Will Budget Cuts Hurt Jazz Education's Swing in the USA?
Though economic indicators suggest we are slowly emerging from the Great Recession here in the United States, repercussions could echo through the jazz world for a generation. The past five or so years of extreme cuts to public school budgets--especially the arts programs-- could mean a dearth of well-trained, young musicians. “I am seeing students arrive ...
Death, Rebirth & New Revolution
The death knell has often been sounded for jazz and many would argue that the last revolution in jazz took place as the '60s handed the baton to the '70s, with the electronic-influenced jazz typified by trumpeter Miles Davis' ground breaking albums In a Silent Way (Columbia, 1969) and Bitches Brew (Columbia, 1970). Many believe that ...
Jazz, Baseball, Politics and the Beltway Blues: Our American Dialogue, Part II
Ref: How Life Imitates the World Series (Penguin, 1983) by Thomas Boswell
Well, that's over. $2.6 billion later, the U.S. presidential election is history. No more polls, no more red state / blue state electoral maps, no more trash-talking. Right on its heels, the BBWAA (Baseball Writers Association of America) announced the ...
Jazz, Politics, Edward Kennedy and the Ghosts of Richard Nixon: Our American Dialogue and the Hatfields and McCoys
To get into heaven, don't snap for a seven Live clean, don't have no fault Oh, I take the gospel, whenever it's possible But with a grain of salt --"It Ain't Necessarily So," from Porgy & Bess by George and Ira Gershwin Edward Kennedy Ellington celebrated his 70th ...
Fado em Si Bemol: Fado... With a Pinch of Jazz
Jazz reinvents itself every day, in any way, like a chameleon transforms Itself to match its surroundings. It is thanks to this ability that jazz's place in the world has been firmly cemented; from a musical point of view, there seem to be no physical or spiritual boundaries to what musicians can arrange with this ever-evolving ...
The Importance of Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas
Into my heart on air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again. ...
On the Banks of the Jabbok With Chet Baker
When Yale professor Harold Bloom was interviewed by NPR shortly after publication of Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (Riverhead, 2005), he was quite candid about his relationship with his own Judaism and Yahweh: Bloom: ... I may, as I say, lack trust in the covenant, but though I keep asking Yahweh to go away, I ...
Radio Killed the Roneo Star?
Recently I began doing a series of short CD reviews with WJSU-FM 88.5, a station broadcasting from the campus of Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi. The opportunity to do it came along within days of learning that KABC's parent company, Cumulus Media, Inc., had pulled the plug on the last remaining AM radio jazz programming ...
Jazz on the Bosphorus: Troubled Waters
For seven years now the rather laboriously named Istanbul Jazz Center (confusingly the logo includes the letters “JC's," I don't know why) has been one of the major clubs of the Turkish city. Situated in the posh neighborhood of Ortakoy, in the shadow of the first Bosphorus Bridge, its schedule has featured major international jazz stars ...
BAM: Bremen Art Music?
[Editor's Note: It's been quite a few years since Italian writer, music educator and general provocateur Francesco Martinelli last contributed to All About Jazz. Having recently returned home from Jazzahead! 2012 in Bremen, and with the current debates about the meaning, future and relevance of the word “jazz" fresh in his mind, Martinelli posits an alternate ...
Bridges vs. Walls
If you ask ten Americans “what does it mean to be an American?" you might well get 10 different answers. So it goes with America's only original, indigenous art form. Wait... we have one of those? Yes indeed--although it's rarely given the National respect or attention it deserves. Thus, if you ask ten Americans what our ...
Whitney Houston: A Final Look
Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson will be forever linked as they brought the world together and made a nation cry. They were God's gift to us mere mortals and in a very brief period of time, they made us believe. They were able to capture through music, what leaders desperately try. And though tragedy would clearly ...
Great Jazz Deserves To Be Heard And Seen At It's Best
Why I'm filing a mass take-down notice on YouTube For several decades, my father committed himself to championing the popular emergence of jazz, and engendering proper respect for the musicians who devoted their careers and lives to the music that had long been dismissed to the sidelines of main stream American culture. Ralph J. Gleason is ...
Ralph J. Gleason's Jazz Casual
(This article was first published at All About Jazz in May 1999)
Various Artists Jazz Casual Rhino / WEA 1999 In 1959, Ralph Gleason had made his reputation as one of the leading Jazz critics of his generation; writing out of his Berkeley home for the San Francisco Chronicle and syndicated ...
