Trumpeter Nicholas Payton calls what he does BAM, for black American music, avering that
negative connotations of the “j-word” does the music and the musicians no good. He gathered instrumentalists Gary Bartz, Marcus Strickland, Orrin Evans and Ben Wolfe to a panel in mid January moderated by writer Touré at Birdland in New York City, essentially to support the position… [read more]
“One day with a lot of great bands, mainly original music, a lot of personalities.” — Ernest Stuart
Arnold Jay Smith blogs about the late John Levy, 1913 – 2012 — bassist, manager to jazz greats, NEA Jazz Master.
High school students from the Germantown Central School District on New York State (about 20 miles northeast of Woodstock) had a go at jazz journalism in early December, when four of a class of
about 30 studying Digital Photography and Journalism took up the challenge to write about or post photos of a performance by the Joe Locke Trio at the Athens Cultural Center. Now… [read more]
My friendship with Paul Blair, who died on December 6, began in the early 1980s when we were both living and working in the Washington, D.C., area. Paul was a broadcaster with the Voice of America (VOA), in which capacity he taped hundreds of interviews of jazz, blues, and pop musicians, catching them between sets at clubs or in their hotel… [read more]
The non-profit New York Policy Forum turns to JJA member and WBGO program host Sheila Anderson Jazz at Lincoln Center Dizzy’s Club artistic director Todd Barkan, drummer T.S. Monk and pianist Helen Sung for a discussion of ”Jazz and Democracy in America” on Tuesday, Thursday, Dec. 8 from 4 to 6 pm — with cocktails afterwards. The discussion, to be… [read more]
The 43-year WABC (NYC) television Sunday public affairs program Like It Is broadcast its last on October 16, 2011, three months after producer and host Gil Noble, the 79-year-old jazz fan, pianist and board member of the Jazz Foundation of America, suffered a debilitating stroke. Newly-joined JJA member Angelika Beener writes in her blog Alternate Takes: Broadening the Jazz Perspective that… [read more]
