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A Different Drummer, Part 3: Pino Basile & Mizuki Wildenhahn
by Karl Ackermann
The Swish Knocker, And More Early on in his career, the late Milford Graves abandoned the snare drum, substituting the resonance of the toms for the snare parts. He believed music of the drum reverberated from within the drummer and the listener without the need for extraneous instrumentation. Tyshawn Sorey's approach to music speaks to contempt ...
A Different Drummer, Part 2: Royal Hartigan
by Karl Ackermann
Drums of Life--Drums of DeathThe ruins of the Anasazi people stand undisturbed in the cliffs between the high mesas and the canyon floors of the southwest. Dating to 2500 B.C., the multi-story adobe pueblos and stone cities were the sites of the ancient indigenous peoples of North America. Archeologists have uncovered an assortment of percussion instruments ...
A Different Drummer, Part 1: Mark Lomax II and Mauricio Takara
by Karl Ackermann
The drum is an instrument of power and presence. It is the heartbeat of music but with uncertain origins. In Africa, China, and Turkey, archeologists have found evidence to suggest that any of those regions may have been the forebearers of the beat, of the definitive expression of freedom. Data concludes that instrumental music is at ...
The Word from Johannesburg, Part II: Brenda Sisane and The Art of Sunday
by Karl Ackermann
Brenda Sisane has been in broadcasting in Johannesburg, South Africa for over twenty-five years while simultaneously heading up her International Relations and Creative Arts public relations firm. Ms. Sisane is also CEO of SPIN Productions and its Non-Profit sister organization, The SPIN Foundation NPC, which both serve the international and domestic arts and music and culture ...
All About Jazz Senior Contributor Karl Ackermann Publishes 'A Map of Jazz: Crossroads of Music and Human Rights'
A Map of Jazz is a history of jazz in parallel with world events. Jazz matured in the era of prohibition with organized crime as its patron. It was homogenized as swing music and found its true Black voice with Bebop and the Civil Rights movement. In spite of systemic racism in the United States, fascism ...
The Word from Johannesburg, Part I: Nduduzo Makhathini
by Karl Ackermann
In 1919, the Pasadena Evening Post said: “the friends of Mr. Whiteman have with much enthusiasm bestowed the title of “King of Jazz" upon him." While Paul Whiteman was heavily criticized for wearing the crown, it was not one that was self-attributed or with which he felt completely comfortable. But Whiteman was a brilliant marketer and ...
The Rebel Festival
by Karl Ackermann
On the morning of July 4, 1960, there were more than a few signs of the mayhem that had taken place the night before in Newport, Rhode Island. Newport's Millionaires Row woke up to broken store windows, overturned vehicles, and storm drains clogged with garbage and beer bottles. One-hundred-eighty-two people, mostly young, New England college students ...
Women in Jazz, Pt. 3: The International Women in Jazz Organization
by Karl Ackermann
In part 1 and part 2 of the Women in Jazz series, we looked at the historical marginalization of women in jazz from Lil Hardin Armstrong and Blanch Calloway in the 1920s to Tia Fuller in 2019. Part 2 focused on several prominent pioneering artists including the all-female International Sweethearts of Rhythm, Marian McPartland, and Melba ...
Jazz in the Time of Pandemic
by Karl Ackermann
The first week of April 2020: images crystalized the daily news reports; a dystopian Times Square; Piazza Navona in Rome, emptied of tourists, Barcelona's Basílica de la Sagrada Família standing like an abstract ruin, makeshift morgues in hospital parking lots. The jazz world is small but still a microcosm of society with interdependencies that run deep. ...
The Archive of Contemporary Music
by Karl Ackermann
In Lower Manhattan, sits a musical gold mine. It's the motherlode of recorded music though the small, brightly colored sign above a grey steel door provides only a cryptic clue. The dusty window display of rare 78 RPM records, broken into erratic pie charts serves as a vestige of the past and a cautionary tale about ...
