Celebrating Community
Beethoven was born 250 years ago this year. What this fact has to do with jazz, in the musical sense, is very little. But it does have to do with the formation of a body of work that represents the aesthetic virtues and values of an art—in other words, what the academies and institutions call a canon. Classical music did […]
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah, fuckin’ with some wet-ass pussy Bring a bucket and a mop for this wet-ass pussy Give me everything you got for this wet-ass pussy “WAP,” it’s the song of the summer, even though summer was cancelled by the coronavirus. So, not much of a summer, and truth be told not much of a song. Once […]
MTV launched in 1981 with a video for the Buggles song “Video Killed The Radio Star,” and the medium of music has never been the same. Most music that is. Music at the edges and in the niches that line mass, popular culture has been little affected by music videos. Opera and experimental Western art music have been working with […]
Last month, I expressed pessimism over the future of live jazz in New York. I’m still unsure how many venues are going to survive into Phase 4 of the COVID-19 reopening, much less after, but some of the leading names have been trying to present live music to remote audiences, with the biggest name, the Village Vanguard, starting up their […]
“We came up from the subway / On the music midnight makes / To Charlie’s bass and Lester’s saxophone / In taxi horns and brakes.” – Joni Mitchell Take the 1 train to Christopher Street and walk uptown on Seventh Avenue South for a few blocks and you end up in a rough triangle marked by Smalls, Mezzrow, and the […]
The musicians are doing their all, but the zoom-type media experience is just not working for jazz. Jazz has an in-the-moment feedback that streaming can’t support. Catch a live performance and the musicians (if it’s safe for two or more to got together) can be seen responding to each other, but there’s nothing they can get from the viewers, nor […]
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 […]
When everyone is making it up on the spot, who’s the composer? This is a question every time an album track has a composer credit, or when a musician on the bandstand announces that “this was written/composed by” so-and-so. If you listen to jazz at all, you’ve heard one or more musicians play a tune (usually a song form of […]