In April, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation announced the recipients of its 2014 Performing Artist Awards, including 13 jazz and improvising musicians, who will receive at least $1.7 million in unrestricted grants in total.

The awards were given in two tiers. Six jazz musicians were given Doris Duke Artist Awards, worth an unrestricted grant of $225,000 over a 3-5 year period, with the potential to earn an additional $50,000. They include alto saxophonist Oliver Lake, alto saxophonist Steve Lehman, multiple woodwind player Roscoe Mitchell, harpist Zeena Parkins, pianist Craig Taborn and pianist Randy Weston.

Seven jazz musicians were given Doris Duke Impact Awards, worth an unrestricted grant of $60,000 over 2-3 years plus the potential of an extra $20,000. They include pianist Muhal Richard Abrams, trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, alto saxophonist Steve Coleman, guitarist Ben Monder, pianist Aruán Ortiz, alto saxophonist Matana Roberts and vocalist Jen Shyu. Continue reading →

Last weekend, at a sold-out, star-studded gala concert in Hollywood, Pharrell Williams and Herbie Hancock remixed Williams’ hit “Happy,” Kevin Spacey served up a compelling Frank Sinatra imitation singing “Fly Me To The Moon” and former President Bill Clinton offered a heartfelt reminiscence about his early days as a John Coltrane wannabe. (“Sometimes frustrated jazz musicians end up in another line of work and it ends up pretty good,” he joked.) The opener was a jazz concert: Three virtuosic young trumpet players — Adam O’Farrill, Billy Buss and Marquis Hill — deftly negotiated standards.

It was the final round of the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition, the annual showcase for the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz and the highest-profile event of its kind. This year’s competition took place in Los Angeles for the first time in six years, though it’s only the latest of the Monk Institute’s endeavors to put down roots here. The Institute’s other flagship program, a select graduate school called the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance, came to UCLA in 2012, after having been housed across town at USC from 1999 to 2007. It also enjoys a close relationship with the Los Angeles Unified School District, where a number of middle- and high-school jazz education programs have operated for nearly 20 years.

On the same day I committed to doctoral study in the UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology, the Institute announced it would move to UCLA. Since arriving in the fall of 2011, I’ve watched the performance program quickly weave itself into the fabric of the recently formed Herb Alpert School of Music at UCLA. Its first cohort of master’s degree students graduated this past June. Continue reading →

Comparisons have always helped me appreciate jazz. An artist plays a tune fast; another does it as a ballad. A trumpeter finishes his solo, and a saxophonist takes that closing phrase and morphs it in a different direction. A musician revisits a composition years later with a new arrangement and ensemble. Aligned side by side, you get a good sense of why jazz is a music of individual style, and of gradual accretion, and of friendly “Oh, yeah, watch this” motivation.

I got that feeling recently listening to a recent duet album from the late pianists Tommy Flanagan and Jaki Byard. In 1982, they played a fondly remembered San Francisco club called the Keystone Korner as a duo: two guys, two pianos. It’s recently been released as The Magic of 2, and from the opening song, comparison is the name of the game. Here’s their take on Charlie Parker’s “Scrapple From the Apple”:

Tommy Flanagan can be heard stating the melody and taking the first solo. At 3:38, you hear applause as Flanagan wraps his solo and Jaki Byard gets his time to shine. A slightly chaotic closing section leads to a final melody statement from Byard. Continue reading →

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 →

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 →

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 →