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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:
Fred Wesley at the Oceanside Jazz Festival
In case you were wondering, Fred Wesley still knows how to get down. At the tender age of 68, the Funkiest Trombonist of All Time overcame a long cross-country flight and a bout with acute bronchitis to serve as the guest artist for the Oceanside Jazz Festival, an all-day celebration of local college and high school jazz ensembles.
I drove down to Oceanside to catch the final concert, which featured the Mira Costa Jazz Collective and Mira Costa Oceanside Jazz Orchestra (operating under the clever acronym MOJO) directed by Steve Torok with Wesley as the guest soloist. Read the rest of this entry »
Tomorrow night, I will be driving down to Oceanside to see perhaps the greatest living trombonist, my childhood trombone hero Fred Wesley, sit in as a guest artist for the Oceanside Jazz Festival. I’m looking forward to checking out the vibe, and hearing what Fred has to offer the next generation of potential funkateers.
Tickets are still on sale — do you really want to miss a chance to hear a living legend doin’ it to death?
Kim Richmond, Photo by William Claxton
After a few months in Los Angeles, I am finally figuring out where the jazz is happening — it’s not like New York, where you can just see who’s playing at the Jazz Gallery or Village Vanguard on a given evening. But after digging the scene at the Blue Whale a few times — including a fantastic show by the Alan Ferber Expanded Ensemble earlier this month, which I wrote about for WBGO — I have started to get the hang of it out here.
One advantage of checking out a big band concert is that it brings a whole bunch of great players together for one evening — just following a few of them has led me to some cool gigs. One of those musicians is trombonist Joey Sellers, who also happens to have just released a fantastic solo trombone record, entitled “What The . . . ?” (Yes, a solo trombone record: that’s how much of a badass this guy is.) Read the rest of this entry »
Reed-Gordon Duo to play at Rutgers-Newark
by Alex W. Rodriguez for the Star-Ledger
Listings for this week include Wcliffe Gordon (above) with Eric Reed, Vic Juris and The Count Basie Orchestra. Gary Burton at the Blue Note is the best reason to cross the Hudson. Leave a comment if you make it to any of the shows — I’ll be on campus for the Reed-Gordon duo for sure, I probably listened to their first duo record We 1,000 times as a high school sophomore.
This weekend, I’m hanging out at Fort Adams State Park with the WBGO/WGBH/NPR Music team, broadcasting this year’s Newport Jazz Festival. Day one is over, and I talked with NPR’s Patrick Jarenwattananon last night for a recap. You can check that out over at A Blog Supreme.
We’re back in action again today, with the Ben Allison Band rocking the stage as we speak (UPDATE: the weekend is over, but you can see our day two recap at A Blog Supreme.) Tune into WBGO.org until 7:30 this evening for more great music, and also dig the NPR Music coverage, where most of what we record is being archived for your listening (and re-listening) pleasure by the NPR Music team.
For the trombonists in the listening audience, I especially recommend tuning in for Conrad Herwig‘s Latin Side of Herbie at 5:20 PM. As many of you know, Herwig has been my teacher and mentor at Rutgers since last year. As a bonus, you’ll get to hear me talk with Josh Jackson on the air to introduce the set. To hear my dulcet tones in action, tune in a little after 5 and catch the (sure to be wild) ending of Ken Vandermark’s Powerhouse. Josh and I will be on to introduce Conrad shortly thereafter.
Thanks to a tweet by freeform, I was just hipped to this recent article in the Wall Street Journal by jazz writer Larry Blumenfeld about New Orleans wunderkinds Christian Scott and Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews. It’s well-done, so give it a read.
… done yet? OK, now for my take: I can see where Blumenfeld is coming from, citing their similar New Orleans musical pedigrees and holding them up as exemplars of young musicians expanding the style and reaching out into new, albeit different, musical horizons.
But having just listened through both of their most recent CDs — Andrews’s Backatown and Scott’s Yesterday You Said Tomorrow — in the past month or so, I don’t believe that the comparison holds up upon closer examination. Maybe it’s just my bias towards kickass trombonists, but if anything these two are a study in contrasts in how to leverage a privileged New Orleans musical heritage. Read the rest of this entry »
This announcement is very last-minute, but if you’re in the NYC area and don’t have any plans tonight, come hear me give a talk at Rutgers-Newark’s Institute of Jazz Studies on my Master’s thesis research. The title of the talk is “White and Blue: Alternate Takes on Jack Teagarden” and will give a broad overview of my attempt to understand Teagarden’s music and its place in American (and global) society.
The details: tonight, April 21, at 7:00 PM, at the Institute of Jazz Studies (4th floor Dana library, map here)
I hope to see you there! If not, I’ll get a recording and would be happy to share it with any interested parties.
I was just informed yesterday that a paper proposal I submitted to the McGill Music Graduate Symposium was accepted! So I’ll be heading to lovely Montreal for the first time next month to talk about rhythmic complexity in Jack Teagarden’s early recorded improvisation.
If you’ve got any good jazz tips for me while I’m there, please do share. I will be sure to post my thoughts on my first conference paper presentation experience once it goes down next month. As of now, I am honored to be participating, super excited to present and nervous about paring this down into something that people will actually be willing to sit down and listen to for 20 minutes … wish me luck!
