More than 200 jazz lovers filed through a night-time image of New Orleans’ Armstrong Park to attend online the Jazz Journalists Association’s JazzBash!, Sunday, September 11, celebrating the JJA’s 27th annual Jazz Awards in a fully interactive, immersive, virtual experience enabled by the innovative platform SyncSpace.live.
the Jazz Journalists Association’s JazzBash!, Sunday, September 11, celebrating the JJA’s 27th annual Jazz Awards in a fully interactive, immersive, virtual experience enabled by the innovative platform SyncSpace.live.
A combination Awards party, live concert, conference with panels and informal schmoozefest, the two-and -a-half-hour Bash! began with Award-winning singers Sheila Jordan, Kurt Elling and Cécile McLorin Salvant. It featured live or pre-recorded acceptance speeches from Jon Batiste, Maria Schneider, Charles Lloyd, Terence Blanchard, Pedrito Martinez, Mary Halvorson, and Ted Gioia, among others. It climaxed with the auction of a stateroom on the Blue Note at Sea 23 Jazz Cruise, a trip-for-two to the Caribbean claimed by Rita Rega, program host on community radio station KBOO, artistic director of the Jazz Society of Oregon-sponsored Cathedral Park Jazz Festival, and the JJA’s 2022 Portland Jazz Hero.
“The event demonstrated how new media can be used to enable real-time, audio-video communications among international participants using multi-space facilities, advanced features and high production values,” said Howard Mandel, president of the JJA and the event’s producer. “Jazz journalism should take cues from jazz itself, evolving with and developing new media possibilities. Our simultaneous activities enabled the JJA to honor artists and heroes, let attendees find their own interests, make new contacts, hear new music and old stories. The online environments – drawn from the Jazz Showcase in Chicago and Sharp 9 Gallery in Durham, NC — were conducive to socializing. Many participants I’ve heard from volunteered that they had fun. The JJA can’t do better than use media for more jazz fun!
Admission was free to JJA members, nominees and winners of its Jazz Awards, and Jazz Heroes, and open to the general public for a $25 charge going to the tax-exempt, 501 (c) 3 JJA. There were logons from Prague, Tel Aviv, Vienna, Warsaw, Canada, Mexico, Norway and throughout the U.S. Attendees moved by computer cursor through seven customized “rooms,” engaged in private or group conversations, observed the flow of jazz celebrities and were treated to stories by jazz elders..
Berklee College of Music’s retiring provost Larry Simpson, toasting “all the nominees” from his home studio transmitted to the JazzBash! ballroom, was met by animated champagne glasses raised across the screen. The singing trio Duchess performed with clarinetist Anat Cohen sitting in — also Yngvil Vattn Guttu’s ensemble from Anchorage, Ernest Khabeer Dawkin’s trio from Chicago, pianist-vocalist Amanda Ekery from El Paso, pianist Deanna Witkowski from Pittsburgh and guitarist Louis Valenzuela’s trio in San Diego.
Terri Lyne Carrington, Nicole Mitchell, Yngvil Vatn Guttu, Jane Ira Bloom, Vijay Iyer, James Brandon Lewis, Melissa Aldana and Johnathan Blake discussed the topics “Where’d My Music Going?”, “Updating the Jazz Canon,” and “Jazz Family Roots” in a room based on Durham, NC’s Sharp 9 Gallery, with moderators Neil Tesser, Greg Bryant and Willard Jenkins, all radio show hosts (same as Awards presenters Linda Yohn and Robin Lloyd; presenter Ron Scott is jazz columnist for the Amsterdam News).
Storyteller Bill Crow held court in a bar-like setting with jazz journalist Bill Milkowski, baritone saxophonist Claire Daly, and DownBeat publisher Frank Alkyer sitting in. Twenty-one performance videos by the likes of Randy Weston, René Marie, Herlin Riley, Elio Villafranca and Organ Monk were available for viewing in a Screening Room, as was a specially prepared exhibition (with curated soundtrack) of “Jazz Images” by Carol Friedman, winner of the JJA’s Lona Foote-Bob Parent Award for Career photography; “Jazz Images” was also displayed in a gallery devoted solely to it. Improvisational painter Lewis Achenbach was watched creating a portrait of Ernest Khabeer Dawkins while listening to the alto saxophonist’s set with a trio. Chicago-based multi-media artist/photo-journalist Michael Jackson’s hilarious auctioneer act netted $4000 for upcoming JJA activities on this platform.
“SyncSpace.live has given the JJA a fantastic add-on to the JJA’s websites JJAJazzAwards.org and JJANews.org,” Mandel continued. “It will be renamed, the Screening Room opened to the general public, and other programs scheduled for this flexible, feature-filled destination.”
Plans are being formulated and site tweaks will be implemented by Adrian Cho, designer of SyncSpace.live. JazzBash sponsors and others in the jazz community are invited to tour the site, by appointment; for information write to President@JazzJournalists.org.
The JJA acknowledges its sponsors, including Berklee College of Music, the Joyce and George Wein Foundation, Blue Note Jazz Club, Jazz Cruise LLC, the Jazz Foundation of America, SF Jazz, San Jose Jazz, Stanford Jazz Workshop, Kuumbwa jazz/Monterey Jazz Festival, Peabody Conservatory/John Hopkines, Century Media Partners, HighNote/Savant Records, Blue Note Records, Mack Avenue Records, Arkadia Records, Delmark Records and Pi Recordings.
