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Soundscan R.I.P.?: Big Champagne Rivals with a New Type of Hit Chart. or Do They?
CEO Garland challenges the Old Guard to the seminal question: is a chart based on electronic metrics more relevant than one based on actual sales? Does a song with 100,000 CDs sold deserve more notice than one with 500,000 streams/downloads, regardless of if they are legal or royalty generating? Last week the data monitoring service Big ...
The Cortex and the Booty
This is Your Brain on MusicThe brass band I play with has been talking about the Asphalt Orchestra. In their they seem to be having a great time, engaging the crowd, playing interesting, offbeat music (apart from New Orleans stuff, arrangements of Zappa, Bjork...). On the other hand, a band-mate saw them on the ...
Tyner-in-Amber Or: Jazz and the Kali Yuga
Hindus break up history into extremely long time spans. We're nearing the culmination of the Kali Yuga, an era of dissolution and breakdown that sets the stage for the next cycle of rebirth.It's always easy to believe you're living in a period of dissolution-it's part of a golden age/nostalgia spiral that's very appealing to ...
Happy Birthday! Jazzwax Turns 3
On August 3, 2007, I started JazzWax on a dare. I vowed not to make the site about me but about the recordings and the artists, keeping myself in the background as much as possible. Rather than e-yammer about what I did each day, I decided to tap into my background as a journalist and historian ...
The Unison. Matt Lavelle.
I'm not an expert on Alice Coltrane and her music,.but I do know that her music has reached out to me in the last few years,and acted as a guide in some way about how to process the relationship of spirit to music.Her music after Trane made the transition fascinates me,and I intend to ...
The Jazz Seduce-O-Meter (PG-17)
Friends, I have seen the error of my ways and apologize for the sarcastic tone of my recent post on the scientific link between sex and jazz. Looking back at my own experience dispassionately, I see there is in fact a clear link between people's sex lives and their musical taste. “Getz-Gilberto" is guaranteed to get ...
Jazz Poetry - "Trane"
"Trane" by Kamau Brathwaite Propped against the crowded barhe pours into the curved and silver hornhis old unhappy longing for a home the dancers twist and turnhe leans and wishes he could burnhis memories to ashes like some old notorious emperorof rome. but no stars blazed across the sky when he was bornno wise ...
Safety in Numbers
The trigger for this was reading that today is Annie Ross' birthday. As far as I'm concerned (and it's a safe bet no one else is), there has never been a greater female 'parts' singer than Annie. Not just parts, but the vocalese solos she sang with Lambert and Hendricks. Fantastic range, intonation and phrasing. I ...
England Swings!
“like a pendulum do," is the Sixties refrain that comes to mind, but I have other evidence to present here. Our UK sojourn so far has offered many charity shops and second-hand bookshops, and a few jazz oases, potential and real. The potential one was spotted in York: unfortunately, in the fashion of used CD shops, ...
All Hail the Jazz Super-Stud
Pity the poor jazz musician. For about 75 years we were branded with a kind of anti-hero cultural status. To live up to that, we coughed up scores of booze-soaked and heroin-riddled deaths. Some-Artie Shaw, Harry James-were forced to march-step through scores of glamorous divorces.After that, the pressure eased off a bit. When people ...
