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Chinese Jazz Fusioners Sizhukong Interviewed at AAJ...And More!
Source:
All About Jazz
It is something of a paradox that the western world knows so relatively little about modern China, even as the awakening giant's influence in the world is increasing. With something like 10 million people migrating every year to China's cities, it seems inevitable that old musical traditions will find new voices once merged with influences such as electronic music, hip-hop, rock and jazz. Most likely, much experimentation is actually taking place among a population numbering 1.3 billion.
As yet, however, ...
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Chicago Underground Dive into the Laptop-Jazz Vortex
Source:
All About Jazz @ Spinner
By Tad Hendrickson
The fusion of jazz and electronics hasn't been a particularly fertile one -- particularly when you consider the possibilities of pairing the agility of improvisation-minded musicians with the infinite possibilities offered by technology, both in the production studio and in the live setting. In the late '60s and early '70s, Miles Davis and producer Teo Macero famously cut and pasted tapes together to create songs with form out of studio jams, but the mercurial Davis moved on ...
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POW! Darius Jones
Source:
Inverted Garden by Eric Benson
The Brooklyn jazz scene has been a boon to New York, fostering a defiantly local culture that the city's biggest clubs (Blue Note, Vanguard, etc) sometimes lack. In Greenwich Village, you see top jazz stars deliver polished performances; at Brooklyn events like the New Languages Festival, you see scruffy young musicians experimenting, developing, emerging.
Yet there's a strain running through some of the new Brooklyn music that feels counterproductive: an attraction toward gimmicks rather than expressions. The Respect Sextet, a ...
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Buddy de Franco + Sonny Clark, PT 2
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
By 1954, the clarinet was all but finished as a solo instrument. Benny Goodman was largely a nostalgia act. Artie Shaw was completing his final recordings with his Gramercy Five. And other leading jazz musicians who played the “stick" did so out of necessity for studio work or as a secondary instrument. One of the only full-time practitioners exploring new ground was Buddy De Franco. But Buddy was fully aware of the clarinet's image problem. Its happy, pleading sound was ...
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19th-Century Concept, with a Few Upgrades
Source:
Michael Ricci
Pat Metheny, the jazz guitarist, has lately spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about robots. Actually, that's putting it mildly: he has been downright obsessed with robots, and with getting them to do his bidding. “I haven't slept more than four hours a night for six months now," he said one day last fall at a makeshift rehearsal space in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, the former home of a Byzantine Catholic church. Wearing a T-shirt and faded jeans, ...
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Giant Steps: The Survival of a Great Jazz Pianist
Source:
Michael Ricci
Influential artists sometimes click in the public consciousness only after the rise of the movements they have influenced. A school of creative work emerges--seemingly spontaneously, its origins obscure at first. Then, with attention to the artists in that school comes recognition of their influences, their antecedents and their mentors. After Pollock, de Kooning and their peers in postwar American art established Abstract Expressionism, the precursory importance of prewar iconoclasts like Kandinsky became clear. After the Ramones, the Sex Pistols and ...
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Riding on the the Main Line of Jazz
Source:
Michael Ricci
The trumpeter Jeremy Pelt has spent most of the last decade as a young exemplar, traveling the postbop continuum on his own steam, at his own pace. As a bandleader he has plunged headlong into funk and dipped a toe in chamber orchestration, but the larger theme of his output seeks a footing on the bedrock of jazz convention. Hes still finding good terrain to explore there, as he proved at Jazz Standard on Thursday night. Mr. Pelt, 33, has ...
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