Rites Of Swing: Jazz And Stravinsky

Posted by kjem

Our friends at Deceptive Cadence, NPR Music’s classical blog, are celebrating the 100th anniversary of The Rite of Spring all this week. You’d be well-advised to wander on over there and check it out.

When I first heard about their plan, I immediately thought about Charlie Parker. Bird had enormous ears, and occasionally they fell on works of modern classical composers like Igor Stravinsky. In fact, he’s been documented quoting passages from The Rite of Spring and other Stravinsky works multiple times.

So I offered to unpack the connection between jazz and the Rite, and in doing so, found deeper links between the Russian-born composer and African-American-born jazz than I had imagined. The full essay is up on Deceptive Cadence now.

I wanted to share one of several little nuggets I couldn’t squeeze into the piece. In 1961, another fleet alto saxophonist, Phil Woods, recorded a gem of an album called Rights Of Swing. It’s a five-part suite for a tightly-arranged octet, and obviously puns on Stravinsky’s radical ballet. Musically speaking, it’s hard to discern much of a connection to the Rite itself, but in the final “Presto” section, he does leave an Easter egg for us. Continue reading →

What Albert Murray Taught Us About Jazz

Posted by kjem

An essayist, cultural theorist, novelist, educator and biographer who died on August 18 at 97, Albert Murray spent more than five decades developing his thesis that America is a culturally miscegenated nation. His contention was that blacks are part white, and vice versa: that both races, in spite of slavery and racism, have borrowed from and created each other. In all of his writing, jazz music — derived from the blues idiom of African-Americans — was the soundtrack at the center of his aesthetic conception.

For the Alabama-bred, Tuskegee Institute-educated, New York-based Murray — and his Tuskegee classmate and aesthetic fellow traveler Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man — jazz was “the embodiment of the American experience, the American spirit, the American ideal,” he is quoted as saying in Jazz: A History of America’s Music, the companion book to the PBS documentary series for which he served as commentator and artistic consultant. It was the creation of a sepia panorama of black, brown and beige people, partially descended from Africa but fully Euro-American in outlook, character and aspiration.

“The omni-Americans are the Americans. My conception makes Americans identify with all their ancestors.” –interview in American Heritage, September 1996

Continue reading →

Rail, Radio And Booze: A Look At Montreal Jazz History

Posted by kjem

Jazz fans may know the Canadian city of Montreal for the Montreal International Jazz Festival, one of the world’s largest. Or maybe they heard that Oscar Peterson, the virtuoso pianist, grew up there. But there’s a fascinating history behind the city’s jazz community which predates either of those two — one that intersects railways, prohibition and the black neighborhood of Little Burgundy.

Last year, the Canadian Broadcasting Company/Radio-Canada recently commissioned a documentary about Montreal jazz history called Burgundy Jazz: Life and Music in Little Burgundy. Only it’s not just on TV, but formatted as a free web series — 14 video episodes of three to five minutes, plus bonus audio, video, music recommendations, photos, a timeline and even an iPhone app for touring the neighborhood itself. It’s fantastically done, digestible in little chunks or all at once, often with a sparkling Oscar Peterson soundtrack. And it tells a neat story about how unique historical incidents made for a jazz scene that lured North America’s best and brightest, whether to visit, to stay, or to emerge from its own ranks. Continue reading →

Rhythm Runs In The Family: Drummers On Their Dads

Posted by kjem

When you read enough about the early lives of jazz musicians, you begin to spot a trend. A lot of artists caught the music bug from their parents.

With instruments and musicians around the house, it’s easy for kids to grow curious about playing. But that’s not nearly the whole story. Sometimes parents are the first teachers. Other times, parental guidance doesn’t fully kick in until much later.

With Father’s Day on the horizon, I recently tracked down five drummers who not only came from musical families but also had fathers who were drummers or percussionists, too. Here’s what Nasheet Waits, Sheila E., Ralph Peterson Jr., Billy Drummond and Kush Abadey had to say about what their dads taught them. Continue reading →

Steve Coleman, Saxophonist And Innovative Composer, Named MacArthur Fellow

Posted by kjem

Composer and alto saxophonist Steve Coleman, 57, has been named one of 21 new recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship, commonly referred to as the “genius grant.” The award is worth a unrestricted stipend of $625,000 over five years, as dispensed by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Though often classified as a jazz artist, Coleman takes a broader search to improvised music. Since the 1980s, he has approached music through the original concept M-Base, which promotes the creation of structures or languages to better express personal experience (the M-Base acronym stands for Macro-Basic Array of Structured Extemporizations). In practice, Coleman has applied the idea to uncommon formal innovation, inspired often by metaphysics, mythology, natural science and travel throughout the African diaspora and Asia.

“If anything, that’s what this music is,” he told NPR Music in 2012. “It’s a lot of different influences, coming from different places — plus, whatever’s coming from inside you, which is the main thing.” Continue reading →