The Tuesday Link Dump

by Patrick Jarenwattananon

The post-Memorial Day edition.

--The Jazz Blog Competition Winners: Back in April, pianist Ethan Iverson (of The Bad Plus) posted a little contest on the band's blog, Do The Math (essential reading, if you didn't know). He noticed something that I have -- that there weren't enough people out there in the jazz blogosphere -- and offered $100 to the two best postings by new jazz bloggers. Now, the results of the competition have been announced, and there are some awfully bright entries: all the links are in the comments here. Incidentally -- and this is a story I always bring up whenever I mention Ethan Iverson, so bear with me -- when I interviewed Iverson in 2007 and asked him about Do The Math, he cracked me off something to this effect: "Yes, I am a jazz blogger. I'm lucky to be married to such a wonderful and beautiful woman, because I don't think I could say that and ever get a date again." No further comment [audible sobbing].

--The Jazz Festival Is Dead. I'm Not Crying: Is the title of a musing found on the PREX blog, in which the author takes an unsympathetic view to the loss of the JVC Jazz Festival New York this summer. George Wein's history of oversights notwithstanding, I can't say that I fully agree with the author: it's hard to argue with the fact that big festivals put butts in seats, making money for artists and raising the net profile of the art. In that light, Wein has done an awful lot of good for jazz at large. (Full disclosure: NPR and WBGO presented from JVC-Newport last year, and are planning to cover Wein's yet-unsponsored Newport festival this year.) I do think the author here has a few valid questions, though: does a poorly programmed summer jazz festival, especially one where prohibitively-priced performances are somewhat secondary to the outdoor picnicking, contribute to a public perception of jazz as "sofa art"? And if Festival Network doesn't pick up the pieces, would the music in fact be better served if smaller, community-oriented productions like Vision Festival swooped in? (One more tangent: anyone else notice that William Parker, one of the primaries behind the Vision Festival, is playing Newport this summer with Charles Gayle and Rashied Ali?)

--Jazz In Yokohama, Japan: A nifty little glimpse into the jazz club scene in the city south of Tokyo. It makes sense that Yokohama was historically a jazz capitol, even over the larger Tokyo: it's a port city which brought international traffic literally in boatloads, including American GIs. (Peter Hum documented that the port city of Shanghai still occupies similar jazz primacy in China, at least over Beijing.) And as BarBarBar owner Hiroshi Tsuruoka mentioned, the cultural exchange of port cities played a huge role in jazz history (cough, New Orleans, cough-cough New York City).

--1959 Was 50 Years Ago: And still the best year in jazz, says the Jazz24 blog. This point has not been lost on one doctoral student, who wrote his entire dissertation on 1959 jazz. Yes, measuring greatness within arbitrary time periods of 12 months remains an outstanding issue, as it is every December during Best Records Of The Year action, but it is hard to argue with that lineup of albums as evidence of something afoot in the cultural zeitgeist.

--Audience Development: Still Task #1: Willard Jenkins at The Independent Ear has an encouraging little feature where he excerpts concert write-ups from his college students, many of whom had never seen a jazz show before. Since it is his opinion that jazz's primary problem is the need to grow an audience -- one that is not lost on these ears -- he takes the rather positive reactions as a pretty good thing. Now, to make jazz into something which your average person might actually go see without a term paper hanging overhead ... As a side note, Jenkins has been killin' it lately on the Internets: the blog also has recent interviews with Michael Cuscuna (of Mosaic Records, among other archival and production work) and A.B. Spellman (of Four Lives In The Bebop Business fame), and jazz.com has his chats with jazz presenters in smaller-town jazz scenes. The latter idea, by the way, is something in the works for this publication -- Willard, if you're reading, I call dibs on Richmond, Va., you hear?

10:00 AM ET | 05-26-2009 | permalink

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