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Then As Now: The Music Is To Die For
by Richard J Salvucci
Hey, it's September 1, 1939 and at the top of the charts is Glenn Miller and His Orchestra with the, whoops, singularly inappropriate tune “In the Mood." In the mood for what? Invading Poland? Because that was “officially" the start of World War II in Europe. In the Far East, things had been going on considerably ...
Fantasy Box Set League
by Patrick Burnette
Box sets are back, baby! Some of us old timers thought they might be gone for good after the CD crash (remember when Joe Henderson's The Milestone Years was going for twenty-bucks at your local mall?) But companies have realized that for those happy few who continue collecting “physical media," the big-ole stack of music still ...
My Summer with Sonny
by Patrick Burnette
Raise your hands, jazz fans, if you've been thinking about jazz legend Sonny Rollins during the last few months. After all, the great man is still with us at age 94. Reaching such an age is an accomplishment for anybody, but a miraculous feat for an African-American jazz musician born in the early decades of the ...
Fusion: What's in a Name?
by Mike Brannon
This article was first published on All About Jazz in November 2000. When I was just starting out, playing guitar in bands as a kid, it was the Blues of Muddy Waters, Fred McDowell, Howlin' Wolf and then the Stones, Hendrix, Cream, Johnny Winter, Kinks, Clapton, The Who, Zepplin etc. A natural progression.
Give Your Regards to Broadway—and Hollywood
by Con Chapman
Those who recognized the complexity and beauty of jazz early on--such as twentieth century French critic Hugues Panassié--rightly characterized it as American's unacknowledged classical music. Their sentiment came to fruition in the wrong way by the end of the century when the genre had fallen from its peak to its current lowly status, tied for last ...
A Tale of Two Jazz Humbugs
by Con Chapman
"Humbug" is a little word of great utility that has unfortunately passed out of general usage. It means, according to Webster's Dictionary, “a person who does not live up to his claims; impostor." While it carries the connotation of deception or trickery, it was more generally applied to what we would today call--with less compactness--a pious ...
The Rat Pack vs. the Kids in the Kitchen: Are Those Our Only Choices?
by Con Chapman
It was a more important anniversary than most so we decided to splurge on a local restaurant that always gives me buyer's remorse when I get the check. My wife and I are both getting up in years and we eat out at what she used to jokingly refer to as “blue hair hours," ...
Jazz Inside And Out: Select Posts from 2013-2015
by John Goodman
Here's a selection of posts from my now-discontinued blog, Jazz Inside and Out. I started writing it in summer 2013 and persisted for about six years. As 2016 rolled around, like many others I got quite taken over by politics, and my posts reflected that. Readership went up, jazz took a sabbatical. Politics and ...
Moers Provides a Festival Blueprint for the Future
by Phillip Woolever
Germany's Moers Festival has a long-standing reputation for expanding the boundaries of top-quality musical formats. Performance scope and content is always unique, but last year's 2020 edition provided even more noteworthy distinction than usual. That truly exceptional pandemic production featured typically abundant instrumental, vocal and electronics highlights but more important, even at a greatly reduced scale, ...
Zappa and the burning strings
by Mick Raubenheimer
Zappa. A glimpse. The composition was entering its fifth mood, a diabolical, gleeful, lurching rhythm, led by deep-plowed violin. The song was “Revised Music for Violin and Low Budget Orchestra," it was written for Jean-Luc Ponty by Frank Zappa. A new instrument dawned into my framework as that composition wheezed and moaned and ranted ...
