Seen live jazz lately? got a twitter account? Put the two together: Tweet about your most recent jazz concert experiences, and include the who, the where, and the hashtag #jazzlives.

Some background:

Two and a half weeks ago, Wall Street Journal critic Terry Teachout set the jazz world a-buzzin’ with an op-ed entitled “Can Jazz Be Saved?” The article referred to a recently published NEA survey of Public Participation in the Arts, which says that the number of Americans who have seen a live jazz performance is in freefall, while at the same time the median age of those live jazz attendees is skyrocketing. Jazz, Teachout concluded, is in dire straits unless it can get more listeners, and younger ones, fast.

In the time since, jazz musicians, journalists, and otherwise devotees have questioned the accuracy of the NEA’s numbers based on context (e.g., aren’t the recession and the Internet revolution being taken into account here?), semantics (how exactly are we defining “jazz” anyway?), geography (doesn’t it count for something that people’s access to jazz is severely limited outside a few big cities?), and anecdotal evidence (how come I see jazz clubs filled with young people?).

Teachout’s response, stubborn but not unreasonable, has essentially been “Anecdotes are well and good, but they don’t square off against numbers. If you have think the statistics are problematic, come up with better ones.”

Howard Mandel, jazz critic extraordinaire and president of the Jazz Journalists Association, has thus proposed exactly that. His campaign is as described above: If you’ve seen live jazz recently, or will do so soon, say so on Twitter. In your 140-character allotment, say who you’ve seen, where and when you saw them, and include the hashtag “#jazzlives.” The goal is to see how many people we can find that actually are seeing live jazz.

Game on, folks. Rack ‘em up and hash ‘em out.

By its broadest definition, Nordic Jazz Week encompasses five nights, including a show tonight at the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage. But Wednesday night at the House of Sweden, in which the big draw was Nils Petter Molvær and Arve Henriksen (pictured above), was treated as a closing night of sorts. The omnipresent threat of rain forced the concert indoors instead of its customary spot on the House of Sweden’s picturesque rooftop, but that didn’t stop a substantial crowd from gathering.

Photos and writeup after the jump. Full gallery here.

Read More “Nordic Jazz Week Wraps Up” »

Nordic Jazz Fest, hosted annually by the embassies of Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and Denmark, has become Nordic Jazz Week for 2009, featuring an opening performance at the Embassy of Finland on Sunday, June 14, and then two nights of performances at the House of Sweden on June 16-17.

Of note in the lineup are Norwegians Nils Petter Molvær & Arve Henriksen, who are pioneers in the peculiar kind of jazz/electronic/ambient music crossover that labels like Rune Grammofon (to which Henriksen is signed) are currently exploring. These two play as a duo on June 17, probably my most highly anticipated set of the festival. A close second is the Søren Kjærgaard Trio on June 16; Kjærgaard is a Danish pianist whose tuneful, energetic style has made him an interesting collaborator with such avant-jazz luminaries as Peter Brötzmann, Derek Bailey, Tim Berne, Herb Robertson, and more.

Full lineup, location and ticket details after the jump.

Photo of Nils Petter Molvær above courtesy his Myspace page.

Read More “Nordic Jazz 09 Lineup Announced” »

A new batch of good shit from Cuneiform Records only comes three times a year, so each time is worth noting. May will see Cuneiform put out:

• Led Bib – Sensible Shoes
• Miriodor – Avant!
• The Ed Palermo Big Band – Eddy Loves Frank
• Positive Catastrophe – Garabatos Volume One
• Upsilon Acrux – Radian Futura

Let’s see. This is all potentially good stuff. Perhaps most exciting (for me) is the Upsilon Acrux – this is a young avant-rock band who were once upon a time on D.C.’s own Planaria Records, whose last record Galapagos Momentum was a feast of heavy odd-time riffing. Miriodor are a Quebecois band who have a humorous and peculiarly Francophone take on avant-rock (you know it when you hear it); Ed Palermo has carved out a niche for himself reinterpreting Frank Zappa tunes, and by the name of this new album it doesn’t seem like anything has changed.

Then there’s the jazz. I know nothing about Led Bib, but apparently the Times (UK) said of them, “Sun Ra didn’t die in vain,” so that bodes well. Positive Catastrophe is a new group fronted by the always excellent Taylor Ho Bynum (and includes a favorite saxophonist of mine, Michaël Attias) and sounds really, really, interesting, purporting to combine Latin jazz and free/avant-jazz in a way that, as far as I know, hasn’t really been done before. Cool!

I recently flew across the country to watch a New York musician play a series of concerts in San Francisco. If that doesn’t seem to make much sense, consider that downtown legend John Zorn, a recent recipient of the half-a-million-bucks Macarthur “Genius” grant, almost never plays live except in New York City and Europe. But last week, he did a six-night residency at Yoshi’s in San Francisco, showcasing a different band each night, all but one playing material from his Masada songbook of tunes based on traditional Jewish scales and melodies.

I caught the last three shows: Bar Kokhba, The Dreamers and Electric Masada. Last Friday was Bar Kokhba, a sextet with violin, cello and guitar doing most of the melodic work with bass, drums and percussion backing. Two sets: the early set contained material from Zorn’s Masada Book 1 – the first 200 songs he wrote in the series – while the late set contained Book 2 material, drawing from some 300 songs Zorn wrote in a more recent burst of insane creativity. On record, I find the Book 1 material incredibly compelling (particularly as represented on the 3-disc set 50th Birthday Celebration Volume 11), while the Book 2 material is much more middle-of-the-road, the kind of the stuff you could play at a dinner party without offending anyone whatsoever. Live, though, it all got flipped.

My (very lengthy) full thoughts after the jump.

Read More “Excursion to the Left Coast: John Zorn @ Yoshi’s San Francisco” »

Transparent Productions is still basically defunct, but it probably shouldn’t surprise anyone that the name is being resurrected to accommodate Kahil El’Zabar and his Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, who for the past 8 years have played a Black History Month show in the D.C. area. Last year it was special: a 35th-anniversary extravaganza that included a drum circle, a workshop, and two nights of fantastic shows at Chief Ike’s (that’s the first night pictured above—trumpeter Corey Wilkes showcasing a technique that really shouldn’t work, but somehow did).

This year, El’Zabar and company are playing at Contradiction Dance in Takoma Park, which apparently is what replaced the venerable Sangha (which was a fair trade/neo-hippie store that played generous host to countless Transparent shows). EHE’s meshing of traditional African music with avant-garde jazz is interesting on record but really comes alive in a live setting; El’Zabar himself is one of the most expressive percussionists (and kalimba-ists) I’ve ever seen.

$15, 7014 Westmoreland Avenue, Takoma Park, MD (three blocks from the Takoma Park metro), 8pm sharp tonight.

Cosmologic are a four-piece jazz combo and a recent signing to Silver Spring’s Cuneiform Records. They fit in well with the rest of Cuneiform’s jazz output: stuff that is very recognizably coming from within the jazz tradition, but pushes boundaries in any number of subtle ways. Not really free jazz and certainly not unrestrained collective improv, but honest-to-goodness grooving tunes with noticeable tendencies towards experimentation. (The Vandermark 5 might be a good, if more aggressive, example of a band that straddle that line in a somewhat similar way.)

The sax-trombone-bass-drums group released Eyes In the Back of My Head on Cuneiform last May and are making an appearance at Pyramid Atlantic in Silver Spring (home to many a Sonic Circuits event) tomorrow evening at 8pm sharp.

photo courtesy Cosmologic’s Myspace page

Duke Ellington Jazz Festival (DEJF) Executive producer Charlie Fishman and managing director Sunny Sumter have announced the 2009 lineup for the DEJF.

As previously announced, the theme for this year is “The Musical Heritage of New Orleans,” and the headliner as such is trumpeter Terence Blanchard — who will be performing his 2007 piece A Tale of God’s Will: Requiem for Katrina in its entirety on June 12, in a free concert at the National Mall.

Another highlight is a closing concert tribute to New Orleans pianist Ellis Marsalis, which will feature his sons Branford, Jason, and Delfeayo, along with Harry Connick Jr., a 15-piece big band, and some surprises.

The list of featured artists after the jump.
Read More “2009 Duke Ellington Fest Lineup Announced” »

Where 2007 was my love-affair year with free jazz, 2008 saw my affections turn to extreme metal in all its varied forms. The sad departure of Transparent Productions meant a dearth of interesting avant-garde jazz in the District, and I replaced concertgoing expeditions to Sangha (RIP) and Twins Jazz with rather different expeditions to places like Jaxx and various smaller venues booking the more underground kinds of metal. My passion for music tracks closely with what I’m seeing in the live setting, so it makes sense that my 2008 list is dominated by the heavy, evil stuff. (My friends—and especially housemates—didn’t appreciate this so much.)

Be it metal, jazz, electronic music, free improvisation, or whatever, I’ve been convinced for a few years now that, industry woes aside, we’re living in a renaissance period with fascinating new music being made at an unprecedented clip. Granted, I have absolutely no empirical basis for this claim, but I present the following 10 recordings as examples of the freshness of today’s music-making scene…

1. One With Filth, Crowpath (Willowtip)
Pundits can quibble over whether or not “avant-garde metal” is really avant-garde in any meaningful sense, but the latest album from Swedish band Crowpath is an undeniably experimental and edgy slab of death metal. Compared to the band’s two earlier releases, it’s downright catchy and accessible, striking a perfect balance between challenging and immediately rewarding, but it’s still impossibly punishing. “Thinking man’s metal” is an overused phrase and too often refers to dry exercises in technicality, but it’s a perfect term for this recording.

Crowpath, “Cleansed In Chlorine”:

2. Doombringer, Nasum (Relapse)
A more than welcome posthumous live release from these grindcore greats. Although Doombringer clocks in at a mere 23 minutes, the 16 tracks here are meatier than most albums twice the length or more. Brutal and unrelenting from start to finish, like getting punched in the face repeatedly, by a guy wearing spiked brass knuckles. You know, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Nasum, “Inhale/Exhale”:

Read More “Music 2008: Alienate Your Friends” »

Some forms of political protest are beneath contempt, and one of them is sporting–sans a shred of irony–a Che Guevara T-shirt. Yet most Che-sporting hipsters don’t know that Guevara opposed art forms that carried the taint of “imperialism”–including jazz and rock music. (Uninformed hipsters? Surprise!) My colleagues at Reason produced an eye-opening video about Paquito D’Rivera, the Cuban jazz clarinetist who immigrated to the U.S. because the Cuban regime was so anti-jazz (those who stayed behind had to hide their LPs or face arbitrary confiscations).