Celebrating Community
“Community” is a word that arts organizations use a lot these days, and I in no way want to undercut the sincerity behind that when I point out that the word’s popularity is fundamentally driven by the kind of grant-writing-thinking that pretty much every arts organization has to adopt in contemporary American life in order to even hope for some […]
Every day, there’s a pile of hype in my inbox; this album and/or that event is either groundbreaking, incredible, the perfect response to a cultural moment, one-of-a-kind, (the unfortunate) “genre-fluid,” a best-of-the-year, or some other superlative. That goes with the territory, I’m a music critic and publicity material is trying to get my attention and get me to listen. As […]
Bad things are just as valuable as good things, at least for a critic. Bad work (art, music, writing) is often a lesson in missed opportunities, the mistakes and missteps that, if corrected, would turn the bad thing into a good thing. It was a bad book I read recently that led to this column, a book about improvisation and […]
You can’t spell “brand” without “band,” and in music the two words are implicitly combined; bands are brands, the name conjuring not just songs and albums, but a specific style and sound. Whether mutable like The Beatles or static, like The Rolling Stone, name the band and their sound immediately springs to life in your head. This applies to jazz, […]
Jazz is political. I’m not here to shock or confound anyone, but in contemporary American culture, there’s a pervasive need to point out the obvious when so many people put effort into blocking the evidence of their eyes and ears from reaching their brain. Jazz is political, all music is political, all creative, cultural endeavors are political. They can’t help […]
Near the start of this current stretch of my life, when I somehow—by circumstance, accident, and desperation—became a freelance writer, I wrote an article for a classical music publication (that still exists but is no longer a place for writing) about how there’s no such thing as difficult music. Except for typing out the words coherently, it was easy to […]
Just in time for your shopping lists, and just before you might, I hope, have some time off and can spend some of your evenings these dark days listening to fine music, here are my choices for the best jazz albums of 2022. I make this list because I think lists are useful, and year-end ones help focus the mind […]
Of course conservatives hate the movies and the entertainment industry that produces them: movies are, bottom line, substantial investments of capital that seek to return profits. Thy are made to sell to viewers, and so movie makers try and give the public what the producers think it wants. Thats why there’s a massive library of MCU and Star Wars movies […]
The jazz world is vastly different than it was 100 years ago.That probably seems obvious, in that the world may seem different than it was 100 years ago, though that is mostly superficial and centered around technology. What I mean is the there are key aspects of the society that gave birth to jazz that have changed and in many […]
No plan survives contact with reality. At the start of this summer, energized by recent listening, I started to dig into my library of books on free jazz, titles like Val Wilmer’s As Serious As Your LIfe, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t by Scott Saul, Michael Heller’s Loft Jazz, and Ekkehard Jost’s im-portant study, Free Jazz. I was jazzed. But then […]