Jazzhouse Diaries

Lee Konitz, recipient of the JJA’s 2009 Lifetime Achievement in Jazz Award wrote on July 2:

I want to thank you and your Jazz Journalists Colleagues for your acknowledgment of my life’s work. A great honor, to be sure.

My really greatest achievement is still being around to say thanks!! I’m playing more than ever — the travel is difficult (for everyone) but that’s what we’re paid for, after all.

I intend to continue playing nice, spontaneous variations on nice songs as long as possible. So, many heartfelt thanks.
Love, Lee

Roswell Rudd, named Trombonist of the Year by the JJA, wrote on June 26:

The special folks who have been able to experience
music performance and write about it in such a way that it continues the sound
(from sublingual to lingual)
I’ve always admired this

And you support us in so many ways

The annual awards get together is just one other

It’s great to see yourself and others who are skilled this way

You’re players too!
Many thanks for your work

Good health and happy landings

Roswell Rudd

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The Festival International de Jazz de Montreal (FIJM) celebrated year 30.  Thanks to its efficient publicity department you already know that.  My personal “handler” on the international press desk was the multinational Carola Duran who instinctively knew how to calm our consternation when we asked for tickets to long sold-out indoor events.

Let’s begin with the spanking new physical plant.  The new pressroom is in a Canadian government gifted building just off the Festival grounds (Place des Arts).  It is spacious and welcoming with a bar serving beer, wine, water, both flat and gaseous, and a new pleasant wrinkle: an espresso machine for coffee, latte and cappuccino, all gratuit.  One could spend most of one’s time hanging out speaking with fellow fourth estaters you haven’t seen in a year(s) or perhaps ever.  I was there over our Independence Day weekend (July 2-6) –FIJM ran from June 30-July 12– when the rain came and went not daily, but hourly. No exaggeration that.

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copyright © 2009 Lyn Horton

Response to the Vision Festival, held in NYC for the past fourteen years, resists prosaic declarations and superlatives. Rather the Festival inspires poetry because the senses are stimulated beyond simple sentences; it is a cultural event that includes visual art, dance and music. In the words of William Parker: “There is nothing not to enjoy.”

The 2009 Festival was held in two venues: the Abrons Art Center on Grand Street and the Angel Orensanz Foundation on Norfolk.

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Weasel Walter/Mary Halvorson/Peter Evans
Les Instants Chavirés, Montreuil, France – May 6, 2009

Drummer Weasel Walter has a knack for organizing extended European tours, a feat that is getting even more remarkable in those challenging days. Among the various projects he presented during his latest visit to the old continent was the trio he has formed with guitarist Mary Halvorson and trumpeter Peter Evans. Their six-day stint took them to Germany, Austria, and Hungary, but their first stop was at Les Instants Chavirés in Montreuil, a subway stop away from the Paris city limits, where they ended up opening for the No Neck Blues Band.

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originally published at AllAboutJazz.com

Photo credit: Lyn Horton

During one of the most tempestuous winters in memory, the twentieth season of the Magic Triangle Series at UMass Amherst began with the highly energetic performance of the Kidd Jordan Trio: Kidd Jordan on tenor, William Parker on upright bass and flute, Hamid Drake on drums, percussion and frame drum.

The producer of the series, Glenn Siegel, announced the players and prepared the audience to expect one set. After rousing applause, the players came to the stage from behind the back wall. A hush blanketed the hall. With his left arm hugging the neck of the bass to steady it, Parker meanwhile applied resin to his bow. Drake settled on his stool in back of his drumset and adjusted his array of drumsticks. Moistening the reed in his mouthpiece by inserting it in his mouth several times, Jordan readied himself to play his glistening silver tenor saxophone.

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Published March 8, 2009 at AllAboutJazz.com:

Sitting at the piano before playing it is somewhat like sitting at a drawing table in front of a blank piece of paper before drawing on it. The keyboard is like the piece of paper. Until a pianist touches the keyboard (or not, i.e. John Cage, 4’33,”1952) or the artist makes a mark (or seems to not, i.e. Robert Rauschenberg, ”White Paintings,” 1951), nothing happens: the emptiness is brimming with potential (which implies “substance” to Cage because Cage was exploring the meaning of silence as itself and Rauschenberg was reacting to the overdone-ness of Abstract Expressionist Painting).

The pianist, like the visual artist, is an individual interpreter of the piano. Through this interpretation, how the pianist plays the instrument and subsequently develops a language using it evolves. The instrument becomes the medium of expression, or communication, as well as a participant in the conversation between instrument and musician. The material with which to communicate through piano is, in turn, drawn from the musician’s life-experience.

For the first three weeks in February, a consortium of contributors brings the Series “A World of Piano” to the Northampton (MA) Center for the Arts. This year, three pianists, each of whom might be said to travel under a popular audience radar, performed: Curtis Clark, Connie Cruthers and Joe Bonner.

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Exploring the World of Piano

A profile of our former Jazz Notes editor, at ease not retirement.

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by Mark C. Gridley

first published October, 2008, in College Music Symposium,
vol. 47, 139-155. Copyright 2008 by College Music Society.

This article deals with two misunderstandings that intertwine to confuse students, teachers, and commentators of jazz history if they study American history at the same time that they study the music itself. The first misunderstanding is that during the 1960s African Americans striving for their political freedoms also transferred those strivings to include the striving for musical approaches (later termed “free jazz”) in which freedoms were sought from adherence to fixed progressions of accompaniment chords and meter. The second misunderstanding is that angry sounding music is a direct result of avant-garde musicians using jazz as a tool of personal protest toward social injustices.

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Free Suite and Six Encores

by Jill McManus

In his Carnegie Hall solo concert on Thursday, January 29, pianist Keith Jarrett freely improvised pieces that showed his mastery of jazz, classical, contemporary, gospel and other styles, keeping the sold-out house silent and engrossed. At the 10-foot unamplified Steinway, dressed in black with a gold vest, he sometimes slouched, sometimes stood in a crouch stamping the beat, and occasionally chanted. His rapport with the audience seemed built-in, and it deepened as the night progressed.

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