EXPLORE JAZZ

                   AMERICA'S NATIONAL ARTFORM

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             STRAIGHT AHEAD                                                                                BE-BOP

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                      THE JAZZ BUZZ

                                                      THE LATEST NEWS IN THE WORLD OF JAZZ.........

      


Jazz legend Norman Connors' just produced 3 tunes on Urban Jazz Guitarist Drew Davidsen's upcoming CD.






Norman featured the following players on this upcoming project. Bobby Lyle, Tom Browne, Kim Waters, Gerald Veasley, and Danny Boy. Stay tuned more surprises on this new Drew Davidsen CD. Coming in 2013!

“Jumpinjazz Kids-a Swinging Jungle Tale” Set For Release 9/25, Featuring Dee Dee Bridgewater, Al Jarreau And Hubert Laws

“JumpinJazz Kids is a great model for what needs to be presented to young people. The age group that it targets is a great addition to music, and it’s wonderful for any organization or school. The manner in which it’s presented strikes a nerve – everyone should take a look at it and listen to it!” — Dr. Billy Taylor

Los Angeles, CA. “JumpinJazz Kids – A Swinging Jungle Tale” celebrates the rich history of Jazz and Popular music by paying tribute to its legendary pioneers through story, song and a variety of musical styles. This unique blend of classic storytelling and fun, original jazz/pop songs are performed by world-renowned jazz artist’s Dee Dee Bridgewater, Al Jarreau and Hubert Laws and backed by an energetic jazz quartet, full symphony orchestra and narration and voice characterizations by James Murray. “JumpinJazz Kids – A Swinging Jungle Tale” introduces children to the imaginative worlds of jazz, the spoken word and the Symphony in a fun yet educational, engaging and unique way. Produced and created by music industry veterans Steve Barta and Mark Oblinger, “JumpinJazz Kids – A Swinging Jungle Tale” is set for release September 25th.

                                                                                                                                                    

Wynton Marsalis And Eric Clapton Play The Blues – Live From Jazz At Lincoln Center Arrives On September 13

LOS ANGELES – New York City’s premier jazz venue got the blues last April when Wynton Marsalis and Eric Clapton performed together in Rose Theater at Frederick P. Rose Hall, home of Jazz at Lincoln Center for two sold-out shows dedicated to vintage blues. The extraordinary collaboration, billed as Wynton Marsalis & Eric Clapton Play the Blues, paired these musical virtuosos with members of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra as they brought to life a repertoire of songs selected by Clapton and arranged by Marsalis.
 
Reprise Records captures the magic of these unprecedented shows from earlier this year on CD and as a CD/DVD combo that both feature selections taken from the two public concerts (April 8-9), as well a special performance for Jazz at Lincoln Center’s annual gala (April 7). WYNTON MARSALIS & ERIC CLAPTON PLAY THE BLUES – LIVE FROM JAZZ AT LINCOLN CENTER will be available September 13 at physical and digital retail outlets

                    TONY BENNETT STILL MAKING MUSIC AT 86

Tony Bennett, one of music's most legendary performers, celebrated his 86th birthday (August 3rd) and continues the celebration with news of the upcoming release of his next album. His newest CD, "Tony Bennett: Viva Duets" is hitting shelves on October 23rd.

This particular album will take an international approach, featuring songs in English, Portuguese, and Spanish and has quite a star-studded roster. Artists hailing from eight different countries and three continents will help Bennett achieve the foreign flair.

                    LOOKING BACK AT  VON FREEMAN - A CHICAGO LEGEND

Von Freeman, a tenor saxophonist who was iconic within Chicago's music scene and to jazz conoisseurs worldwide, died Saturday at the Kindred Chicago Lakeshore care center. He was 88 and had been in declining health for more than a year.

Freeman became a godfather of Chicago's jazz community not only through his distinctive style, which refracted the core language of bebop through its antecedents and outgrowths, but through his active leadership. For decades, "Vonski" hosted a weekly gig and jam session at the New Apartment Lounge on Chicago's South Side, attracting musicians and tourists alike. Unlike many contemporaries of similar talent, he never moved away from the town where he was born.

In 2004, he described his "Chicago sound" on the saxophone to NPR's Tony Cox. "Well, it's tough and it's windy, it's broad," Freeman said. "It means getting down to business, so to me it's just a composite of Chicago, all four sides. Of course, we have a lakefront, don't we?"

Earle Lavon Freeman Sr. was born in 1923 and grew up in a musical home. Major figures like Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller visited his house and Freeman's brothers George (guitar) and Bruz (drums) also become musicians. Freeman attended DuSable High School, where Captain Walter Dyett's music program was regularly producing future stars like Nat "King" Cole, Dinah Washington and Eddie Harris. He worked in just about every conceivable situation, from a Navy band to strip clubs to blues groups to the nascent AACM to jamming with stars passing through town. He did it all in the Chicagoland area, even refusing opportunities to join bands led by Miles Davis and Billy Eckstine.

Despite his talent, wide recognition, even within the jazz community, came late in life. Freeman was already 49 when he recorded his first album as a bandleader, 1972's Doin' It Right Now. It took him a few more decades and albums to develop a national profile. In January 2012, he was honored with the NEA's Jazz Masters award in a New York ceremony he was unable to attend. His sons Chico Freeman, a well-known saxophonist himself, and Mark Freeman accepted on his behalf.

Far from being bitter, Freeman said his relative obscurity allowed him to develop a unique artistic profile. In a 2004 All Things Considered story, he told Tony Sarabia of Chicago's WBEZ that his only regret was that his mother, who lived to be 101, never saw him receive fame.

"That makes me almost want to cry 'cause she was — she never really wanted us [her sons] to play music, but after we behaved ourselves to a certain extent, she was proud of us," Freeman said. "And she stuck it out with us, and she never saw any of us really make it, you know. And now I'm — I don't think I've made it, but, I mean, at least I'm being sought after for this 15 minutes."

ROBERTA FLACK AND DAVID SANBORN IN CONCERT

Billed as a "historic celebration of peace, music and common ground," the One World Concert is set to take place on October 9 at Syracuse University's Carrier Dome.  The concert is scheduled to follow a talk by the Dalai Lama at the University.  The all-star lineup for the show includes Roberta Flack, David Sanborn, host band Don Was and his All-Star Band, Dave Matthews, Phillip Phillips, Cyndi Lauper, Bebe Winans, Angelique Kidjo and David Crosby, among others.  Whoopi Goldberg will be the emcee for the evening, while Ann Curry from NBC News will be a special guest.  Proceeds from the concert will be donated to international relief efforts and to fund a new scholarship named for Bassel Al Shahade, a Syracuse University graduate student killed this year in Syria while filming a documentary about the violence in his homeland

       KEEPING JAZZ ALIVE IN BROOKLYN

On the wall nearby was a framed photo of Barack Obama standing in the White House gazing at a black-and-white photo of another musician, a saxophonist like Ravi. “To Ravi,” it is inscribed. “From a huge fan of your father’s.”

Not a little of the ambition of the new record is due to the ever-present specter of Ravi’s father, John Coltrane, one of most influential musicians of the 20th century. “Spirit Fiction,” with its rhythmic complexity and slippery structures, doesn’t so much challenge John’s legacy as move astride it. The album radiates a quietly adventurous artistry and a serene self-confidence.

That serene feeling emerged from conditions that were anything but. “Spirit Fiction” is Coltrane’s first record for Blue Note, the most legendary label in jazz and the company that in 1957 released “Blue Train,” the classic that made John Coltrane’s name as a bandleader. For the “Spirit Fiction” sessions, Ravi pushed himself and his bandmates hard. After recording tracks with his longtime quartet, Coltrane felt the urge to return to the studio again, this time in hastily arranged sessions with a quintet of musicians he has known since college. Thrown together with tape running, the quintet played with refreshing looseness, hitting on a mood that Coltrane had been seeking.

The final record contains tracks from both ensembles. Cobbling it together was an exhausting effort that strained some relationships; Coltrane’s quartet, formed in 2003, has gone on hiatus in its wake. It was a lesson his father might have passed along to Ravi: artistic searching sometimes leaves collaborators in its wake.

John Coltrane died of liver cancer at age 40 in 1967, when Ravi was not quite 2. He was raised by his mother, Alice, herself a brilliant composer and performer whose music — a trippy, meditative style of jazz that brought harps, synthesizers and chanting into the mix — was heavily influenced by her Eastern-inflected spiritual practice.

As a boy, Coltrane was sensitive, shy and a little nerdy. He aimed at becoming a filmmaker or a photographer. But he played the clarinet in his high-school marching band, and music — jazz, symphonic, pop (his aunt is the Motown songwriter Marilyn McLeod) — was always around.

“I used to sit in my mom’s car, back in the days when you could play the tape player without having to cue it,” he said. “And I’d literally just sit there after school and play tapes and stare out the windows just looking at the trees moving in the wind.”

He left high school after his older brother died in a car crash in 1982, and as he put it, “I just let a bunch of time pass.” When he emerged, he had left photography behind and returned to his musical roots. He began hanging out with serious jazz lovers, people who for the first time instantly recognized his surname.

“I had been anonymous in that regard,” he said. “Someone would say, ‘John Coltrane — I know that name. Wasn’t he a blues singer?’ I was just me growing up. No one knew who John Coltrane was. He was still an underground figure in many ways.”

He decided to study music and enrolled at the California Institute of the Arts. “Showing up with a saxophone and having the name Coltrane,” he said, “I immediately recognized that this was going to be distracting for people.” But it was also an opportunity. He spent summer breaks in New York with Rashied Ali, the drummer whose free-form style helped define John Coltrane’s late period. During daily jam sessions in Ali’s apartment, Ravi impressed older musicians who once played with his dad. Right out of school he scored a gig in the band of Elvin Jones, who played in John Coltrane’s legendary quartet of the 1960s. He proved himself on grueling international tours, but there were still people attracted solely by the novelty value of his lineage. Some record companies were more interested in getting him to join supergroups made up of the sons of jazz greats than in his own work.

“There were a lot of people who just wanted to take advantage of these things that for me — I felt, Man, I’m not here for that reason,” he said. “Anyone who knows me ultimately understands what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.”

In his airy home studio, he keeps his mother’s Steinway piano and his father’s saxophone, its keys capped in pristine mother-of-pearl. There’s a bass clarinet that belonged to Eric Dolphy, who played with his father. The miniature drum kit seems to have seen the most recent action, though his son Aaron, after begging for it, promptly grew bored by it. I asked Coltrane, who just turned 47, if he wanted Aaron and his brother to grow up to be musicians.

“Secretly, I’d love — ” He stopped himself and started to laugh. “Well, I can’t put that out there. Because it’s up to them — it’s up to them. They’ll be great no matter what they do. They’ll be cool no matter where they go in life.”

The Newport Jazz Festival will be anchored this year by the guitarist Pat Metheny, the drummer Jack DeJohnette and the vocalist Kurt Elling, among dozens of other acts, George Wein, a festival founder, announced on Tuesday.

Mr. Wein said he wanted to present not just veterans but also younger musicians who represent currents in contemporary jazz. These will include the saxophonist Miguel Zenon, the pianist Jason Moran, the trumpet player Ambrose Akinmusire, the composer Darcy James Argue and the drummer Dafnis Prieto.

First held in 1954, the festival has long been an important yearly showcase of top jazz stars. This year's festival will start on Aug. 3 in the International Tennis Hall of Fame at the Newport Casino in Newport, R. I. Outdoor concerts will be held in Fort Adams State Park on Aug. 4 and 5. Tickets go on sale on Thursday.

                                                   Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute

                                                        Phase 1: Intensive, August 7-11, 2012

                                  UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music -Los Angeles, CA

                                                 Eligibility & Guidelines            

       Terence Blanchard Named Jazz Chair For The Detroit Symphony Orchestra

The Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) unveiled one of the most ambitious seasons in recent years for the Paradise Jazz Series – a collection of one-night-only appearances hand-picked by the legendary jazz musician and composer Terence Blanchard.  Five-time Grammy Award-winning Blanchard will join the DSO as the Fred A. & Barbara M. Erb Jazz Creative Chair beginning with the 2012-13 season of the Paradise Jazz Series, sponsored by MGM Grand Detroit.

“We are thrilled to welcome such a renowned jazz musician to oversee our jazz series,” said Anne Parsons, DSO President and CEO. “Since Orchestra Hall was once home to the famous Paradise Jazz Theatre, it is very important to us to maintain that legacy by bringing the most talented acts of the genre to Detroit audiences. We believe Terence is the perfect choice to help do just that.”

In this role, Blanchard will assist in curating the acts for the Paradise Jazz series and contribute to community education initiatives.  As Jazz Chair, he plans to add an unprecedented facet to the position: for the first time in Paradise Jazz Series history, Blanchard will make special guest appearances throughout the season, serving as host and at times even performing with the featured acts.

“I am very excited to play an active role in shaping the future of the DSO’s jazz series,” said Blanchard. “It was extremely important to me to choose artists who I personally respect and whose talent is indicative of the inspiring jazz history in Detroit.”

We're proud to announce the inaugural Bass BootCamp EXPO! On Saturday, March 17th, Bass manufacturers and vendors will be exhibiting their merchandise from noon to 6pm at the Crowne Plaza in Reading, PA!  As a valued member of the bass community, you're receiving this exclusive invitation to attend the EXPO.  As an invited guest, your admission is FREE!

The stellar Bass BootCamp faculty will be making appearances during the EXPO including a master class by bass great, Victor Bailey! 

                                                             EXPO Basics

                                                       Date: March 17, 2012

                                         Time: Noon to 6PM (Sign-in starts at 11AM)
              Location: Reading Crowne Plaza, 1741 Papermill Road, Wyomissing, PA 19610
                                      

                                (Reading, PA is about one hour's drive from Philadelphia)

Can a massive jazz museum take root in Chicago?

Howard Reich Arts critic

February 29, 2012

Back in the 1990s, several influential Chicagoans joined forces to try to build a National Jazz Museum here.

They quickly raised $350,000 in seed money to launch an institution that would do for jazz what Symphony Center does for classical music or the Lyric Opera of Chicago for music drama: provide a world-class venue that nurtures the art form.

Better still, the proposed National Jazz Museum would achieve what none of its Loop counterparts attempted, giving music with African-American roots high visibility in a downtown cultural grid mostly devoted to white, European-derived art.

• Wynton Marsalis

But the effort lost steam in 1999, when the City of Chicago turned down the planners' proposal to take over a choice parcel of land up for redevelopment at the northwest corner of Roosevelt Road and Michigan Avenue, where the decaying Avenue Motel once stood. After that setback, the National Jazz Museum quickly faded into memory.

Now a group of respected Chicago cultural figures has revived the idea, in somewhat altered form and under a new name: the International Jazz Hall of Fame. But the core goal remains the same: To create a downtown institution for jazz, a music identified with Chicago around the world.

Considering that New York has Jazz at Lincoln Center, a multi-faceted cultural institution in Manhattan that opened in 2004, and that next January San Francisco will have the SFJAZZ Center, a free-standing edifice dedicated to the music, Chicago already seems late to the party.

Could the timing finally be right?

"We decided Chicago would be the city – if it wanted us," says Norman Brander, who co-founded the International Jazz Hall of Fame in Kansas City, Mo., as a nonprofit two decades ago and recently revived the idea.

"We've talked to a number of different people in the city, and they're excited about it."

Specifically, Brander, 68, has recruited for his advisory committee such jazz heavyweights as pianist Ramsey Lewis, Columbia College Chicago president Warrick Carter (a former jazz drummer) and Indiana University music professor David Baker, among others. In addition, the Chicago architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill – which had created initial designs for the original National Jazz Museum – has been helping Brander develop the concept.

The idea, according to the Hall of Fame's business plan, is to build "a world-class museum and tourist attraction," at an estimated cost of $45-$50 million, says Brander, that will hum with performances, recording sessions and educational offerings. To begin launching the project, Brander and his colleagues recently met with Michelle Boone, the city's Commissioner of Cultural Affairs, to pitch the idea. As a former member of the Chicago Jazz Partnership, a consortium of foundations and corporations that has poured millions into Chicago jazz in recent years, Boone indeed was intrigued.

"I love it – it's a great idea, that we would have an institution that would solidify the role of Chicago in jazz music internationally," says Boone. "But they've got a lot of work to do. …

"What I encouraged them to do is to meet with the Chicago Jazz Partnership, that that's a group of stakeholders really committed to jazz. I also encouraged them to meet with the people who years ago were trying to build a jazz museum in Chicago.

"What were some of the roadblocks? Who were the real crusaders? How do you re-enlist those people?"

As Boone says, the work involved in realizing such a colossal project is immense. Jazz at Lincoln Center was operating for years before opening its state-of-the-art, $128 million home at Broadway and 60th Street in 2004 – and that campaign was led by Wynton Marsalis, then and now one of the most celebrated jazz musicians in the world.

SFJAZZ, meanwhile, has been presenting the San Francisco Jazz Festival and concerts across the Bay Area for decades and is in the midst of raising $60 million for its state-of-the-art new home (including a $10 million endowment).

Though the International Jazz Hall of Fame has produced various jazz awards shows and jazz cruises, says Brander, who's based in Boca Raton, Fla., it has nowhere near the assets or track records of either Jazz at Lincoln Center or SFJAZZ. Yet Brander's quest clearly has found initial support from important quarters in Chicago, not least Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

"It's really exciting, but it's very early (in the process)," says Brian Lee, a design partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill who's involved with the Hall of Fame project.

"We'd love to see something like this come to the city of Chicago … so we'd love to help. As an architectural, engineering and urban design firm based here, we think we can assist them."

Yet past experiences raise an inevitable question: Considering all the support that the planned National Jazz Museum generated more than a decade ago, why did it implode after its first setback, the loss of its hoped-for site?

Jazz Musicians Expand Pension Protest