The JJA’s eyeJAZZ Training program held its first online webinar on March 17, welcoming 33 “official” trainees and countless more participants to a series of interactive sessions about video shooting, editing, distribution and journalistic issues related to the production of brief, news, lo-tech but  strong concept videos for public consumption.

The two-hour webinar, in which instructors Bret Primack, Floyd Webb,… [read more]

Avant-gardist to rockers, musicians have answered the disaster in Japan resulting from tsunami, earthquake and nuclear reactor failures by establishing fundraiser benefits and spirit-raising video projects. New York-based saxophonist/composer John Zorn, long fascinated with Japanese culture, has quickly organized all-star, genre-crossing  concerts at Miller Theater on March 27, Abrons Arts Center on April 8, and the Japan Society on April… [read more]

The Newport Jazz Festival, along with the Newport Folk Festival, will from now on be produced under the rubric of the Newport Festivals Foundation, Inc., a new 501(c)(3) organization. George Wein and his staff will remain in place as the festival producers.

After being held in 2010 as the CareFusion Newport Jazz Festival, the Newport organization is returning to its… [read more]

Mark your calendars! The Jazz Journalists Association has announced a date for its 2011 Jazz Awards gala gathering: Saturday, June 11, again at City Winery, 155 Varick Street in Manhattan.

The gala will run from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., an hour longer than the JJA’s previous awards events, to allow more time for presentations of the honors and musical… [read more]

New analysis of  National Endowment for the Arts data on American participation in the arts, from Curt Hopkins of ReadWriteWeb, has been posted at NYTimes.com. The JJA invites further comment at our Discussion Forum.

“A new National Endowment of the Arts study has looked back into the data from the 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. Expanding the definition from… [read more]

National Medals of Arts and Humanities were conferred by Barack Obama on Sonny Rollins, Quincy Jones, Jacques Barzun, Philip Roth and 16 other American luminaries — the President’s remarks are inspiring (the House of Representatives’ budget cuts support for Arts to the bone).

I forgot what prompted me to send for a sample issue of Cadence, circa 1988, but once I did, I was hooked. Printed on plain stock paper, the magazine was filled with numerous reviews of CDs and videos. It included Bob Rusch’s blunt, sardonic columns about the music business, a detailed interview or two and until recent years, a vast… [read more]

Cadence magazine, a periodical edited and published by Bob Rusch of North Country Distributors in Redwood Landing, New York, since 1976, announced cessation of publication in a statement accompanying the Winter 2010 issue. The handbook-sized magazine put out “just under 400 editions,” according to Rusch, starting as a monthly and going quarterly in 2007. He imagined a forthcoming final edition… [read more]

The National Endowment for the Arts has announced plans to end its 30-year-old Jazz Masters program. See blog posts by JJA President Howard Mandel here and here.

Will this negatively affect jazz or individual jazz communities in the U.S. or elsewhere? As detailed in an email to the JJA membership from Howard earlier this week, our organization can play a… [read more]

Jazz really is everywhere, as demonstrated by the 186 would-be jazz videographers from around the U.S. — and the world — who applied to the eyeJAZZ Training Program. Applicants range widely in age, experience, musical interests,  background and, especially, location.

This map shows the distribution of applicants (zoom in to view down to local level.) While there are concentrations of applicants from… [read more]