Celebrating Community
There is nothing new under the sun. Not to mention, you’ve heard that line before. How often? Well, Ecclesiastes was written about 3,000 years ago, so imagine the level of boredom it took to have someone mention it in the Old Testament. And they didn’t even have records back then. As surprising as it has been to admit this to […]
In the winter of 2020, trumpeter Wallace Roney appeared one evening on WKCR. A few weeks later, he was dead, killed, by the coronavirus. As Sharif Abdus-Salaam, who had hosted Roney, said with some shock when reporting this, “COVID does not play around.” No it does not. Nor, now with more than a million Americans needlessly dead, has it stopped […]
Henry Threadgill, photo by John Rogers Jazz is not just modern, but modernist; not just part of the last 100 years of cultural history, but a music that took old and existing language and made it new. Bebop was an explicit modernist, even avant-garde, movement that took existing popular material, like “How High The Moon,” and gave it a new […]
Charles Mingus is one of the greatest figures in the history of jazz and modern music. Born 100 years ago this month (April 22) , he’s one of those few musicians who, in the mind of the public and fellow musicians goes by one name: just Mingus, like Miles and Col-trane and Ella and Monk and Duke. Even rarer, he […]
Here’s a motto to listen by: it’s harder to write a song than a sonata. There’s a general perception both among outside listeners and musicians inside institutional structures that the sonata is one of the supreme formal achievements of classical music. And this is true, proven by how vital and enduring the form has been since composers like Haydn were […]
Last month’s Winter Jazziest 2022, such as it was, was disappointing for all the wrong reasons. This had nothing to do with jazz and everything to do with America writ large, and the destructive nihilism of self-proclaimed conservatives and the political class overall. There are too many people with everything they need in life who can’t even conceive of enduring […]
The idea of the “star,” a celebrated and famous performer, isn’t new in and of itself. It goes back at least to the career of pianist Franz Liszt, who in the mid-19th century caused such public sensations during his European tours that he begat a new word, “Lisztomania.” And before Lady Gaga and even Barbra Streisand, there was the first, […]
What if jazz is the original fusion music? What if it was always fusion music, from the very beginning, long before the Tony Williams Lifetime and Electric Miles and Weather Report? That is all the truth, so obvious that it was overlooked before Williams and Miles brought the startling, creative rock of the late ‘60s into jazz. But jazz never […]
Late style, the idea that an artist’s work changes markedly as they see the end of life on the horizon, is mainly reserved for discussions of literary figures, or else musicians, like Beethoven, that literary figures hear of enough to dig, if not understand. Another way to put it is that it is a middle-to-highbrow topic that you can read […]
There’s lots to love when it comes to Blue Note records, not the least of which is that the combination of the consistently fine music they recorded and released and the distinctive and influential graphic design of the record albums were some of the most important elements of creating what “cool” meant in American culture, before it was coopted and […]