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John H. Armwood Jazz History Lecture Nashville's Cheekwood Arts Center 1989

Sunday, November 26, 2017

Classical and Jazz musicians show different brain responses to unexpected events, study finds





"Scientists at Wesleyan University have used electroencephalography to uncover differences in how the brains of Classical and Jazz musicians react to an unexpected chord progression.



Their new study, published in the journal Brain and Cognition, sheds new light on the nature of the creative process.



“I have been a classical musician for many years, and have always been inspired by the great jazz masters who can improvise beautiful performances on the spot,” explained study author Psyche Loui. “Whenever I tried to improvise I always felt inhibited and self-conscious, and this spurred my questions about jazz improvisation as a model for creativity more generally: What makes people creative improvisers, and what can this tell us about how we can all learn to be more creative?”



The researchers used EEG to compare the electrical brain activity of 12 Jazz musicians (with improvisation training), 12 Classical musicians (without improvisation training), and 12 non-musicians while they listened to a series of chord progressions. Some of the chords followed a progression that was typical of Western music, while others had an unexpected progression.



Louie and her colleagues found that Jazz musicians had a significantly different electrophysiological response to the unexpected progression, which indicated they had an increased perceptual sensitivity to unexpected stimuli along with an increased engagement with unexpected events.



“Creativity is about how our brains treat the unexpected,” Loui told PsyPost. “Everyone (regardless of how creative) knows when they encounter something unexpected. But people who are more creative are more perceptually sensitive and more cognitively engaged with unexpectedness. They also more readily accept this unexpectedness as being part of the vocabulary.



“This three-stage process: sensitivity, engagement, and acceptance, occurs very rapidly, within a second of our brains encountering the unexpected event. With our design we can resolve these differences and relate them to creative behavior, and I think that’s very cool.”



Previous research has found that Jazz improvisers and other creative individuals show higher levels of openness to experience and divergent thinking — meaning the ability to “think outside the box.”



But without additional research it is unclear if the new findings apply to other creative individuals who are not musicians.



“We looked at three groups of subjects: jazz musicians, classical musicians, and people with no musical training other than normal schooling, so the results are most closely tied to musical training. It remains to be seen whether other types of creative groups, e.g. slam poets, cartoonists, interpretive dancers, etc. might show the same results,” Loui explained.



“It would also be important to find out whether these differences emerge as a result of training, or whether they reflect pre-existing differences between people who choose to pursue training in different styles. We are currently conducting a longitudinal study to get at that question.”



“This is the first paper of a string of research coming from our lab that use different methodologies to understand jazz improvisation,” Loui added. “We are also doing structural and functional MRI, as well as more behavioral testing, including psychophysical listening tests and also production tests, where we have people play music in our lab.”



The study, “Jazz musicians reveal role of expectancy in human creativity“, was also co-authored by Emily Przysinda, Tima Zeng, Kellyn Maves, and Cameron Arkin."



Classical and Jazz musicians show different brain responses to unexpected events, study finds

Thursday, November 02, 2017

Muhal Richard Abrams, A Sweepingly Influential Jazz Artist, Has Died At Age 87 : The Record : NPR

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

Bessie Smith (Poor Man's Blues, 1928) Jazz Legend

King Pleasure / Moody's Mood For Love

Red Top by King Pleasure and Betty Carter

King Pleasure - Jumpin' with Symphony Sid

ALVIN QUEEN QUINTET...Seven Steps To Heaven

Jazz great, former Oscar Peterson drummer Alvin Queen, denied entry into USA.





"Mr. Queen, who has held a Swiss passport for thirty years, was informed this week that, due to a run-in with the law as a youth, a half century ago, while a minor, he would have to apply for a Waiver from the U.S. Dept of Homeland Security, despite the fact he was born in the USA. This would take months, making it virtually impossible to participate, barring Presidential decree, and we know that’s unlikely. But this is not “fake news.”



“Sadly, this doesn’t surprise me one bit,” comments Mr. Queen, 67, from his home in Geneva. “I’ve spent months preparing for this concert. Dozens of others are also implicated in its planning. Funny thing, I gave up my U.S. passport to make life simpler at tax time. I never dreamed I would one day be denied entry, and with such ridiculous reasoning. I am frankly disgusted to be disrespected in this way, after a half century devoted to music.”



Mr. Queen, who until 2016 held dual citizenship with the United States and Switzerland, has previously worked numerous times for the US State Department as a Cultural Ambassador, and participated in numerous tours of Brazil, Africa and Japan. Queen also performed at the American International Jazz Day in Paris several years ago.



Mr. Queen has held a U.S. passport, and regularly worked under the auspices of the American government, for over fifty years of his life. Like many citizens, he’s had brushes with the law, but these have never impeded his ability to enter and exit his native country. A one-time DWI charge and a minor drug offense both resulted in not guilty charges.



For this occasion, the US State Dept had only to apply for an “O1B Work Visa” in order for Mr Queen to enter in the United States. This was done correctly, but after the process was completed, fingerprints matching a 1967 FBI file were dredged up and presented as a reason to prevent him from entering the USA. So now we can see that the infamous “travel ban” is not limited to citizens of Sudan, Syria, and Iran. It extends to a then 16-year-old drummer who once sat in with John Coltrane.

How can you process someone fifty years later for charges that occurred when they were a youth, a mere child? And why punish this now acclaimed adult, a leading light on the international jazz scene, who is now 67 years old? He obviously forged a path and created a fabulous life for himself. Adds Queen, “I feel this is more about racial profiling than anything. It’s all about trying to control everyone. I am not a criminal and in fact never was. When I became a Swiss citizen, I “became a criminal” again in the eyes of US law enforcement. If I was undesirable fifty years ago, why have I been issued a fresh passport every ten years for the past six decades?” Indeed, this is the question."



Jazz great, former Oscar Peterson drummer Alvin Queen, denied entry into USA.

Saturday, October 07, 2017

Black History Meets Black Music: 'Blues People' At 50 : A Blog Supreme : NPR





As brilliant, controversial and even anti-semitic as Baraka Sr. could be his insights on American culture and his understanding of African American philosophy and music was and is groundbreaking. I met him through saxophonist David Murray who I was managing for a short while during the early 1980s. I spent many an evening at the bar of the long defunct jazz club, Sweet Basil's with Amiri and his wife Amina discussing music politics and America. I particularly like this section from your article Eugene Holley Jr."...Blues People argues that in their art, Louis Armstrong, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and countless other black bards confronted the forces of racism, poverty and Jim Crow. This gave birth to work songs, blues, gospel, New Orleans jazz, its Chicago and Kansas City swing extensions, the bebop revolution (which in turn spawned the so-called cool and hard bop schools), and the then-emerging avant-garde of the late '50s and early '60s, characterized by the forward-thinking artistry of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor. For Baraka, jazz is "the most cosmopolitan of any Negro music, able to utilize almost any foreign influence within its broader spectrum" — a cultural achievement Baraka says was downplayed and ignored by Eurocentric whites.
"They have to do that to make themselves superior in some kind of way: that everything has come from Europe, which is not true," Baraka says. "And if you study, you'll see [the Africanisms] even in the way Americans talk; it's quite unlike English [from Great Britain]. And certainly the music has been one abiding register of Afro-American influence."
Baraka wrote that Blues People was a "theoretical endeavor" that "proposes more questions than it will answer" about how descendants of enslaved Africans created a new American musical genre and turned "Negroes" into "African Americans" in the process. That message still resonates deeply with many scholars, including Ingrid Monson, a professor of African-American music at Harvard University and author of Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa...". This is the essence of White Supremacy. "... Monson wrote in Blues People: Amiri Baraka As a Social Theorist, a speech she delivered in 2004, "to remind my students that cultural studies and critical race theory didn't begin in the academy, but in 20th-century African-American thought and intellectual practice from DuBois to Garvey, Locke, Ellington, Ellison and Baraka..."


Black History Meets Black Music: 'Blues People' At 50 : A Blog Supreme : NPR

Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Charlie Parker and the Meaning of Freedom - The New York Times

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“They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But man, there’s no boundary line to art.”

Those are the words of Charlie Parker, the jazz saxophonist also known as Bird, who was born on Aug. 29, 1920. Parker was arguably the greatest genius of the bebop era and indeed, one of the finest American musicians of the 20th century.

You might be tempted to take his words literally when you hear the seemingly effortless grace and ease of his virtuosic improvisational style. His freewheeling solos made up on the spot are pure freedom, right?

Wrong. Jazz, like all serious art, is slavish in its adherence to boundaries and rules. And therein it achieves the nature of true freedom, in both art and life.

Charlie Parker and the Meaning of Freedom - The New York Times:

Friday, August 11, 2017

Wynton Marsalis Quintet at Jazz in Marciac 2017 on Livestream

The brilliance and unparalleled virtuosity if Wynton Marsalis and his band contrasted against the often frustrating wait for the groove, for swing and blues feeling. It comes but he make you wait occasionally wading through fields of corn.




Wynton Marsalis Quintet at Jazz in Marciac 2017 on Livestream

Thursday, June 29, 2017

Geri Allen, Pianist Who Reconciled Jazz’s Far-Flung Styles, Dies at 60 - The New York Times

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"Geri Allen, an influential pianist and educator whose dense but agile playing reconciled far-flung elements of the jazz tradition, died on Tuesday at a hospital in Philadelphia. She was 60.

Her publicist, Maureen McFadden, said the cause was cancer.

Perhaps more than any other pianist, Ms. Allen’s style — harmonically refracted and rhythmically complex, but also fluid — formed a bridge between jazz’s halcyon midcentury period and its diffuse present.

She accomplished this by holding some things constant: a farsighted approach to the piano, which she used both to guide and to goad her bandmates; an ability to toggle between artistic styles without warping her own sound; and a belief that jazz ought to interact with its kindred art forms across the African-American tradition.

‘The music of most African societies integrates all of the arts, particularly dance,’ Ms. Allen told Marc Myers of the website JazzWax in 2012. ‘By doing this, the entire culture is embraced, not just music and musicians. The result is that audiences have a more vivid sense of music’s importance. The cultural embrace of music has been a big part of my reality and my art.’

Continue reading the main story Ms. Allen first came to prominence in the 1980s, when she moved to New York after receiving a master’s degree in ethnomusicology from the University of Pittsburgh. She soon became a part of the loosely configured M-Base Collective, which united rhythms from across the African diaspora with a commitment to experimental improvising.

She also established a long association with the bassist Charlie Haden and the drummer Paul Motian, both veterans of the jazz avant-garde of the 1960s and ’70s, and played with the drummer Tony Williams and the bassist Ron Carter, former members of Miles Davis’s quintet.

She later became one of the first pianists since the 1950s to make a commercial recording with the free-jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman, who typically found piano players too harmonically restrictive. Around the same time, she filled the piano chair in the vocalist Betty Carter’s quartet, demonstrating an ability to play expressively in a relatively traditional style.

‘She could go anywhere, and she wasn’t in a box,’ the drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, who first played with Ms. Allen in the 1980s, said in an interview. ‘She would talk about things like putting water on chords — not technical terms, but terms that are visual and deal with the other senses. That’s the kind of player that Geri was.’

Ms. Allen was the rare jazz musician of her generation to have an academic background in musicology as well as in jazz performance. She went on to spend 10 years as an educator at the University of Michigan, becoming a sought-after mentor to young musicians, and in 2013 she returned to the University of Pittsburgh as the director of its jazz studies program.

In 2014, she helped found the All-Female Jazz Residency, a summer program at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center for young jazz musicians in their teens and twenties.

Ms. Allen’s academic training and her upbringing in Detroit — a hotbed of black music of various styles — both helped guide her development. On ‘Twylight,’ an album of original compositions released in 1989, she and a band of Detroit musicians used African percussion instruments and newfangled synthesizers. On ‘Grand River Crossings’ (2013), Ms. Allen performed solo piano interpretations of Motown songs, vesting them with a shimmering breadth.

Along the way, she cut a path for a younger generation of pianists — among them Jason Moran, Vijay Iyer, Craig Taborn and Courtney Bryan — who have incorporated their own personal histories into an expansive, globally minded experimentalism.

Reviewing a performance by Ms. Allen’s trio in 2011, Nate Chinen wrote in The New York Times: ‘Her brand of pianism, assertive and soulful, has long suggested a golden mean of major postwar styles. She just as easily deploys the slipstream whimsy of Herbie Hancock, the earthy sweep of McCoy Tyner and the swarming agitation of Cecil Taylor.’

Geri Antoinette Allen was born on June 12, 1957, in Pontiac, Mich., and grew up in Detroit. Her mother, Barbara Jean Allen, was a defense-contract administrator for the United States government; her father, Mount Allen Jr., was a principal in the Detroit public schools.

Ms. Allen, who lived in Pittsburgh, is survived by her father; her brother, Mount Allen III; two daughters, Laila and Barbara; and a son, Wallace. Her marriage to the trumpeter Wallace Roney ended in divorce.

By the end of middle school, Ms. Allen knew she wanted to be a jazz pianist. At Cass Technical High School in Detroit, she studied with Marcus Belgrave, the influential jazz trumpeter and educator. On graduating, she attended Howard University, where she became one of the first students in the university’s jazz studies program, under the direction of the trumpeter Donald Byrd.

After receiving her bachelor’s degree, Ms. Allen moved briefly to New York, then accepted an invitation to study at Pittsburgh, where she also worked under the pianist Nathan Davis and the Ghanaian musicologist Joseph Hanson Kwabena Nketia. For her master’s dissertation she wrote a musical analysis of the iconoclastic saxophonist, bass clarinetist and flutist Eric Dolphy.

Ms. Allen graduated in 1982 and moved back to New York, where she joined up with the saxophonist Steve Coleman, a founder of the M-Base Collective. ‘She had a grasp of what came before, but she was trying to extend that in different ways,’ Mr. Coleman said in an interview. ‘We talked about music from all over the planet, and we talked about music from all eras.’

He featured her on his debut album, ‘Motherland Pulse,’ beginning a long association.

Her own debut, ‘The Printmakers,’ a 1984 trio date with the drummer Andrew Cyrille and the bassist Anthony Cox, is a startling display of rhythmic and melodic mutability, as well as her inventiveness as a composer.

It was the beginning of a recording career that spanned about 20 albums as a leader, including dazzling solo piano records; collaborations with choruses and tap dancers; and an array of small-group albums that range from acoustic jazz to avant-funk.

Ms. Allen also used her academic background to explore the repertoire of Mary Lou Williams, a pioneering bebop pianist, and in 2006 released the album ‘Zodiac Suite: Revisited,’ reinterpreting Williams’s most famous work.

She received an array of accolades over the years, including a Guggenheim fellowship; Denmark’s Jazzpar Prize (she was the first woman to win it); the African-American Classical Music Award from Spelman College in Atlanta; and the first ‘Lady of Soul’ prize for jazz, awarded by the television show ‘Soul Train.’

In her final years Ms. Allen released a triptych of solo piano albums on Motéma Records, and played often with two trios, both with Ms. Carrington: one including the saxophonist David Murray, the other featuring the bassist Esperanza Spalding. In both of those ensembles, Ms. Allen was wont to cut things loose, subverting the tempo or abandoning a song’s structure..

‘Audiences aren’t always given credit for being emotionally aware,’ she said in the interview with Mr. Myers. ‘I’ve found that most people are quite capable of internalizing emotions that are stimulated by music and art, even if the music isn’t immediately familiar.’

(Via.).  Geri Allen, Pianist Who Reconciled Jazz’s Far-Flung Styles, Dies at 60 - The New York Times:

Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Geri Allen, Brilliantly Expressive Pianist, Composer and Educator, Dies at 60 | WBGO

Geri Allen at the Village Vanguard in 2011



"Geri Allen, a widely influential jazz pianist, composer and educator who defied classification while steadfastly affirming her roots in the hard-bop tradition of her native Detroit, died on Tuesday in Philadelphia. She was 60, and lived for the last four years in Pittsburgh.



The cause was cancer, said Ora Harris, her manager of 30 years. The news shocked Allen’s devoted listeners as well as her peers, and the many pianists she directly influenced.



In addition to her varied and commanding work as a leader, Allen made her mark as a venturesome improviser on notable albums with the saxophonist-composers Ornette Coleman, Oliver Lake, Steve Coleman and Charles Lloyd; drummer Ralph Peterson, Jr.; bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Paul Motian; and many others. Her recent collaborations with drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, in separate trios featuring bassist Esperanza Spalding and tenor saxophonist David Murray, found her in a ceaselessly exploratory mode, probing new harmonic expanses and dynamic arcs.



Allen’s solo piano work, from Home Grown in 1985 to Flying Toward the Sound in 2010, reveals an uncommon technical prowess and kaleidoscopic tonal range. The subtitle of Flying Toward the Sound claims inspiration from Cecil Taylor, McCoy Tyner and Herbie Hancock specifically, but on this and other recordings we hear Allen, unfailingly distinctive. From Home Grown, the track “Black Man,” with its looping, interlocking pulses and forward momentum, points clearly toward a rhythmic sensibility heard today from such celebrated pianists as Craig Taborn and Vijay Iyer."



Geri Allen, Brilliantly Expressive Pianist, Composer and Educator, Dies at 60 | WBGO

Wednesday, June 14, 2017

Arthur Blythe, Jazz Saxophonist Who Mixed Sultry and Strident, Dies at 76 - The New York Times

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"Arthur Blythe, whose brawny alto saxophone sound and independent spirit made him a standard-bearer of the New York jazz avant-garde in the late 1970s, died on Monday at a retirement home in Lancaster, Calif. He was 76.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Queen Bey Blythe.

When Mr. Blythe arrived in New York from California in the mid-1970s he was already well into his 30s, with a trenchant, vibrato-thickened saxophone style and a reputation that preceded him.

‘It was pretty much undisputed that Arthur Blythe was the best alto saxophonist out there on the West Coast,’ the tenor saxophonist David Murray said in a phone interview.

Mr. Blythe quickly became a leader of the newly ascendant loft jazz scene, centered on musician-run venues in Lower Manhattan. Within three years, he had a deal with Columbia Records, making him a spokesman for jazz’s Afrocentric vanguard at a moment when the music’s future was far from certain.

Continue reading the main story His first two albums with the label, both released in 1979, bespoke the breadth of his vision. On ‘In the Tradition,’ he performed compositions by Duke Ellington, Fats Waller and John Coltrane accompanied by a standard rhythm section of piano, string bass and drums. ‘Lenox Avenue Breakdown’ featured tuba, electric bass, flute and assorted percussion and consisted of four giddy, hotfooting originals that opened up into extended improvisations.

In 1982, the critic Francis Davis wrote that Mr. Blythe ‘may well prove to be the magic figure of reconciliation, the force for consensus, that modern jazz has been looking for in vain since the death of John Coltrane in 1967.’

That was not to be. Within a few years, a young crop of neo-traditional musicians had seized what spotlight remained for jazz. Mr. Blythe left New York at the end of the 1990s, and his playing career tapered off.

‘I would love for everyone to accept my music, and I would love to make money, but only by keeping my music on the cutting edge,’ he said in a 2000 interview with The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Arthur Murray Blythe was born on July 5, 1940, in Los Angeles, the middle child of three sons. (A fourth brother died as an infant.) His father was a mechanic, his mother a homemaker and part-time seamstress.

His parents soon divorced, and when he was 4 he moved with his mother to San Diego. At 9, inspired by the rhythm-and-blues and swing records she often played, he asked her for a trombone. She gave him an alto saxophone instead.

He studied with Kirkland Bradford, who had played with the Jimmie Lunceford big band, and developed a trilling style reminiscent of postwar saxophone stars like Earl Bostic.

Mr. Blythe worked in R&B bands throughout his teens, learning to cut through the volume of electric guitars while maintaining a romantic lyricism. That mixture of sultry and strident came to define his style.

Newsletter Sign UpContinue reading the main story Louder Stay on top of the latest in pop and jazz with reviews, interviews, podcasts and more from The New York Times music critics.

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MANAGE EMAIL PREFERENCES PRIVACY POLICY OPT OUT OR CONTACT US ANYTIME When he was 19, he moved back to Los Angeles, where he met the pianist and bandleader Horace Tapscott and became affiliated with the Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension, Mr. Tapscott’s Pan-African alliance of innovators.

In 1974, frustrated with the Los Angeles jazz scene’s limitations, Mr. Blythe left for New York, determined to make his mark.

He arrived with a nickname that reflected his self-affirmation and his uncompromising spirit: Black Arthur. He was known in Los Angeles for his racial pride and his willingness to speak boldly on behalf of other black people, despite an otherwise understated demeanor. Mr. Murray recalled him standing up fearlessly to police officers who had hassled him.

Mr. Blythe embraced the nickname, even calling himself Black Arthur Blythe on the cover of a 1978 album, ‘Bush Baby.’

Soon after arriving in New York, he began assembling bands with unusual instrumentation. When not playing with a straight-ahead quartet, he favored chunky, percussive backdrops that offset his tuneful improvising.

In 1977, The New York Times critic Robert Palmer praised Mr. Blythe, writing, ‘He is sly; he teases the beat, toys with polyrhythms and leaves gaping holes in the fabric of the music, only to come roaring back in with plangent held tones or crisp, punching riffs.’

Even after signing with Columbia, Mr. Blythe insisted on creative autonomy, releasing nine albums across a range of styles. He continued to record and perform regularly, often with the tuba player Bob Stewart and the drummer Cecil Brooks III, after Columbia declined to renew his contract in 1987.

He moved back to California in 1998 to take care of his children after his second marriage ended. He performed less frequently but released a handful of albums on the Savant label in the early 2000s before failing health eventually forced him to stop performing.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Blythe is survived by his daughter, Odessa Blythe, and two sons, Chalee and Arthur Jr., all from his second marriage; two half brothers, Bernard Blythe and Adrich Neal; and a half sister, Daisy Neal. His first two marriages ended in divorce.

‘The music that I deal with has elements of bebop to ballad, swing to sweet, blues to boogie, and pop to rock,’ Mr. Blythe told the musician and oral historian Ben Sidran in 1986. ‘If I have the ability to do that, I should be able to do whatever I want to do in those areas — because I am dealing with the tradition, and my culture, and my heritage.’"

(Via.). Arthur Blythe, Jazz Saxophonist Who Mixed Sultry and Strident, Dies at 76 - The New York Times:

Tuesday, May 23, 2017

Celebrating the life of the late drummer Mickey Roker. Joe Pass, Milt Jackson, Ray Brown & Mickey Roker - Grooveyard

Mickey Roker, Dynamic Hard-Bop Drummer and Philly Jazz Institution, Dies at 84 | WBGO

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"Mickey Roker, a soulful and deeply propulsive drummer who carried a torch for literate hard-bop in the decades after its commercial peak, died on Monday in Philadelphia, where he was a local jazz institution. He was 84.

His death was confirmed by his daughter, Debra Roker, who cited natural causes but noted that he had lung cancer and diabetes, among other health issues.

Though he was never a household name like Max Roach or Art Blakey, who were more than a decade his senior, Roker was held in high regard as a modern jazz drummer for more than 40 years. He’s probably most widely known for his nearly decade-long association, in the 1970s, with trumpeter and bebop paragon Dizzy Gillespie.

Roker can be heard on a handful of Gillespie albums from that era, including Afro-Cuban Jazz Moods, with Machito (1975), and Carter, Gillespie Inc., with saxophonist Benny Carter (1976). His entry in The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz includes a glowing endorsement from Gillespie: ‘Once he sets a groove, whatever it is, you can go to Paris and come back and it's right there. You never have to worry about it.’

Roker also had a highly visible tenure with the Modern Jazz Quartet, which he joined in the early 1990s as a sub for, and then a successor to, its longtime drummer Connie Kay. Roker appears, anchoring a battery of guests, on A 40th Anniversary Celebration, released in ‘93. But his core contribution to the band was as a road warrior..."

(Via.).  Mickey Roker, Dynamic Hard-Bop Drummer and Philly Jazz Institution, Dies at 84 | WBGO:

Thursday, May 18, 2017

Cécile McLorin Salvant’s Timeless Jazz - The New Yorker

Wynton Marsalis said, “You get a singer like this once in a generation or two.”



"On a Thursday evening a few months ago, a long line snaked along Seventh Avenue, outside the Village Vanguard, a cramped basement night club in Greenwich Village that jazz fans regard as a temple. The eight-thirty set was sold out, as were the ten-thirty set and nearly all the other shows that week. The people descending the club’s narrow steps had come to hear a twenty-seven-year-old singer named Cécile McLorin Salvant. In its sixty years as a jazz club, the Vanguard has headlined few women and fewer singers of either gender. But Salvant, virtually unknown two years earlier, had built an avid following, winning a Grammy and several awards from critics, who praised her singing as “singularly arresting” and “artistry of the highest class.”



Cécile McLorin Salvant’s Timeless Jazz - The New Yorker

Tuesday, April 04, 2017

Arthur Blythe - Equinox RIP

Arthur Blythe, acclaimed jazz musician, dies aged 76 | Music | The Guardian

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OMG, Arthur based. I knew Arthur well during the 1980s and 1990s.  I met him first in the 70s.  He was a great player.   I did a show with him at the Atlanta jazz festival in 1991 where he played just before Jackie McLean.  At one tome his "In The Tradition" quartet with John Hicks on piano, Fred Hopkins on bass and Steve McCall on traps was this hippest quartet inn the City.  Arthur was a lot of fun.  I remember one time he was visiting my Bronx apartment with a mutual lady friend of ours and I played a record by blues guitarist Johnny Copeland  which I had an alto saxophone solo on it.  I jokingly asked Arthur who was [;lying saxophone.  He said he did not know.  I said it is you Arthur.  We had a good laugh.  I really liked Arthur.  He singled handedly brought the tuba back into small group jazz wit his trio then later quintet recordings with tuba player Bob Stewart.  Arthur had a searing tone on alto that reminded be of a cross between Johnny Hodges's beauty and a blow torch. His tone was unmistakeable and incredibly appealing.  He will be missed.

Arthur Blythe, acclaimed jazz musician, dies aged 76 | Music | The Guardian: ""

Wednesday, March 29, 2017

John Coltrane Documentary Chasing Trane Coming to Theaters | Pitchfork

"A new trailer has been released for a forthcoming documentary about John Coltrane, titled Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Story. Watch it below via Vanity Fair. Combining archival footage, photographs and performances, the film tells the story of the jazz musician's short but powerful life. Since Coltrane gave minimal radio interviews and never gave a television interview before he died at age 40, Denzel Washington narrates his words. ‘In many of his roles Denzel radiates an exceptional quiet strength,’ said director-writer John Scheinfeld in a statement. 'Coltrane, many of his friends told me, embodied a similar strength.’

The documentary also features Common, Kamasi Washington, Carlos Santana, Wynton Marsalis, Bill Clinton, Sonny Rollins, Dr. Cornel West, and more, who discuss Coltrane's significance and impact. His family and the labels that own his catalogue all lent their support to the film's production. 

Chasing Trane will be screening at the IFC Theater in New York City beginning April 14 with a wider release to follow. 

"

(Via.).  John Coltrane Documentary Chasing Trane Coming to Theaters | Pitchfork:

Monday, February 27, 2017

A New Documentary Explores The Troubled, Brilliant Life Of Pianist Bill Evans : NPR

Friday, February 17, 2017

Jazz Trumpeter Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah Melds Past, Present and Future - The New York Times

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 “...With “Ruler Rebel,” he is taking up a new challenge: uniting the spare, rippling power of trap music (Southern hip-hop known for its austere beats and deep puddles of bass) with a range of parallel inspirations, from Sergio Leone’s spaghetti-western themes to New Orleans funk…"

 Jazz Trumpeter Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah Melds Past, Present and Future - The New York Times: ""

Tuesday, February 14, 2017

Does this sound familiar? Our "Manchurian President" and "King Richard". Democrats Demand: What Did the President Know and When Did He Know It? - The New York Times

 Michael T. Flynn’s resignation as national security adviser prompts calls to redouble investigations of Russia contacts.

■ President Trump names Lt. General Joseph Keith Kellogg Jr., a retired Vietnam War veteran, as interim security adviser.

■ White House press secretary Sean Spicer briefs the press at 1 p.m."

(Via.).  Democrats Demand: What Did the President Know and When Did He Know It? - The New York Times: "■

Tuesday, February 07, 2017

DownBeat News

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"Almost 50 years in the making, Jon Hendricks’ vocalese re-scoring of Miles Ahead, the seminal Miles Davis/Gil Evans from 1957, will receive its global premiere in New York on Feb. 17.



With Hendricks, considered by some to be the Godfather of vocalese, on hand to witness the historic event, Miles Ahead will be performed by the London Vocal Project (a 20-piece choir plus rhythm section) and a handful of special guest soloists at St. Peter’s Church, 619 Lexington Ave. in Manhattan.



Hendricks, who rose to prominence as part of the legendary vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, started work on his vocalese rendition of Miles Ahead nearly five decades ago, initially as response to the wave of popularity that greeted the widely acclaimed LH&R album Sing A Song Of Basie, a recording that helped define the sound of vocalese, or the art of writing lyrics to existing instrumental solos.



It wasn’t until 2012, however, that he began to collaborate closely with London Vocal Project director Pete Churchill who, with the support of the choir, will help bring Hendricks’ artistic vision to life. Every note of both Davis’ solos and Evans’ arrangement has been re-scored for voices with Hendricks’ lyrics.



The world premiere of the material was made possible with help of Quincy Jones, a longtime friend of Hendricks, and also through the support of the Jazz Foundation of America.



Looking ahead, LVP will return to the studio to put the finishing touches on a recording of Hendricks’ Miles Ahead. The album will be due for release later this year.



A European premiere performance has been scheduled in London for May 21. DB"



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