June 13th, 2008
Recommended Reading: June 13, 2008
Okay, this “catching up” thing is not working… I’m still two weeks behind on my online reading list! Guess it’s time to start taking items off the top of the pile rather than the bottom.
Here’s another batch of articles and blog posts worthy of your attention…
RETURN OF THE JAZZ SHOWCASE
There’s lots of coverage out there regarding the re-opening of Joe Segal’s Jazz Showcase in Chicago, which has moved to Dearborn Station after the previous Grand Avenue location was killed by a massive rent hike in 2006. Never having been to Chicago myself, I have no idea where those places are. But even I know how essential the Showcase has been to Chicago’s vibrant jazz scene (it’s existed in one form or another, one place or another, for about 60 years), so I’m happy to hear they’re up and running again.
- “Joe Segal’s Jazz Showcase Lives Again” by Michael Jackson (Chicago Sun-Times, June 13)
- “Jazz Showcase Opens Tonight” by Micah Maidenberg (Chicago Journal, June 12)
- “New Jazz Showcase Set to Open” by Howard Reich (Chicago Tribune, June 8)
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VISION FESTIVAL XIII
Also getting a lot of ink right now is the Vision Festival, New York’s annual celebration of avant-garde jazz and other creative music.
- Review: Kidd Jordan by Nate Chinen (New York Times, June 13)
- Howard Mandel enthuses over Vision and other festivals (Jazz Beyond Jazz blog, June 13)
- Festival profile by Nate Chinen (New York Times, June 6)
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QUICK HITS
The other day I linked to a profile of bassist/vocalist Esperanza Spalding. Here’s another one, by Paul de Barros, whose feelings echo my own (Seattle Times, June 13). Seriously, check her out.
Jazz Festivals a Go-Go:
- “Playboy Jazz Fest has its 30th edition” (Associated Press, June 13)
- Ben Ratliff looks at the evolving JVC Jazz Festival New York (New York Times, June 13)
- James Hale asks, “What Makes a Festival Festive?” (Jazz Chronicles blog, June 12)
“No Cover, No Minimum” - June 13, 2008
Here’s the playlist for this morning’s installment of “No Cover, No Minimum,” my weekly radio program on KZSU-FM.
It’s Friday the 13th of course, so as I was driving down to the station this morning I decided to drop the usual format and rename the show “Bad Luck and Trouble.” There was a lot of frantic digging through the library, and in the end the show wound up being about 90% blues. If I’d had more time to think about it, I would have put together a superstition set, mixed in more genres, maybe thrown in some voodoo or witchcraft songs. But I had a blast, and that’s what matters.
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HOUR #1 (0600 - 0700)
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Thelonious Monk & Sonny Rollins - “Friday The 13th” - Thelonious Monk/Sonny Rollins (Prestige)
Ray Charles - “If It Wasn’t for Bad Luck” - Genius & Soul, Vol. 4 (Rhino)
Albert King - “Bad Luck” - Funky London (Stax)
Monti Amundson - “I See Trouble” - I See Trouble (Beatville)
R.L. Burnside - “Bad Luck and Trouble” - Mississippi Hill Country Blues (Fat Possum)
Sunnyland Slim - “Unlucky One” - Sunnyland Train (Evidence)
Carey & Lurrie Bell - “Trouble in My Way” - Second Nature (Alligator)
Clarence “Tom” Ashley - “Short Life of Trouble” - Greenback Dollar (County Records)
Byron Berline & John Hickman - “Double Trouble” - Double Trouble (Sugar Hill)
Border Radio - “Unlucky Love” - Americana Brand (Border Radio)
R. Crumb & The Cheap Suit Serenaders - “Mysterious Mose” - Chasin’ Rainbows (Shanachie/Yazoo)
Ando Drom - “I Got Into Trouble” - Gypsy Life on the Road (North Pacific)
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HOUR #2 (0700 - 0800)
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Taj Mahal - “Having a Real Bad Day” - Señor Blues (Private Music)
Bobby “Blue” Bland - “I Woke Up Screaming” - The Anthology (MCA)
Otis Rush - “Mean Old World” - All Your Love I Miss Loving (Delmark)
A.C. Reed - “Hard Times” - I’m in the Wrong Bussiness (Alligator)
Floyd Dixon & Mari Jones - “Unlucky Girl” - Floyd Dixon: Complete Aladdin Recordings (Capitol)
James Cotton - “Call It Stormy Monday” - Mighty Long Time (Antone’s)
Big Maybelle - “Oh Lord, What Are You Doing to Me” - Maybelle Sings the Blues (Charly)
Thomas Mapfumo - “Disaster” - Chimurenga Explosion (Anonym)
Aphrodesia - “Trouble” - Frontlines (Cyberset)
Tommy Flanagan - “Friday the 13th” - Something Borrowed, Something Blue (Galaxy)
Lester Bowie - “Doom?” - The Great Pretender (ECM)
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HOUR #3 (0800 - 0900)
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Calvin Owens - “Best Worst Day” - I Ain’t Gonna Be Yo’ Dog No Mo’ (Sawdust Alley)
Big Joe & the Dynaflows - “Bad Luck Blues” I’m Still Swingin’
(Severn)
Carter Brothers - “Sucker of Circumstances” - Essential Carter Brothers (Fuel 2000)
Albert King - “Born Under a Bad Sign” - Born Under a Bad Sign (Stax)
Stevie Ray Vaughan - “Texas Flood” - Martin Scorsese Presents... (Columbia)
Lurrie Bell - “Earthquake And Hurricane” - Let’s Talk About Love (Aria B.G.)
Magic Slim - “Black Tornado” - The Essential... (Blind Pig)
Dr. John - “Right Place Wrong Time” - Anthology (Rhino)
Phillip Walker - “Bad Luck” Working Girl Blues (Black Top)
Willie Mabon - “Why Did It Happen to Me” - Cold Chilly Woman (Black & Blue)
Big Maceo - “Tuff Luck Blues” - The Best of Big Maceo (Arhoolie)
Melvin Taylor - “Another Bad Day” - Bang that Bell (Evidence)
Buddy Guy - “Trouble Don’t Last” - Damn Right, I’ve Got the Blues (Silvertone)
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No show next week, as KZSU will be in the middle of a 24-hour electronica marathon. But I’ll be back on the air June 27th, hopefully with an interview around the Stanford Jazz Festival.
June 12th, 2008
FOX Does It Again…
How much longer are we going to let FOX News get away with their constant “slips” regarding Barack Obama? After several well-publicized incidents earlier in the campaign in which the network “inadvertently” confused Obama’s name with that of a certain terrorist leader, the past few days have seen a flurry of inappropriate jokes and jabs.
Yesterday, a FOX News “chyron” (those are the little headlines that pop up on the screen while a story is being discussed) about Michelle Obama read: “Outraged Liberals: Stop Picking on Obama’s Baby Mama!” As the New York Times points out, the African-American slang term “baby mama” is defined as “the mother of a man’s child, who is not his wife nor (in most cases) his current or exclusive partner.” That’s a slick one, managing to smear Obama, his wife and children and “liberals” all at the same time, while also highlighting Obama’s race and carrying just the right whiff of minstrel-show buffoonery… all in eight words! It’s quite impressive, in a sick sort of way.
Six months ago, I might have chalked this up to harmless ignorance in the copy room. But it’s becoming a familiar story. The Times blog entry continues:
Earlier this week, the Fox News anchor E.D. Hill had apologized for raising the possibility that the Obamas affectionate fist bump during the senator’s victory rally in St. Paul on June 3 was “a terrorist fist jab.” Two weeks prior, the Fox News analyst Liz Trotta said she regretted making a joke about a possible assassination of Mr. Obama.
Her mea culpa followed that of former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas a week earlier after he made a similar crack at a gathering of the National Rifle Association.
In other news, Fox News Channel announced today that it was hiring Mr. Huckabee as a contributor.
It is becoming increasingly obvious that these supposedly isolated incidents are part of a pattern, a subliminal campaign of fear-mongering and rabble-rousing meant to make Obama look too clownish, too scary, and, yes, too black to be President. I’d say that FOX should be ashamed of itself for engaging in such behavior, but they’re well beyond shame at this point.
Graphic Content: June 12, 2008
Treats for the eyes from around the web…
NIGHTHAWKS (AND OTHERS) AT THE DINER
tersmeditasyon.com | via DO
We all know the scene: it’s midnight and the city streets are empty. But light beams from a lonely diner, as a white-coated soda jerk pours coffee for his three insomniac customers. One one side of the angled counter are the lean, hawklike man and his girlfriend, two weary people who have seen the world and learned to live with it. And on the other side of the counter, his back to us, sits the solitary man in the suit. It’s one of those indelible images we all recognize even if the title ("Nighthawks") or the artist (Edward Hopper, 1882-1967) are obscure to us.
And where there’s an icon, there are imitations. In the case of “Nighthawks” there are dozens of them, some wry send-ups, others cheap knockoffs. The Ters Meditasyon blog has assembled a whole bunch, all of which are guaranteed to make you laugh, do a double-take, or just scratch your head.
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LOUIS ARMSTRONG’S COLLAGE ART
theparisreview.org | via DO
I’d heard stories of Louis Armstrong’s vast collection of reel-to-reel audio tapes, which he would use to create durable copies of his favorite music for travel and archiving purposes. What I didn’t know was that Stachmo would turn the tape boxes into canvases for collage art. The Paris Review has a sampling in their Spring 2008 issue, and a book about Louis’s visual art is in the works. Check it out…
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QUICK HITS
- Design by Humans offers outstanding t-shirts
- Linzie Hunter has some awesome sketchbooks
- Illustrator Glen Mullaly has a monster latin-jazz combo (and more!)
June 11th, 2008
Recommended Reading: June 11, 2008
Still cleaning up my backlog of unread online articles, here’s some more stuff I should have told you about last week…
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THE LIBRARY IN THE NEW AGE
nybooks.com—May 27, 2008
Writing in the New York Review of Books, Robert Darnton looks at the Internet and what it means to the future of information: what is to become of the research library when the World Wide Web so famously makes information instantly accessible—and more prone than ever to becoming misinformation? Drawing on examples ranging from his own experience as a cub reporter in the 1950s to the works of Shakespeare and Voltaire, Darnton makes a persuasive argument that information is neither spiraling into instability nor becoming less reliable—because it was never stable or reliable to begin with. Rather, the printed word has always and inevitably been subject to the vicissitudes of interpretation, error, or overt manipulation. Continuing to buck the treds of popular opinion, Darnton then goes on to outine the eight reasons he believes Google and its ilk are making the research library more important than ever.
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WHO KILLED JAZZ AND WHEN?
jazzwax.com—May 30, 2008
Why, in the middle of the 20th century, did jazz suddenly cease to be mainstream music in the United States? Was it the rise of rock & roll, the shift of jazz from entertainment to art music, or something else entirely? Marc Myers pondered these questions on his JazzWax blog a couple of weeks ago, moving the focus from Elvis and the Beatles to an earlier stage, when jump blues and R&B began tearing up the scene in the late 1940s, and arguing that jazz musicians themselves bore much of the responsibility for the fall. As you might expect, the comments on this one are as good as the article.
Today, Myers follows up that post with a broader view, reassessing some of his earlier comments in the context of technological, demographic and cultural shifts. Again, be sure to read the comments.
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BRUBECK AND THE BLACK HAWK
artsjournal.com/rifftides—May 29, 2008
I often regret that I came on the scene too late to experience some of the legendary jazz haunts, like San Francisco’s famed Black Hawk nightclub. Drummer Shelly Manne recorded a series of outstanding sets at the Black Hawk in the late 1950s, and the club was the setting for classic albums by Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Mongo Santamaria soon afterwards.
You can catch a glimpse of the club in this cool YouTube clip of the Dave Brubeck Quartet, filmed for a failed television pilot in 1958 and hosted by Mort Sahl. Introducing the clip on his Rifftides blog, journalist Doug Ramsey waxes nostalgic about the room and provides some nice context.
Read the article »
Watch the video »
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QUICK HITS
- Ben Ratliff reviews Aaron Parks at Smalls (New York Times, May 30)
- A labor of love: producing a Jack Sheldon documentary (Los Angeles Times, May 30)
- Robert Ryan tours Paris for jazz lovers (The Sunday Times, June 1)
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