Author Archive
The Price of Jazz
Jazz Gallery’s Legacy and Ledger Latest music organization to enter the tight local real estate market: the Jazz Gallery, which lost the lease on its loft at Hudson and Spring streets after 17 years. Moving an ongoing venture at any time is painful, but seldom worse than right now in Manhattan, where the Gallery wants...
Jazz For Life
Mandel Reports a “First” As UN Swings Our Global Heritage The United Nation’s General Assembly never before hosted an event like the International Jazz Day (IJD) concert staged under its high, vast dome on April 30. Pianist Herbie Hancock, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) cultural ambassador and Jazz Day instigator, played Miles...
On the Record
Reviewing New Jazz Now The organizing principle behind this batch of records: They’re recent releases by NYC-based talents, recommended for originality and freshness. They’re all worth hearing more than once, and constitute discoveries. You don’t need to be told you’ll like Keith Jarrett’s solo Rio, right? Roots Before Branches, by drummer Henry Cole and the...
Nonstop Herbie
Charting Hancock’s musical voyages Who is this particular Herbie Hancock appearing at Jazz at Lincoln Center March 9 and 10? Not the keyboardist who enlisted Dave Matthews, The Chieftains, India.Arie, Los Lobos et al. as guest stars on his latest album, The Imagine Project, or who won by surprise the Grammy for Record of the...
Listening to People: How the Swiss keep jazz Intakt
With no background of blues, gospel or swing, what does “jazz” sound like? A two-week festival March 1–15 at The Stone of the Zurich-based musicians who record for the Swiss record label Intakt offers intriguing examples. Pianist Irene Schweizer will perform powerful, blocky improvisations. Pierre Favre, her frequent accompanist and one of Europe’s busiest drummers,...
Lone Wolf Compositions
Tim Berne presents ‘Snakeoil’ Tim Berne is the saxophonist as lone wolf—a rangy and determinedly individualistic composer/improviser who has for 30-plus years lived far from the jazz mainstream and skirted the edges of the avant-garde. He’s been a presence in aficionado venues in New York, North America and beyond, and has just embarked on an...
Winter Wonderings
Jazzfest remains timely Jazz 2012 in New York City began as 2011 did: with a Winter Jazzfest proving that a couple thousand fans in their twenties and thirties will flock to The Village in January for staggered sets by some five dozen original and emergent ensembles for one low price in multiple venues. The excitement...
Seasonal Sensation
Mandekan Cubano Project Delivers The winter holidays’ emphasis on warmth and good will towards humankind means that musicians genuinely possessing those qualities bear the most desirable of gifts. As a New Yorker in constant search of musical substance, engagement and freshness, I’m thrilled that singer-songwriter-electric bassist Richard Bona debuts his Mandekan Cubano project at the...
A How-To Guide to Improv
Free music with direction Large ensembles defying genre labels and intent on collective improvisation are unusual but not entirely new; there’s a nearly 50-year history of them just in the East Village. But a new movement of improvised orchestration is upon us, exploring the balancing act at the heart of the art of jazz: How...
A Landmark Soundtrack
How West Side Story’s score became basic American vocabulary For West Side Story, the score’s the thing. Even a first exposure to the 1957 original Broadway cast album or the 1961 Academy Award-winning movie soundtrack reveals this music to be the peak of the golden, pre-rock age of American song. Leonard Bernstein’s melodies are immediately...
Why the Blues Rocks
NY music goes hardcore The Stone, a recital room for the avant-garde, is the size of a corner bodega, and its artistic director John Zorn maintains a strict no refreshments/no hanging out policy. It’s an odd place to hear a bustin’ loose electric jazz power trio such as the Free Form Funky Freqs, who did...
Chicago Jazz Comes to Brooklyn
Historic AACM relocates at Roulette The big news about jazz and new music in New York is the re-location, opening and first season of performance space Roulette in Brooklyn, which may reconvene and reinvigorate a scene. A related, underlying theme is the vast influence a coterie of ex-Chicagoans from the 46-year-old grassroots Association for the...
New York Jazz’s Resilient Rhythm
Amina Figarova’s ‘September Suite’ a highlight Creators of jazz and other new music in New York are a resolute bunch, determined to make the best of circumstances that are tough even in the best of times. Immediately after the World Trade Center towers were destroyed on Sept. 11, 2001, local musicians I know reacted to...
Summer Jazz Blues
How is Madeleine Peyroux not Charlie Parker? Let’s count the ways. The Charlie Parker Jazz Festival is Manhattan’s last free music fling of the summer. Two four-act afternoon-to-evening concerts—Saturday, Aug. 27 in Harlem’s Marcus Garvey Park and Sunday, Aug. 28 in the East Village’s Tompkins Square Park—honor an iconic saxophonist who took melodic, chordally based...
Musical Staycations
As an alternative to swanky or dank clubs, try the concerts in the city’s harbor and parks One of the great things about jazz in this city is that you can get away from it all and still be on the case—at least during summer. For instance, there are few venues more transporting than the...
Symphony Not for Improvisers
The American Composers Orchestra offers jazz professionals a extraordinary opportunity with recent concerts In a hectic week running up to my production of the 15th annual Jazz Journalists Association’s Jazz Awards, I made sure to attend the jazz symphony. Missing the Vision Fest, the first fabulously promising days of the Blue Note Jazz Club Festival...
Just Listen
Jazz is the soundtrack of New York City and everybody knows it. That’s jazz you hear in every tone and texture coming down the street, out of windows, with the wind, in your face, in your ear: the incredible array and interaction of color, shape, style and rhythm, sound through which we make our ways,...
Improvisers’ Paradise Revisited
The legacy of the Creative Music Studio persists—if you listen One upon a time, the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, N.Y., was the coolest place on the planet for musicians. Now the people who made that happen are trying again at The Stone, located on Second Street and Avenue C.
The Jazz Divide
Why does the divide between black and white jazz persist? In jazz, the racial rift that has long plagued our nation is continuously, simultaneously both healed and re-torn. Musicians and listeners alike proclaim a meritocracy, meaning anyone who can play an instrument trumps skin color, ethnicity or nationality at birth. Yet audiences are still often...
The Sound of Unsound
Morton Subotnick’s ‘Silver Apples’ rings again When Morton Subotnick programmed the Electric Circus to open on St. Mark’s Place in July 1967 with the heartbeat sequence from his Buchla Electric Music Box composition “Silver Apples of the Moon,” the 3,000 beautiful people in attendance included Seiji Ozawa, George Plimpton, Mary McCarthy, Truman Capote and various...
Go to Gowanus
This previously shunned part of Brooklyn is the place to hear new things Considering New York City’s real estate patterns—always a consideration regarding everything here—it was inevitable the musically adventurous would find Gowanus. A neighborhood so toxically unlovely that the Environmental Protection Agency wants to declare it a Superfund cleanup site, Gowanus buildings are suitable...
