John Chacona has been documenting the northeast Ohio creative and improvised music scene with weekly posts on his Let’s Call This blog and hoping to port the project to a community organization that will sustain the work. When time allowed, he reviewed Thumbscrew’s Multicolored Midnight for PostGenre, and Fred Hersch & esperanza spalding’s Alive at the Village Vanguard and concerts in Cleveland by the Dan Weiss Trio and the Ben Wendel Group for All About Jazz.
Rob Evanoff is pumped for ‘Raymond Scott Reimagined,’ a fantastic collaborative effort brought to life by violinist Jeremy Cohen (of Quartet San Francisco), who enlisted Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band and a cappella icons Take 6 to bring a mesmerizing energy to nine reimagined versions of Scott classics including “Powerhouse,” “Toy Trumpet,” “Huckleberry Duck,” “Twilight in Turkey,” “Cutey and the Dragon” and “18th Century Drawing Room.” Recorded at Skywalker Sound, Raymond Scott Reimagined releases in June.
Doug Hall has posted a recent profile article on WICN, an all-jazz radio station out of Worcester, MA. Also, in recognition of the passing of jazz giant Wayne Shorter, he produced a long-form artist profile for AllAboutJazz. He attended a Jazz at Lincoln Center performance featuring an all-Ellington big band performance on April 1.
Dorothy Longo has spent the past two years writing her husband, Mike Longo’s biography based on his memoirs. Mike passed away from Covid on March 22, 2020, and his bio The Rhythm of Unity: A Jazz Musician’s Lifelong Journey Beyond Black and White is now available through mikelongojazz.com or directly from Amazon.
Howard Mandel reviewed Tineka Postma’s Aria for DownBeat, started a Substack (Mandel’s Media Diet) and produced two episodes of The Buzz: The JJA Podcast using audio from panels at the JJA Book Bash of March 26. He also edited and posted to Youtube Stuart Brinin’s Seeing Jazz Photography Master Class.
Dan Ouellette continues writing the OLD and the NEW in his one-year-old The Landfill Chronicles book of memoir-like archival stories on the Medium platform (the four-part Chapter 8 profiles Regina Carter embracing Paganini’s priceless violin). He also enters the fourth year of his monthly column “Jazz & Beyond Intel,” profiling artists who are not well-known but deserve to be (February: young vibraphonists taking the instrument into uncharted territory). He wrote DownBeat upfront profiles of Elaine Elias and Jim Snidero.
Scott Thompson PR is working two-time Grammy nominee Elio Villafranca’s new release Standing by the Crossroads, Jakob Dreyer’s Songs, Hymns and Ballads, and Grace McNally’s Full Circle featuring the Plantation Singers and Grace’s beautiful acoustic guitar work. Thompson has also been busy with the OVISION release/project, which has been winning numerous international awards for both music and video. These Italian musicians, with vocalist Roc Flowers and trumpeter Fabrizio Bosso, deserve recognition.
Michael J. West profiled Margherita Fava for DownBeat, Braxton Cook for the Washington Post, and Fred Irby III and the Howard University Jazz Studies program for Washington City Paper.
