With the world – and the arts world with it – shuttering its doors amid COVID-19’s havoc, life as we know it has sputtered to a standstill. That doesn’t erase the months or years that bands and musicians had poured into preparing albums slated for a release whose timing turned out to be impeccably poor. But that also doesn’t discount […]

Few industries are immune to the financial and structural chaos that COVID-19 has wrought. The music business, though, is particularly vulnerable. Essentially made up of dozens of patchwork business models, with the majority of workers being self-employed, there is little relief for the majority of musicians. Broadway is shuttered, bars are closed, weddings are postponed, international tours are canceled, and […]

Ben Bierman lives around the corner from me, which explains how I first met him and his partner Val at the local gin palace. It was the usual Sunday afternoon gathering, and I was on the prowl for a game of cribbage, but there were no takers, no suckers, no ringers. I felt like a cross between an also-ran Paul […]

25 years ago, Ibrahima Diokhane opened Keur Djembe, an African drum shop, on Union Street. When I stopped in to talk to Ibrahima last month, he was sitting on a stool, as if waiting for me. “Ibrahima?”  “Yes, that’s me.” The store was about as big as my living room.  I told him that I wanted to write an article […]

Like most of us, Ethan Fiks has had to respond creatively to the new reality of the Coronavirus. Ethan has been teaching my nine-year-old-son, Travis, guitar for the past year and a half.  Travis went from not being able to play guitar to now playing songs like “Stray Cat Strut” and “Wonderwall.”  We go to Ethan’s house on East 16th […]

The sad state of the days means that pianist Mike Longo will, for at least a good period of time, be remembered more for being the first American jazz musician to succumb to the COVID-19 virus than for the what he did musically, and how it added to the world. Dorothy Longo, his wife for 32 years, reported his death […]

This is not about listening to jazz at home, which is how we’ve done it for most of the last 100 years. The radio, the stereo, 78s, LPs, cassettes, CDs, what else is there to say about them? They deliver music to our ears, and while that may not be the best way to experience jazz, it’s the most convenient […]

1918 was a strange intersection for musicians even before the 1918 Flu Pandemic hit. These were the final times that music would be experienced   primarily the way it had been for thousands of years. With the exception of music boxes that evolved into player pianos, music had always been performed live. There was little need for the term, “live […]