Celebrating Community
People frequently (that is, once every few years) stop me on the street and ask me, “George” (no one really knows who I am), “should I be listening to jazz?” My first response is always, “absolutely!” Then, when they ask me why, this is what I tell them (again almost never happens, but it’s good to have a handy quasi-script […]
First, the good news: the Library of Congress last month added new albums to its National Recording Registry, which preserves the most important and salient examples of American audio culture. One of the new entries is Miles Davis’ monumental, complex, darkly thrilling Bitches Brew. It’s a testament to the brilliance and possibilities of this country that it produced Miles and […]
What is the sound of being ghosted after going through a job interview? According to the prog-rock band KADAWA, it’s the crisp, complex rhythms, slashing riffs, and soaring major key guitar solo of “We’ll Get Back to You” off their album, Post-Graduation Fees. Take something larger and not focussed on an individual’s experience: What is the sound of what the […]
Spend time on social media, especially text-based sites like Bluesky (that’s what I use—and enjoy—now after deleting my account at the neo-Nazi’s site) and you eventually find people decrying a lack of media literacy. What they mean by that is the ability to see the difference between assertion and fact, to know what’s reporting and what’s stenography, to tell when […]
As a critic, I’m wary of addressing issues of taste. Taste is personal, it’s what we like and what we don’t—I love how in Italian you say you like something with “mi piace,” which means “it pleases me”—and there’s very little taste-wise that is truly bad. Bad taste, done with affection, is kitsch, which is a good thing. Criticism is […]
This is just one calendar year, which may be sufficient time in the pop music manufacturing industry to spot a trend, but is a far less meaningful span in music that wrestles with its own history—the old is constantly being renewed and incorporated with ideas from other genres—as jazz does, and that is so free of commercial pressures (unfortunately) that […]
By the time you read this, Bud Powell’s 100th birthday (September 27) will have passed, with a 24-hour broadcast from WKCR and a 25% discount promotion from Blue Note records on the two Powell LPs on their label currently in print. So after blowing out the candles, let’s take a look at how that is a tragedy. Powell was the […]
Every year, the Vision Festival opens with a concert dedicated to one musician who is honored with a Lifetime Achievement award. That’s an evening of three or four sets, each one featuring this figure. In 2023, that was French bassist Joëlle Léandre, one night at Roulette with four sets in four different grouping around her playing and artistry. That, June […]
The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD (6th edition), introduces vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson by pointing out that if he “were a saxophonist, trumpeter, or pianist, he would be regarded as a major figure in modern jazz.” That’s no exaggeration, Hutcherson (who died in 2016) was one of the greatest of all jazz musicians of the post-1959 era. He was an […]
Here in New York City, the jazz capital of the world, hot summer nights mean not just jazz but free jazz. The very idea of Ornette Coleman or Albert Ayler playing at Slugs’ Saloon fills me with the image of musicians on the bandstand in a hot, crowded club, the air conditioning failing to compete with the temperature outside, the […]