Interview News

Trumpeter Forbes Graham Interviewed at AAJ

Source: All About Jazz
February 2, 2010

Forbes Graham isn't hell-bent on taking the jazz world over by fiat.

Then again, a sterling tone like Louis Armstrong's, a sense of stride and a sidewinder sleekness position him to do so. He brings spot-on timing, inherited from his key precursor, Don Cherry, into the icy age of post jazz--and swings, too, situated comfortably within the classic idiom.

AAJ Contributor Gordon Marshall spoke recently with Graham about his background, numerology and music, and the road from thrash metal to ...

Continue Reading

Peter Martin Featured in St. Louis Beacon

Source: St. Louis Jazz Notes by Dean Minderman
February 1, 2010

Continue Reading

Chinese Jazz Fusioners Sizhukong Interviewed at AAJ...And More!

Source: All About Jazz
February 1, 2010

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, ...

Continue Reading

Chicago Underground Dive into the Laptop-Jazz Vortex

Source: All About Jazz @ Spinner
January 31, 2010

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 ...

Continue Reading

POW! Darius Jones

Source: Inverted Garden by Eric Benson
January 31, 2010

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 ...

Continue Reading

Buddy de Franco + Sonny Clark, PT 2

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers
January 30, 2010

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 ...

Continue Reading

19th-Century Concept, with a Few Upgrades

Source: Michael Ricci
January 30, 2010

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, ...

Continue Reading

Giant Steps: The Survival of a Great Jazz Pianist

Source: Michael Ricci
January 30, 2010

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 ...

Continue Reading