This past spring, D.C.-based DJ 2-Tone Jones and his business partner Gerald Watson released Shaolin Jazz: The 37th Chamber, an effective mashup of classic Wu-Tang verses and abstract jazz loops. On "Baby I Got Yo' Love," for instance, 2-Tone mixed the vocals of Ol' Dirty Bastard's "Got Yo' Money" atop Lonnie Liston Smith's "Love Beams." "The Brew Out" blended [...]
This image is a section of a musical score by Wadada Leo Smith, the avant-garde trumpeter. Obviously, he doesn't use notation as you and I recognize it; Smith has a musical system he calls "Ankhrasmation," which merges the ideas of composition, improvisation, and performance into a single construction.
Currently a faculty member at the California Institute [...]
Steve Reid, a New York-based drummer who moved through several forms of African-American music while rarely straying from the cutting edge, died this morning in New York at 66 years old. The cause of death has not been reported.
Reid's professional career began at 16 as the house drummer of Harlem's Apollo Theater, with his [...]
Setlist normally tries to stick with one jazz event per evening. But most evenings aren't New Year's Eve, where we'll all be out on the town and wondering what our options are. So, as a Washingtonian and a jazz nerd, it is my duty to tell you that the options are many.
Dec. 31
The District's strongest [...]
Ever the bearer of bad news, I'd like to alert BPB readers to another rock 'n roll fatality: This time it's Merl Saunders, who passed away last Friday at the age of 74. Complications from a stroke sidelined him in 2002, effectively ending a remarkable career that included luminous collaborations with Miles Davis, B.B. [...]
