Music Industry News

This Fil-AM Has Jazz in His Genes

Source: All About Jazz
July 27, 2008

The year is 2002. The place is Charlie O's, a comfortable, somewhat-upscale jazz club in North Hollywood, Southern California, whose claim to fame is “great music" in the jazz universe. It is Thursday night and a jam session is about to take center stage. Tonight, just like any Thursday night at Charlie O's, several musicians have listed their names and wait for a call to perform and intuitively integrate their sense of rhythm, harmony, and melody without any dress rehearsal. ...

Continue Reading

High Culture Meets Low Culture in a Mass-Media World

Source: Michael Ricci
July 27, 2008

Many stigmas are gone as the lines between highbrow and lowbrow blur. But will a loss of quality be the price?

It was only 50 or so years ago that critics and intellectuals were busy constructing -- and redrawing, and shoring up -- hierarchies about what kinds of culture were good for us and which ones were bad. Literary man Dwight Macdonald wrote a famous essay about “Masscult and Midcult" -- both, he said, were degrading real, traditional High Culture. ...

Continue Reading

Elitism is Not a Dirty Word

Source: Michael Ricci
July 27, 2008

Categorizing 'the best' isn't confined to art; it plays out in sports, cinema, pop music and beyond.

EVERY NOW and then, writers at The Times lose a word. Mainly these are adjectives subject to misuse. Some years ago we were advised to let go of legendary. Similarly, don't expect to see iconic, which has become equally cheapened, in the paper much anymore. The adjectival criminal I'd like to see handed over to the word police is elitist, especially in its ...

Continue Reading

Pop Music Critics Embrace the Mainstream

Source: Michael Ricci
July 27, 2008

SHAMELESSNESS IS not a problem for pop critics. The job used to require ego and a disdain of the establishment. Ego remains but many now embrace the mainstream. Is it good? They all have opinions.

Quite the opposite: It's a daily practice. Invented by rebel newspaper staffers (most notably, Ralph J. Gleason at the San Francisco Chronicle) who stayed out late and never came into the office, codified by freaks and attitudinal New Journalists, the pursuit of passionate ...

Continue Reading

Rolling Stones Switch Labels

Source: Michael Ricci
July 27, 2008

Ending months of speculation in the music industry, the Rolling Stones have left EMI, the record label that has released the group's music since the early 1990s, and signed a long-term recording deal with the Universal Music Group, the company announced on Friday.

The worldwide contract covers three new albums and the rights to release the band's valuable catalog of music recorded since 1971 for about five years, according to people with knowledge of the negotiations who were not authorized ...

Continue Reading

Compatible Quotes: Composing

Source: All About Jazz
July 26, 2008

You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down... some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today--Aaron Copland

Well, American composers are the best composers. At this time in the world, we are where the energy is. We are the most diverse, the most iconoclastic, the most maverick, and the most skillful--David Del Tredici

I don't hate work, composing is ...

Continue Reading

Chamber Music America Awards over $660,000 in Grants to Ensembles, Presenters and Festivals

Source: All About Jazz
July 25, 2008

Support for Community Residencies, New Works, and International Collaborations provided by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, JP Morgan Chase Foundation, Argosy Foundation, and CMA's Endowment Funds (New York, NY) Chamber Music America (CMA) announced today that it will award $664,534 to fund 64 ensemble music projects conducted by artists and presenters throughout the U.S. and in France. Twenty-eight of the grants will support community-based residencies through CMA's Residency Partnership Program, 19 are commissions awarded through the New Works: Creation and ...

Continue Reading

Ah Paris, Beacon of Freedom, City of Jazz

Source: Michael Ricci
July 25, 2008

With all the theater out there, how inspiring it is to be reminded how invigorating an Off Broadway play can be with just two appealing performers, compelling music and a searching, intelligent script. Lenelle Mose, a poet, playwright and performer, has written, composed and stars in “Expatriate," a two-woman production at the Culture Project that delivers on all counts. In the first act the play follows the best friends Claudie (Ms. Mose ) and Alphine (Karla Mosley) from childhood in ...

Continue Reading