The drummer Marcus Gilmore is coming off a major year in his career. In 2012, DownBeat magazine named him its top Rising Star Drummer in its long-running Critics Poll; pianist Vijay Iyer‘s trio, of which Gilmore is a member, also took the Jazz Album and Jazz Group of the Year categories. Over the last decade, he’s worked with an esteemed roll call of performers including Cassandra Wilson, Nicholas Payton, Kenny Garrett and the legendary pianist Chick Corea, with whom he just recorded a new album. He’s currently in the studio working on a solo project.

Gilmore is 25.

It’s no secret that he’s also the grandson of iconic drummer Roy Haynes, but it’s not something Gilmore wears on his sleeve — at least not in a typical sense. While he says he doesn’t feel any pressure to follow in such enormous footsteps, he does intently advocate for his grandfather’s rightful legacy.

“What people don’t realize, when they talk about people like Roy Haynes as one of the great jazz drummers, is that really he is one of the original drummers creating the language for everybody,” Gilmore told me in a backstage interview, in between sets with Iyer at the Jazz Standard in New York. “But people don’t think about it like that; they think of him as a jazz great. But the thing is really the drum — the trap set — is pretty new, maybe like 100 years. If you’re playing that much drums in 1945, that means you’re one of the pioneers of the instrument.” Continue reading →

If anyone has earned the nickname Pops, it’s Ellis Marsalis.

As jazz’s best-known father figure, the senior Marsalis has four noted musical offspring: Branford, Wynton, Delfeayo and Jason. But if you consider all the musicians he’s taught or mentored, his clan is even more extensive, diverse and influential.

I talked to six musicians who gave us the long view of the Marsalis family tree, and how they were schooled by its patriarch.

Delfeayo Marsalis (trombonist and son): Ellis Marsalis represents the history of American music, from a time when all performers had a profound understanding of the sound of jazz, the blues and swing. No one born after 1955 has the sound I’m speaking of, and we’re not exactly sure why that is. When he plays, it is the sound of truth. That’s a sound we’re all trying to get to. As an educator, he is able to teach students firsthand by example.

Irvin Mayfield (trumpeter): In terms of music education in the city of New Orleans, Ellis Marsalis is omnipotent. I grew up with the Marsalis family, starting with nursery school alongside Jason Marsalis. When I was 10 years of age, Ellis Marsalis became my first jazz teacher. Continue reading →

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 →

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 →