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Ahmad Jamal's Identity Crisis
by Fradley Garner
Ahmad Jamal's Identity CrisisAhmad Jamal aterrorist? Surely not the renowned American pianist who's given hundreds of concerts over the last half century. So it was puzzling why the $10,000 that the Festival da Jazz in Moritz, Switzerland ordered paid to Jamal in advance of his July 16 appearance, was promptly frozen by U.S. authorities. ...
Online Jazz Bookshop Thrives in Ontario Hills
by Fradley Garner
Would you pay $8,750 for a used but pampered hardcover copy of the classic Lady Sings the Blues, autographed by Billie Holiday? If you were a jazz bibliophile with deep pockets, and the book was a declared first edition, “boldly and handsomely SIGNED and inscribed at the first blank page"-- and, according to ...
A Chorale-a-Day Keeps the Blues Away
by Fradley Garner
To celebrate his 31st birthday, the New York-based, Canadian composer and soprano saxophonist Rob Mosher gave himself a challenge: writing 31 Bach-style chorales in 31 days. He started October 20, and at press time he was on target. “I'm a big fan of Duke Ellington's 'I don't need time, I need a deadline' approach," quotes Mosher. ...
October 2010
by Fradley Garner
Tenants of Tin Pan Alley are showing ever more pride in their habitat. Apartment residents and ground floor shops occupy the row of five historic brownstones on West 28th Street, Manhattan, where America's enormous sheet music industry took root in the 1850s. Here the careers of galleon figures Irving Berlin, W.C. Handy, George Gershwin and Ira ...
August 2010
by Fradley Garner
Two East Coast Big Bands specialize in music of the 1920s and '30s. Vince Giordano and His Nighthawks share the pre-Swing era with Long Island trombonist Ray Osnato and his South Shore Syncopators, a 10-piece band with five singers whose performances mimic a 1930s radio show, complete with honey-tongued announcer. Like Giordano, Osnato started young, collecting ...
Join #jazzlives and Show 'em!
by Fradley Garner
WITH THE JAZZ PUBLIC “SHRINKING," a new group of activists formed a “#jazzlives" campaign on Twitter to buck the trend. Surveys by the National Endowment for the Arts picture jazz being viewed by ever more Americans as a high-culture art form, like classical music. Fewer are hearing it live than at any time since the late ...
First Lady Knows "Salt Peanuts!"
by Fradley Garner
JAZZ FOUND A PLACE in more than the president's BlackBerry when the first lady invited some 150 young music high school students to the White House this summer for an afternoon workshop led by Wynton Marsalis and four other members of the distinguished trumpeter's musical family. The youngsters were instructed in “American History and Jazz," “Syntax ...
2009 Jazz Masters Awards
by Fradley Garner
The Olympic Games overshadowed all events in recent Chinese history, but don't underplay what's happening on China's big-city jazz scene. Singer Jessica Meider, a 10-year veteran of the Beijing circuit with the ensemble Quattrology, speaks of “amazing growth" in recent years. Meider and several Chinese players are named in the government-controlled, English language China Daily. Western ...
Forest Whitaker as Satchmo
by Fradley Garner
Asia's Queen of Jazz they call Annie Brazil. The singer from Okinawa started at age 6 in stage shows, performed at 12 for American troops in Pamopanga, frontlined a nightclub act at 15, and at 20 landed a bigger contract on the Pacific island. That's when Ms. Brazil caught impresario George Wein's ear; he invited her ...
Cab Calloway Home a New Landmark?
by Fradley Garner
“A bad happening for the jazz community" is how reedsman Dave Liebman described the demise earlier this year of the International Association of Jazz Educators. Why IAJE filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy is still being asked, but part of the problem was the return to Toronto for this year's conference. Attendance was little more than half ...
