album, “Illmatic.” I was on the song “Life is a Bitch.” He asked me to come and rap, but I didn’t want to be the oldest rapper in the world. So I opted to play a little on one song. The next time we played together was on my first album, where he does some spoken word. And on his album “God’s Son” I played some. We made music together when he was young in the house. So it’s like doing it the way we used to do it in the house—that’s how easy it feels.
Are you working on anything yourself?
When this settles down, I’ll go back into the studio.
You do some theater, too.
In a couple weeks I’m going down to George Mason University to put up a play with Diane McIntyre about the anniversary of Brown v. [Board of Education]. Usually I would be in it, but I don’t have time. I am going to go down there and compose the music and musically direct it. I’m busy working with my band too. We just left New Orleans.
Do you see this single as a message song or just a celebration of your own relationship?
Initially, I just thought about it as a relationship between father and son. It wasn’t anything unusual for me. But I’m finding out it’s kind of an anomaly to most people in the world. Why? I don’t know. Maybe fathers and sons are not as close as I thought they were. So maybe it is a wholesome message since people think it’s unusual.
It must be fun to do this with him.
We always did. He and I have never had a minor dispute. I may have had to chastise him when he was 7 years old. But our relationship has been very healthy throughout, from the beginning. In hindsight, I remember getting comments from the women in the neighborhood saying how special it was to see a man with his son walking around every day. I think that’s really when I started realizing that it’s an unusual sight to see. I find that with most men of all races it’s hard to see fathers and sons [together].
What’s your take on Bill Cosby’s comments about raising kids in the black community when he railed against “the young males who become fathers and [are] not held responsible, the young women having children and moving back in with their mothers and grandmothers?"
Well, he’s in the ivory tower. A lot of times you see wealthy people who escape the hard life of the ghetto, they become separated from that. He’s basically detached, which is why he can make those statements. He’s been away from that kind of thing for a long time. Only a detached person would have nerve enough to say anything like that. That’s just my own take.
Do you think the way you raised Nas encouraged him to do the positive songs like this and “I Can?”
That song [came out of] an overt conversation about 10 or 12 years ago with his grandmother, my mother, who told him to make sure that before he finished his career that he would make a song for kids. That’s the one thing he would have to do to really make a dent in the family, get appreciation from the family.
You’re a jazz and blues man. Do you listen to rap?
Oh sure, I knew a lot of the rappers during the embryonic stages of hip-hop in New York, Queens and places like that. I watched them get it rolling before it was popular. I love to dance, so rap attracted me first because of the way they use the music. I like the medium tempos they use. You listen to something like “Lean Back” by Fat Joe and if you dissect his song you hear European classical violins, you hear indigenous sounds in the back, you hear the blues beat. They actually mix four or five different genres on one song.
What about the harshness or violence of some of the more outré lyrics?
If you’re older, like me, you’ve heard it [before]. Those lyrics are not going to surprise you
So it doesn’t bother you to hear some of your son’s tougher lyrics when they come out of his own mouth?
Look, I’ve been to movies that are deeper than that. I can go and watch “Godfather” I, II and III and not only hear it but see it. I can see blood and guts, you know? It’s only something that gets people talking about it because it’s from the young black culture. One guy who interviewed me said “I don’t like gangsta rap; I don’t like what they’re saying.” And yet he was a fan of “Halloween” I, II and III. He liked Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney. He didn’t mind the scene in the Godfather when they messed up the man’s daughter-in-law. But people have a way of singling out hip-hop. One day I’m going to write something about the psychology of the criticism of hip-hop.
And you can vouch for how true-to-life the lyrics are that pertain to Nas’s childhood in songs like “Poppa was a Playa”—which is a warts-and-all portrait of you?
He portrays accurate things in his lyrics. If he speaks anything about me or his mother or anything like that, that stuff is right. It’s on. That’s it.
Saturday, November 13, 2004
JAZZFM: GET IT ON
JAZZFM: GET IT ON: "8.10.04 :: Branford Marsalis to present new TV documentary
Next month sees the airing of a new documentary, It's a Jazz Thing, presented by saxophonist Branford Marsalis on Channel 4 on 13 November at 7.30pm. The 90-minute documentary was made by production company Somethin' Else and is directed by Christopher Walker. The documentary follows Marsalis' travels around Europe and the US as he meets leading contemporary figures in jazz including Herbie Hancock, Michael Brecker, John McLaughlin and Dave Douglas, Bill Frisell, Medeski Martin and Wood, Tim Berne, Evan Parker, David S Ware, Ken Vandermark and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Commenting on the project, Jez Nelson, the executive producer on the show, says: 'There hasn't been a major, terrestrial jazz TV show for many years ? so this is really exciting for us. Branford is that rare thing ? a great musician who's also a superb and engaging presenter ? this should be a fantastic journey!' "
Next month sees the airing of a new documentary, It's a Jazz Thing, presented by saxophonist Branford Marsalis on Channel 4 on 13 November at 7.30pm. The 90-minute documentary was made by production company Somethin' Else and is directed by Christopher Walker. The documentary follows Marsalis' travels around Europe and the US as he meets leading contemporary figures in jazz including Herbie Hancock, Michael Brecker, John McLaughlin and Dave Douglas, Bill Frisell, Medeski Martin and Wood, Tim Berne, Evan Parker, David S Ware, Ken Vandermark and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Commenting on the project, Jez Nelson, the executive producer on the show, says: 'There hasn't been a major, terrestrial jazz TV show for many years ? so this is really exciting for us. Branford is that rare thing ? a great musician who's also a superb and engaging presenter ? this should be a fantastic journey!' "
Thursday, November 11, 2004
Pete Jolly, jazz pianist
Pete Jolly, jazz pianistPete Jolly, jazz pianist and accordion player known for his disciplined work as a studio musician as well as his improvisational skills in live performances, died Saturday. He was 72.
Jolly, whose composition "Little Bird" was nominated for a Grammy in 1963, died in Pasadena, Calif., of complications of bone marrow cancer and an irregular heartbeat.
The Pete Jolly Trio, which for more than 35 years included bassist Chuck Berghofer and drummer Nick Martinis, performed in Southern California clubs until Jolly's hospitalization in August.
Born Peter A. Ceragioli Jr. in New Haven, Conn., he began studying accordion with his father at age 3 and at 7 appeared on the nationwide CBS radio program "Hobby Lobby." Billed as the "Boy Wonder Accordionist," he was mistakenly introduced by the announcer as "Pete Jolly" - and liked the error so much he adopted it as his professional name.
In 1954, playing with Barney Kessel and the Shorty Rogers Giants, he became a fixture in the softer, cooler West Coast jazz movement. In 1955, he recorded his first trio album, "Jolly Jumps In." His talent on piano, organ and accordion bolstered memorable music for many television shows and films, including "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."
Jolly, whose composition "Little Bird" was nominated for a Grammy in 1963, died in Pasadena, Calif., of complications of bone marrow cancer and an irregular heartbeat.
The Pete Jolly Trio, which for more than 35 years included bassist Chuck Berghofer and drummer Nick Martinis, performed in Southern California clubs until Jolly's hospitalization in August.
Born Peter A. Ceragioli Jr. in New Haven, Conn., he began studying accordion with his father at age 3 and at 7 appeared on the nationwide CBS radio program "Hobby Lobby." Billed as the "Boy Wonder Accordionist," he was mistakenly introduced by the announcer as "Pete Jolly" - and liked the error so much he adopted it as his professional name.
In 1954, playing with Barney Kessel and the Shorty Rogers Giants, he became a fixture in the softer, cooler West Coast jazz movement. In 1955, he recorded his first trio album, "Jolly Jumps In." His talent on piano, organ and accordion bolstered memorable music for many television shows and films, including "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
The New York Times > Arts > Music > Jazz Review: Soaking Up the Spaces at a New Jazz Center
The New York Times > Arts > Music > Jazz Review: Soaking Up the Spaces at a New Jazz Center: "Soaking Up the Spaces at a New Jazz Center
Soaking Up the Spaces at a New Jazz Center
By BEN RATLIFF
Some basic impressions of Jazz at Lincoln Center's new space, which opened last night: It is a sophisticated, cosmopolitan, fairly expensive-feeling experience; it is flexible and alive.
Jazz has so many different connotations for different people. But at least some part of this three-theater complex, taking up the fifth and sixth floors of the Time Warner Center on Columbus Circle, could ring the bells of recognition of someone who had never been to a jazz performance before and only possessed the received wisdom of photographs and album covers: yes, this seems right; this is jazz. And it contains enough attention to detail to impress those who have spent the better part of their lives hearing it, too.
Last night's invitation-only opening shows, broadcast live on PBS, are not going to remain in the imagination as any kind of normal night: it was an evening for board members, donors, critics, musicians and those involved with the construction of the hall. And so it is too early to tell what it will feel like as the theaters begin their season-long schedule, with the bigger concerts in the 1,200-seat Rose Theater and the 550-seat Allen Room overlapping with shows in the 140-seat Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola.
The Rose Theater, especially, was hard to get a grip on in a first encounter. It was set up as a theater-in-the-round, which won't always be the case, and for the sake of television, the ceiling lights were torching the house. And there's no way that all the different configurations of music, with guests coming and going for every song (among them Abbey Lincoln, Tony Bennett, Mark O'Connor, Giovanni Hidalgo, Cyro Baptista and Wynton Marsalis's musical family) could have been sound-checked to their best advantage. The music itself worked as a statement of purpose: a version of the organization's desired eclecticism in miniature, with a blues, a New Orleans tune ("Dippermouth Blues"), an orchestration of forró music from Northeastern Brazil, ballads, Coltrane, Basie and so on.
But at certain moments - as when the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra suddenly cut away from the tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano, who played a few unaccompanied bars during his solo in "Body and Soul" - you could hear some of the richness we have in store. His saxophone sound had tremendous depth and resonance, a more intimate sound than we have become used to at Avery Fisher Hall and Alice Tully Hall, where Jazz at Lincoln Center's concerts were held since the mid-1980's.
For the basic potential of hearing jazz in a theater, it might not get much better than the Allen Room. The Lincoln Center Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, eighteen musicians on an oval bandstand, set up there for three sets, through more than three hours of music, and they played their repertory, from Machito to new works like Tom Harrell's "Humility." The room is exceptionally well-balanced. With only light amplification (and the idea is that some performances in the future will have none), the music was detailed. Pablo Calogero's baritone saxophone came through as well as Milton Cardona's conga drums. And the high windows overlooking Central Park South give another staggering dimension: toward the top of the glass, you see the reflection of car headlights playing on the windows.
From the smaller windows behind the bandstand at Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola, you see half Trump International Hotel and Tower, half Central Park treetops. Bill Charlap played three sets there, a small space with a variety of guests sitting in, including Wynton Marsalis, who played whinnies and melodic inventions through "Just Friends," in front of Clark Terry, stopping by to check out the new place.
Adjustments, acoustic and otherwise, are made to nearly all theaters after they open. I've seen some clubs proceed for years in a fairly raw or problematic state. But already these rooms impressively translate into bricks-and-mortar reality how the planners of Jazz at Lincoln Center have raised the stakes for jazz to become visible and powerful in the city. In their thesis, jazz isn't secluded; it's right out there, exposed and imperious, peering over the street.
Soaking Up the Spaces at a New Jazz Center
By BEN RATLIFF
Some basic impressions of Jazz at Lincoln Center's new space, which opened last night: It is a sophisticated, cosmopolitan, fairly expensive-feeling experience; it is flexible and alive.
Jazz has so many different connotations for different people. But at least some part of this three-theater complex, taking up the fifth and sixth floors of the Time Warner Center on Columbus Circle, could ring the bells of recognition of someone who had never been to a jazz performance before and only possessed the received wisdom of photographs and album covers: yes, this seems right; this is jazz. And it contains enough attention to detail to impress those who have spent the better part of their lives hearing it, too.
Last night's invitation-only opening shows, broadcast live on PBS, are not going to remain in the imagination as any kind of normal night: it was an evening for board members, donors, critics, musicians and those involved with the construction of the hall. And so it is too early to tell what it will feel like as the theaters begin their season-long schedule, with the bigger concerts in the 1,200-seat Rose Theater and the 550-seat Allen Room overlapping with shows in the 140-seat Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola.
The Rose Theater, especially, was hard to get a grip on in a first encounter. It was set up as a theater-in-the-round, which won't always be the case, and for the sake of television, the ceiling lights were torching the house. And there's no way that all the different configurations of music, with guests coming and going for every song (among them Abbey Lincoln, Tony Bennett, Mark O'Connor, Giovanni Hidalgo, Cyro Baptista and Wynton Marsalis's musical family) could have been sound-checked to their best advantage. The music itself worked as a statement of purpose: a version of the organization's desired eclecticism in miniature, with a blues, a New Orleans tune ("Dippermouth Blues"), an orchestration of forró music from Northeastern Brazil, ballads, Coltrane, Basie and so on.
But at certain moments - as when the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra suddenly cut away from the tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano, who played a few unaccompanied bars during his solo in "Body and Soul" - you could hear some of the richness we have in store. His saxophone sound had tremendous depth and resonance, a more intimate sound than we have become used to at Avery Fisher Hall and Alice Tully Hall, where Jazz at Lincoln Center's concerts were held since the mid-1980's.
For the basic potential of hearing jazz in a theater, it might not get much better than the Allen Room. The Lincoln Center Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, eighteen musicians on an oval bandstand, set up there for three sets, through more than three hours of music, and they played their repertory, from Machito to new works like Tom Harrell's "Humility." The room is exceptionally well-balanced. With only light amplification (and the idea is that some performances in the future will have none), the music was detailed. Pablo Calogero's baritone saxophone came through as well as Milton Cardona's conga drums. And the high windows overlooking Central Park South give another staggering dimension: toward the top of the glass, you see the reflection of car headlights playing on the windows.
From the smaller windows behind the bandstand at Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola, you see half Trump International Hotel and Tower, half Central Park treetops. Bill Charlap played three sets there, a small space with a variety of guests sitting in, including Wynton Marsalis, who played whinnies and melodic inventions through "Just Friends," in front of Clark Terry, stopping by to check out the new place.
Adjustments, acoustic and otherwise, are made to nearly all theaters after they open. I've seen some clubs proceed for years in a fairly raw or problematic state. But already these rooms impressively translate into bricks-and-mortar reality how the planners of Jazz at Lincoln Center have raised the stakes for jazz to become visible and powerful in the city. In their thesis, jazz isn't secluded; it's right out there, exposed and imperious, peering over the street.
The New York Times > AP > Arts > New Home of Jazz Opens at Lincoln Center
The New York Times > AP > Arts > New Home of Jazz Opens at Lincoln Center: "October 18, 2004
October 18, 2004
New Home of Jazz Opens at Lincoln Center
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:09 p.m. ET
NEW YORK (AP) -- Led by Wynton Marsalis, a swinging group of musicians belted out ``When the Saints Go Marching In'' as they strutted down Broadway to kick off the opening of the new home of Jazz at Lincoln Center.
Office workers clapped from open windows, and other onlookers tapped their feet. Some even started to jitterbug on the street as excitement of the traditional New Orleans-style parade of saxophones, trumpets, tubas and trombones filled the brisk air.
``I just had to be here for this,'' said Igor Butman, a sax player from Moscow. ``This is the first real jazz center in the world.''
It was an event that Kiyoshi Koyama, a jazz music writer from Tokyo, didn't want to miss either.
``This is one of the major events in the history of jazz,'' Koyama said.
The $128 million Frederick P. Rose Hall features three concert and performance spaces, including Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola, a 140-seat jazz club; an education center that includes a combined rehearsal hall and recording studio large enough to house a symphony orchestra; two classrooms and a jazz Hall of Fame.
The 1,200-seat Rose Theater is designed for jazz but also will accommodate opera, ballet, theater and orchestra performances. The Allen Room is a 500-seat performance space reminiscent of a Greek amphitheater that provides an airy elegant setting with spectacular views through a 50-foot-by-90-foot glass wall overlooking Central Park.
Derek Gordon, who took over as executive director of Jazz at Lincoln Center last summer after 12 years at the Kennedy Center in Washington, where he created its jazz program, said the new center was ``dedicated to America's classical music, perhaps the only uniquely American art form.''
``This represents a higher level of acknowledgment, a new embracing of jazz as an art form,'' he said.
The opening festival continues through Nov. 5.
Marsalis, JALC'S artistic director who also was celebrating his 43rd birthday, said jazz giants such as Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie would be proud of the new center.
``They would probably start crying,'' said Marsalis, the first jazz artist to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize in music. ``They gave a lot and fought hard to earn the recognition for jazz in our culture. We respect them and honor them with this center.''
------
On the Net:
http://www.jazzatlincolncenter.org/
October 18, 2004
New Home of Jazz Opens at Lincoln Center
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:09 p.m. ET
NEW YORK (AP) -- Led by Wynton Marsalis, a swinging group of musicians belted out ``When the Saints Go Marching In'' as they strutted down Broadway to kick off the opening of the new home of Jazz at Lincoln Center.
Office workers clapped from open windows, and other onlookers tapped their feet. Some even started to jitterbug on the street as excitement of the traditional New Orleans-style parade of saxophones, trumpets, tubas and trombones filled the brisk air.
``I just had to be here for this,'' said Igor Butman, a sax player from Moscow. ``This is the first real jazz center in the world.''
It was an event that Kiyoshi Koyama, a jazz music writer from Tokyo, didn't want to miss either.
``This is one of the major events in the history of jazz,'' Koyama said.
The $128 million Frederick P. Rose Hall features three concert and performance spaces, including Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola, a 140-seat jazz club; an education center that includes a combined rehearsal hall and recording studio large enough to house a symphony orchestra; two classrooms and a jazz Hall of Fame.
The 1,200-seat Rose Theater is designed for jazz but also will accommodate opera, ballet, theater and orchestra performances. The Allen Room is a 500-seat performance space reminiscent of a Greek amphitheater that provides an airy elegant setting with spectacular views through a 50-foot-by-90-foot glass wall overlooking Central Park.
Derek Gordon, who took over as executive director of Jazz at Lincoln Center last summer after 12 years at the Kennedy Center in Washington, where he created its jazz program, said the new center was ``dedicated to America's classical music, perhaps the only uniquely American art form.''
``This represents a higher level of acknowledgment, a new embracing of jazz as an art form,'' he said.
The opening festival continues through Nov. 5.
Marsalis, JALC'S artistic director who also was celebrating his 43rd birthday, said jazz giants such as Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie would be proud of the new center.
``They would probably start crying,'' said Marsalis, the first jazz artist to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize in music. ``They gave a lot and fought hard to earn the recognition for jazz in our culture. We respect them and honor them with this center.''
------
On the Net:
http://www.jazzatlincolncenter.org/
MSNBC > Reuters > Jazz finds a new home in a New York skyscraper
NEW YORK, Oct. 19th 2004 Perched above a shopping mall in a skyscraper at the heart of corporate America, the new home of New York's leading jazz orchestra is a long way from the smoky basements and soulful southern cities of the past.
''Welcome to the house of swing'' -- with those words Wynton Marsalis, of the legendary jazz family, opened the new headquarters of Jazz at Lincoln Center Monday night with a gala performance in an auditorium designed specially for the acoustics of jazz.
Earlier he led a New Orleans-style musical parade down Broadway, kicking off the inaugural festival at the three venues housed in the Time Warner Center that towers over the southwest corner of Central Park.
Public performances start Thursday with the Dizzy Gillespie Festival in the smallest and most intimate of the venues -- Dizzy's Club Coca Cola, whose curved walls, low lighting and tables give the atmosphere of a nightclub.
The Frederick P. Rose Hall complex, sitting above the clothes stores and cafes in the sleek new glass towers, was built at a cost of $128 million and includes recording studios and classrooms for lectures and educational events.
''We've built a house that really swings with the way jazz works, the way jazz feels, and most of all, the way jazz sounds,'' Marsalis said before the gala opening featuring names such as Tony Bennett and Abbey Lincoln, as well as another four members of the Marsalis clan.
Jazz has always been a family affair, and the new center aims to start them young. Children as young as two can join the singing and dancing in the WeBop! educational program.
The main 1,200-seat Rose Theater is designed for jazz but will also be used for opera, ballet, theater and orchestra performances. The most spectacular of the venues is the Allen Room, a 500-seat auditorium with dramatic views through a 50-foot-by-90-foot (15-meter by 27-meter) glass wall overlooking Central Park and the shimmering lights of the city.
Initial reactions were good. ''Sophisticated, cosmopolitan ... flexible and alive,'' was the verdict of The New York Times.
Artistic director Marsalis said it's all about the music. ''Either you can play or you can't play. That's the test.''
''Welcome to the house of swing'' -- with those words Wynton Marsalis, of the legendary jazz family, opened the new headquarters of Jazz at Lincoln Center Monday night with a gala performance in an auditorium designed specially for the acoustics of jazz.
Earlier he led a New Orleans-style musical parade down Broadway, kicking off the inaugural festival at the three venues housed in the Time Warner Center that towers over the southwest corner of Central Park.
Public performances start Thursday with the Dizzy Gillespie Festival in the smallest and most intimate of the venues -- Dizzy's Club Coca Cola, whose curved walls, low lighting and tables give the atmosphere of a nightclub.
The Frederick P. Rose Hall complex, sitting above the clothes stores and cafes in the sleek new glass towers, was built at a cost of $128 million and includes recording studios and classrooms for lectures and educational events.
''We've built a house that really swings with the way jazz works, the way jazz feels, and most of all, the way jazz sounds,'' Marsalis said before the gala opening featuring names such as Tony Bennett and Abbey Lincoln, as well as another four members of the Marsalis clan.
Jazz has always been a family affair, and the new center aims to start them young. Children as young as two can join the singing and dancing in the WeBop! educational program.
The main 1,200-seat Rose Theater is designed for jazz but will also be used for opera, ballet, theater and orchestra performances. The most spectacular of the venues is the Allen Room, a 500-seat auditorium with dramatic views through a 50-foot-by-90-foot (15-meter by 27-meter) glass wall overlooking Central Park and the shimmering lights of the city.
Initial reactions were good. ''Sophisticated, cosmopolitan ... flexible and alive,'' was the verdict of The New York Times.
Artistic director Marsalis said it's all about the music. ''Either you can play or you can't play. That's the test.''
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