Results for "AAJ Staff"

The Jazz Session #276: Julian Lage

June 4, 2011

Pandora IPO to Value Company at $1 Billion

June 4, 2011

(UPDATED) Pandora has filed an updated S-1 that shows they will be pricing stock at $7 to $9 per share during its IPO on the The New York Stock Exchange. That puts the total valuation of  Pandora over $1 billion. According to the filing, Pandora hopes to raise about $140 million in the offering. The latest ...

Honey Ear Trio - Steampunk Serenade (2011)

June 4, 2011

By S. Victor Aaron Listening to Allison Miller's superb CD from last year Boom Tic Boom, I appreciated how it covered a lot of ground within advanced modern jazz, helped along by such sympathetic supporting players in this piano jazz trio. But that album still left me wondering where this ace drummer, composer and bandleader was ...

Ben Folds - Speed Graphic (2003)

June 4, 2011

By Tom Johnson Ben Folds opened this EP (Speed Graphic refers to the camera seen on the sleeve) with the Cure's “In Between Days." While staying true to the Cure's sound, he managed to inject an extra little dose of his hopeful optimism into the song: It's just a quality of his soft, youthful voice that ...

What to Expect from a Good Music Publicist

June 4, 2011

There comes a time in every band's career when they should hire a music publicist. We all know that the main aim of every publicity campaign is to generate as much media coverage as possible. But what else should you expect from him or her? It's not all about column inches, after all. Every good publicist ...

AACM | John Szwed on the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians

June 4, 2011

For Ars Nova Workshop's AACM: Great Black Music Festival, we've asked several leading jazz scholars and journalists to engage performers in a series of pre-concert public discussions about the history, present, and future of the AACM. At 6pm on Saturday, June 4 at Philadelphia Art Alliance, Sun Ra and Alan Lomax biographer and Columbia University professor ...

Wow: Wax Revenues Have Grown 455% in Just Five Years...

June 4, 2011

Sure, this is still a small piece of overall recording sales in the US, but we keep seeing astonishing growth data. The latest, sourced from RIAA retail revenue data obtained this week, shows a near-fivefold revenue increase in vinyl over a five-year period. Which, when scaled to size, looks something like this...

Ray Bryant - R.I.P.

June 4, 2011

While the news today has been full of the deaths of Jack “Dr. Death" Kevorkian, 83 (a curiously interesting musician in his own right), and actor James “Matt Dillon" Arness, 88, the great pianist Ray Bryant has also died. His sound—a mix of joyous jazz and grandstanding gospel—was like no other and is evident on many ...

AACM | Great Black Music, 6/4-13

June 3, 2011

Presented in Philadelphia by Ars Nova Workshop from June 4-13, AACM | Great Black Music is a festival of performances and public discussions with scholars and writers celebrating the past and present work of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Founded in Chicago in 1965, the AACM's motto is “Great Black Music, Ancient ...

Eddie Mendenhall Makes a Splash with His "Cosine Meets Tangent"

June 3, 2011

Any jazz ensemble with a lineup of piano-vibes-bass and drums invites com- parisons and gets a sound right off the bat that reverberates with the history of the music. Of course there was the MJQ, the Bobby Hutcherson Blue Notes with that configuration, and a number of others. The instrumentation lends itself to harmonically intricate voicings, ...