NEW RECORD OF THE YEAR:
Winner: Carla Bley, Appearing Nightly.
My Vote: Bill Frisell & Jim Hall, Hemispheres. This guitar-duet recording is a masterpiece, the best thing either player has made in years, and that’s something. I liked Bley’s album a lot; I’d put it in third place, after the Frisell-Hall and Rudresh Mahanthappa’s head-turning,…
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The Jazz Journalists’ Association held its annual awards bash this week, honoring musicians and their work for the period from March 2008 to March 2009. Here’s who won in each of the major categories, followed by who got my vote and why.
I woke up this morning with a couple of sweet lines playing themselves over and over in my mind. The doctors and scientists call this phenomenon an earworm, which is an entirely unpleasant term. Isn't it? I mean, I would never want an earworm, but I don't at all mind the sound of pretty words running through my head.
Come on, everybody, sing it with me now:
Don't know why I have to work
Don't know why I can't play
We can sing just those two lines over and over again, and be perfectly fulfilled, or we can try to add a couple more lines to it:
Turn me…
Seems to me most musicheads always have a reserve of bands, solo artists, string quartets, jazz soloists that they know but haven’t really seen or connected with. You know `em but you don’t.
Loudon Wainwright III has for years been that for me, but that’s all changed. Yeah, I know his hit, his nightmare come true that he has to sing every time he plays, “Dead Skunk,” but it was always clear that that tune was an anomaly, the unlikely hit that became the bane of his existence. This Wednesday at Madison Square Park in Manhattan I got a chance to see Loudon do his thing and it was…
Trumpeter Dave Douglas’ new album, Spirit Moves, featuring his Brass Ecstasy quintet, is a rouser: hot, cool, raucous, pensive, sometimes all at once, and always a lot of fun. The band’s name is a play on the late Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy, and they share a similar hard-blowing vibe—as well as two of the players (Luis Bonilla on trombone and Vincent Chancey on French horn)—but where Bowie used the band to riff on the pop tunes of the day (long before The Bad Plus), Douglas’ sources are mainly original tunes with a zesty swing and a dash of his trademark Mediterranean melancholy.
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What’s the point of having a blog if I can’t occasionally indulge in self-promotion? So if you’ll forgive my blatancy for a moment, today marks the official pub date of my new book, 1959: The Year Everything Changed. Unlike my last book, which was entirely about foreign policy, this one actually might be of some interest to the readers of this space, because it covers not just politics but also culture, society, science, sex—as the title suggests, everything. More to the point, there are three chapters (out of 25) that deal explicitly with jazz. (Key jazz albums of 1959 included Miles Davis’…
A couple of months ago, I heard an interesting segment on NPR about Sam Hillmer's Representing NYC project. Hillmer, a NYC school teacher, partners his students with indie-rock musicians to create hip-hop albums. The children are given an opportunity to express themselves and gain real experience in the art of commerce, while the musicians get to contribute to the working-class communities they've recently moved into.
Awesome, right? There's more.
Released by True Panther, the first Representing NYC album is Da' Brats From Da' Ville and comes from a group of young…
Here in the office, I am (like most jerks in the corporate world) constantly juggling several tasks at once. Sometimes these tasks seem to have absolutely nothing to do with one another, and nothing to do with the making of a magazine. So it goes. To keep everything from crashing down at my nervous, trembling feet, I scribble little reminders on yellow Post-it notes and stick them to everything around me: Post-it notes on my computer screen, Post-it notes on my telephone, Post-it notes on my calendar, Post-it notes on my stapler, etc.
As time passes, I'm sure to revisit my notes…
There has been a lot of Leonard Cohen talk going around the office this week. You will find out why when you receive your September issue of Stereophile. You will enjoy it, too, I am certain.
For now, however, there is this:
There has been a lot of Leonard Cohen talk going around the office this week. You will find out why when you receive your September issue of Stereophile. You will enjoy it, too, I am certain.
For now, however, there is this:
Back in February 2008, senior contributing editor John Marks decided to hold a competition.
What this competition is about is finding five songs from what I will loosely call the Rock Era (written anywhere, but only since 1954) that, in craftsmanship, musicality, intelligence, and emotional impact, can give the lieder and chanson traditions a run for their money.
Fun, right? Several of our readers came up with excellent lists, but one winning list that I found especially impressive came from Sarah Witkowski.
My name is Sarah Witkowski. When I read about…