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Photo courtesy of reddit, dottylemon
When I logged into my WordPress account for the first time in a few weeks this morning, I was greeted by a cheerful note:
Happy Anniversary with WordPress.com! You registered on WordPress.com 4 years ago! Thanks for flying with us. Keep up the good blogging!
Wow — not only is that a lot of exclamation points, but four years is, like, a really long time. For those keeping score at home, that’s one seventh of my life, and the same amount of time that I spent pursuing my B.A. It also reminded me that this blog has roughly coincided with my return to academia as a graduate student — in fact, my first post was also a paper that I wrote for my first class at Rutgers (and later became the introduction to my MA thesis.) I’m not sure quite what to make of the milestone, but I’ve been meaning to put up a stuff-I’ve-been-up-to-recently post anyway, so here it is! Read the rest of this entry »
In MLK Days past, I have shared a famous quote that outlines Martin Luther King, Jr.’s love of jazz, a passage that has been something of a mantra for me ever since I first came across it in 2009.
Today, I’ve linked to it again but also want to share another, perhaps less-well-known quotation that ought to resonate with what jazz can mean for our continued struggle against racism in the United States and around the world.
I first got hip to this quote via the prolific and oftentimes hilarious antiracist advocate John Randolph, aka Jay Smooth. Here’s his video of ten OTHER things MLK said: Read the rest of this entry »
The first UCLA cohort of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance with new UCLA professors Wayne Shorter (bottom left) and Herbie Hancock (bottom right)
A Brief History of Jazz Education: Part 1 and Part 2
By Alex W. Rodriguez for A Blog Supreme/NPR Jazz
The second half of my latest contribution to A Blog Supreme is now online — part one was posted in November — and I learned a lot from putting this together. It turned out that part two went up on the same day that UCLA announced the appointment of Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter as Professors of Music there — auspicious times for jazz education, indeed!
Kid Ory
As the quarter gets underway again here at UCLA, I have added a new wrinkle to my academic grind: being a Teaching Associate for the Department of Ethnomusicology’s undergraduate survey course, Jazz in American Culture.
In fact, this is the first time that I have actually sat in on an old-school undergraduate jazz history survey, so I am learning a lot about how certain stories about jazz are told and retold. The real fun, though, lies in being able to supplement the text with some of my own perspectives during the two discussion sections that I lead on Fridays. As an experiment, I have been posting links and outlines on the course website, which are also viewable to the public. Tomorrow, the topic is early jazz in Los Angeles:
Hitomi Oba, Dominic Thiroux, and Jessica Jones at Blue Whale
Jessica Jones, Hitomi Oba — Blue Whale — 7/24/12
By Alex W. Rodriguez for LA Weekly West Coast Sound
This was is my first piece for LA Weekly — and what a great set to review! Jones and Oba, her former student, brought all original music and sounded fantastic. It also featured a cameo from Ambrose Akinmusire, another former student of Jones, who sounded amazing even as a last-minute addition.
In Los Angeles, An Immigrant’s Dream Becomes a Jazz Hub
By Alex W. Rodriguez for A Blog Supreme/NPR Jazz
This piece is a part of the Jazz Journalists Association’s Jazz Day Blogathon, celebrating jazz in local communities in honor of “Jazz Day.” Click the link for updates from all over the world!
Behold: A white piano trio that is not full of shit
This morning, I finally caught up with the jazz internet hoopla surrounding the Toronto-based trio Badbadnotgood (BBNG). I will not link to any of their music here, because they have received plenty of attention already.
I will, however, link to Peter Hum’s excellent take.
Read that, and then come back to see why I even bothered weighing in: because this group exposes the racist underbelly that haunts today’s systems of music distribution and consumption, something that many jazz musicians have been diligently and intelligently resisting for decades. Read the rest of this entry »
Mary Lou Williams and Jack Teagarden, hanging
I’m taking a quick break from my finals week bonanza (this quarter system really takes some getting used to) with a link for those of you who might be curious to take a look at what I’ll be presenting next week at the EMP Pop Conference in New York. It’s a preview of my paper, “Deconstructing the Hang: Urban Spaces as Cross-Cultural Contexts for Jazz Improvisation.”
If you’ll pardon the slightly cumbersome academic prose, I’d love to hear what any of you think about the idea — that “the hang” as it is conceived of in the jazz community has something to offer those engaging in ethnographic fieldwork more generally. Again, the link is here — thanks for taking a look, and if you’re in New York next week, I hope to see you there on Saturday from 4-6 p.m.
Clearly, it’s worth checking out, because even Stephen Colbert is jealous that he won’t be presenting on an awesome panel with David Adler, Nate Chinen and Phil Freeman!
Louis Armstrong, author of countless hilarious missives
I’m a little late to the party on this one, but I have been spending much of my limited internet free time on my road trip (hello, Arizona! Almost there …) reading the many impassioned responses to Roanna Forman’s question, “Do Jazz Critics Need To Know How To Play Jazz?” The question has inspired a very worthwhile discussion and sparked a flurry of great jazz writing — precisely the sort of thing that I had been missing when I wrote my last post.
The question gets right to the heart of what has, for me, often felt like a deep, existential struggle. I have spent much of my life playing with these dual identities, Jazz Musician and Jazz Writer, and remain unclear as to how they can best get along in my life. Most broadly, I agree with Peter Hum’s take:
Good jazz writing is accurate, well-informed, clear, insightful and, I’d contend, passionate. Having my modest but, I’d contend, significant background as a jazz pianist provides me with a vital grounding in most, if not all, of these respects.
Still, I read plenty of great non-jazz-musician jazz writers, some of whom have very thoughtfully defended themselves at their own blogs. So my answer to Roanna’s question, in a specific sense, is “no, you can write about jazz without playing, but basic music training will always inform one’s criticism and is very worthwhile.” But there are deeper issues to parse here; to understand why this discussion seems so relevant today, it helps to hear it in conversation with the music’s long history of critical debates. Read the rest of this entry »
Change: not always what you expect
On Monday, I submitted my last column to the Star-Ledger, and with my professional writing career on hold for now, I’m in a bit of a reflective mood. Looking back at my earlier posts, I am reminded of the fun conversations and insightful dialogues that I have been blessed to join over the past two-plus years, and am proud of what I have been able to contribute to the discussion.
When I started this blog in May 2009, I was delighted and surprised by the vibrancy and warmth of the nascent community that seemed to be emerging on the internet to share its love for jazz. NPR’s A Blog Supreme had just started (long before I became an occasional contributor), musician-bloggers like Ethan Iverson, Andrew Durkin and Darcy James Argue were in full force, longtime jazz journalists were bringing their work online, jazz.com supported rich, daily contributions, Nextbop was in its infancy, The Checkout was the new thing in jazz radio, and the exchanges and arguments brimmed with possibility.
But as many frustrated liberal politicos can tell you, change rarely plays out in ways that optimists expect. Still, if there are any lessons that jazz can teach a distraught idealist, it’s that there is beauty in the unexpected, and the pleasures of spontaneity reward the adventuresome. Read the rest of this entry »
