Among the notable musician deaths of this week was go-go pioneer Chuck Brown. As prelude to this week's links, I find it fascinating how jazz so directly led into something that could be called an original musical style. See: the Washington Post obituary, and YouTube footage of a "Go-Go Swing [It Don't Mean A Thing]/Midnight Sun/Moody's Mood For Love" medley. And now:

• This story is titled "Top Ten Jazz Albums for People Who Don't Know S— About Jazz." Let the debates begin. From Sean O'Connell/LA Weekly.
• DownBeat magazine has slowly been sprucing up its web presence. You'll see some current news and concert reports on the left-hand column, plus some editors' recommendations. The layout for archival material is a bit improved and it appears that some ad support is coming too.
• Gil Evans centennial celebrations are happening this week in New York. Nate Chinen writes about efforts to deliver the great composer/arranger's repertoire, including some new discoveries. Also from Chinen: Dafnis Prieto takes us through his day in uptown New York, when he isn't making next-level percussion things around the world.
• The Cabaret Card rules in New York had an awful lot of sway in who got to have careers in music prior to 1967. Nate Chinen gives the synopsis for JazzTimes.
• Taylor Eigsti, who came onto the scene as a piano prodigy a decade or so ago, also writes pieces for orchestra. (He's only 27.) He returns to his hometown for a performance with the Oakland-East Bay Symphony this week. From Richard Scheinin/San Jose Mercury News.
• Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran (his wife) just curated a week of performances at the Whitney Biennial. Ben Ratliff sums it up.
• Sidney Bechet, the first jazz review ever and the relationship between journalism and the "feeling" in black-origin music. From New England Public Radio.
• Don Cherry in the 1960s is the subject of this week's Night Lights, from WFIU.
• Latin jazz in the Bay Area is the subject of a documentary in progress. The Latin Jazz Corner has a short interview.
• Before Peggy Lee was great singer Peggy Lee — quite literally — she was a teenage train depot agent in North Dakota.
• Milton Babbitt's seminal "Who Cares if You Listen" article (opens PDF). Contributor Alex W. Rodriguez, himself a Ph.D. candidate, reminded me of this viewpoint with respect to the movement of jazz toward the academy.
• Two major musicologists argue to save the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago. Testaments to this place's importance continue to pour in.
• "Hyatt Hotel Heir Denies He's Spent $100 Mil on Unfinished Jazz Film," reads the Forbes headline. You'll note that NPR first covered this story in 2007, when the filmmaker's "side-project" movie about Louis Armstrong had a different working title.
• Ted Panken's archives this week: a Jackie McLean remembrance.
• JazzWax has a variety of features up.
• The Jazz Session spoke with vocalist Maria Neckam and the trio of Colin Stranahan, Glenn Zaleski and Rick Rosato. It also announced a tour which we'll have more information about next week.
• The Checkout sat down with the great Chico Hamilton, and arranger Ryan Truesdell, who has arranged some newly-discovered Gil Evans charts.

Elsewhere at NPR Music:

 

• Gil Evans at 100.
• Cecil Taylor is featured on All Things Considered.
• Arturo Sandoval on his mentor, Dizzy Gillespie.
• JazzSet features Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke and Lenny White.
• Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz features pianist Chris Ziemba.
• Louis Armstrong's last recorded concert is featured on Song of the Day.
• S. Epatha Merkerson of Law & Order tells NPR's Tell Me More about what she's been listening to. Joe Henderson is first up.

People throughout Belgium are currently celebrating the harmonica player and guitarist Jean-Baptiste "Toots" Thielemans, born in Brussels on April 29, 1922. That puts the NEA Jazz Master, also made a Baron by the King of Belgium in 2001, just a few days past 90.

The night after his birthday, Thielemans set out on an eight-concert tour across his homeland. In Ghent, Belgian guitarist Philip Catherine joined him as a special guest. In Brussels, his long-time pianist Kenny Werner and guitarist Oscar Castro-Neves came from the U.S. and Brazil, respectively. In Hasselt, Thielemans — who had broken his foot — performed from a wheelchair. And last night and tonight, May 17 and 18, the two final concerts take place in Liège and then Dinant. It's all taking place in a country where everyone can pronounce the name "Thielemans." (Try "teel-mahnz.")

Invited by the Belgian Tourist Office, I attended his May 9 performance at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, a.k.a. BOZAR (get it?), in Brussels. The interviews and meet-and-greets were canceled, but the concert was sold out and a great success.

Thielemans entered to roaring applause. His band members helped him cross the stage to perch on a high chair so his feet could dangle and clap together. He looks frail, but his breath support and musicality seem little diminished. Just the sound of his Hohner harmonica brings joy and sadness together, and sweetly so.

 

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Prior to the show, we journalists were taken on a "Toots Walk" through central Brussels to see his birthplace. There's a whimsical mural that tells you when you're near his childhood home on Rue Haute (High Street).

The Baron calls himself un vrai Bruxellois (a true man of Brussels). His father was a carpenter; his parents ran a pub. They rented rooms to construction workers during the 1920s building boom.

Down the street, a larger but now-demolished building housed the workers' center. Historian Roland Jacob told us that Thielemans remembers being hoisted on his father's shoulders at socialist-leaning political meetings.

His first instrument was the accordion. Then, in an ornate movie palace (still standing, though no longer a cinema) on the same street, Thielemans first heard the harmonica on a film soundtrack. His early inspiration on the guitar, in the early 1940s, was Django Reinhardt. As for his singular technique of whistling an octave above his guitar, it's said that comes from Slam Stewart (1914-87), the humming virtuoso bassist.

Toots Thielemans did it all — the guitar, the whistling, the harmonica. (He struggled with asthma to do so.) Now, he sticks to the instrument he can carry in his pocket. As he said from the stage in English, "I try to sing almost bel canto with this toothbrush!"

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From the early 1950s, Thielemans lived and worked in the U.S., where he became a citizen in 1957. Two early thrills were jamming with Miles Davis in Paris in 1949 and — a few years later — working a week in Philadelphia in the Charlie Parker All Stars, again with Davis. (Toots recalled in a recent article in Le Vif that Parker protected him from Davis. But when Davis remarked that Toots was Caucasian, Toots himself responded, no, "I come from Belgium.")

At BOZAR, four of Toots' first five tunes were recorded by Miles Davis in a short span: "On Green Dolphin Street" (1958), "All Blues" (early 1959), "I Loves You, Porgy" and "Summertime" (both 1958, for Porgy and Bess). "Days of Wine and Roses" was the other number.

In these tunes, Toots' quartet of pianist Karel Boehlee, bassist Hein Van de Geyn and drummer Hans Van Oosterhout were elegant and swinging, much in the tradition of the 1982 Toots Thielemans album Live in the Netherlands with Joe Pass on guitar and Niels-Henning Orsted Pederson on bass. Toots was flying then. And, though he's streamlined his playing, 30 years later he still sounds tuneful, optimistic, willing to soar.

When Werner and Castro-Neves came to the stage — excitement! embraces! — they brought shades of Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra and Hollywood as they played "How High the Moon" (a samba, thanks to Castro-Neves), "All the Way" (Werner on synthesizer, interpolating "My Way"), and the theme to Midnight Cowboy, an eight-note melody that circles and haunts. Indeed, Thielemans played it on the soundtrack.

Toots' commercial work paid well. He made a Chrysler ad with Louis Armstrong (who called Toots "Bop Chops"), whistled the iconic Old Spice jingle, and played harmonica on the theme song for Sesame Street. Our Toots Walk tour guide quoted him as having said, "When I'm on tour, I can pay for the gasoline for the car. When I make advertising, I can buy the car."

Back on stage, he celebrated his love of Brazilian music with an Ivan Lins piece. It segued into "Manha da Carnival," the theme from the 1959 film Black Orpheus. Applause met "Manha" at the beginning, and rose in a great crescendo at the end.

It was then that I began to feel the emotion of the occasion.

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Toots Thielemans' most famous song is "Bluesette." As he told my WBGO colleague Michael Bourne in a 1993 DownBeat story:

"I was playing a concert with [the Parisian violinist] Stephane Grappelli in Brussels in 1962. I was in the same dressing room as Stephane and I was tuning my guitar, and somehow this little song came out. I was humming it and Stephane said, 'That's nice. What is it?' I just said he inspired me, but he said, 'Ecrivez tout de suite! Write it down right away!' I called it 'Bluette' for this little blue flower in Belgium, but when I played it on a show in Sweden, the producer said, 'Isn't that a blues? Why don't you put the 's' in there?' I owe the 's' to him."

Bourne told me another story. Toots' first gig outside Belgium came in Sweden, and he learned Swedish to play in a cabaret. He said the woman introducing him presented him to the crowd as "Tits Tooliemans." I can imagine Toots giggling.

For his 90th birthday concert in Brussels, "Bluesette" — the waltz named for a flower — came near the end of the show, delivered with a deep, stirring, almost frightening samba beat.

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Toots Thielemans loves musicians. The more they challenge him, the better. He's said in response to Kenny Werner's more "out" harmonies, "Keep throwing me in the pool. But don't let me drown."

He had a close friendship with the wild and woolly electric bassist Jaco Pastorius (1951-87). In a story in his new Toots 90 coffee-table book, he writes:

I met Jaco [Pastorius] at the end of 1979 at the Berlin Jazz Festival. He was playing solo bass. He had just recently left Weather Report. I was playing at the festival, too. During a press conference, a journalist asked Pastorius, 'If you were to form a duo now, who would it be with?' And Jaco glanced at the festival programme and said: 'With Toots Thillman [sic]. Yes, bring me Toots!'

Pastorius said that ever since his childhood, when Thielemans was a member of the George Shearing Quartet, he'd been familiar with Toots' music. So here's a song for Toots Thielemans' 90th birthday, from NPR's Jazz Alive! archive. At the 1982 Kool Jazz Festival in New York, Toots joins Jaco and the Word of Mouth Band for Jaco's waltz, "Liberty City."

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Becca Pulliam of WBGO is the producer of JazzSet with Dee Dee Bridgewater.

The late alto saxophone giant Jackie McLean would have been 81 this week. He died after a long illness in 2006, but continued performing and teaching until late in his life. One of the last songs he wrote and recorded was "Mr. E," which leads off his 1998 septet album Fire and Love.

I'm thinking of it because I recently heard another version of the song by the much younger alto saxophonist Steve Lehman and his trio. Their take on "Mr. E" comes from a recording called Dialect Fluorescent, which came out just a few months ago.

"I really love the composition," Lehman said. "I love the way the melody is structured; I love the way that the harmony is set up. And I think it's really ingenious, actually, the way that every aspect of the composition ... is really set up to create a kind of musical framework that at once is really grounded, and gives you a kind of sense of place and sound as a listener, but also has an incredible amount of flexibility and is kind of malleable as musical material."

Obviously, Lehman likes the tune — but I suspected that there was more to it than that. I had read that Lehman studied with McLean, and I knew that Lehman had even written an academic paper about McLean. And if you listen closely to the two saxophonists, you'll notice a certain strident overtone to both, an quality that Lehman's recent press material describes as a "bracing, McLean-tinged saxophone sound."

There's a deeper connection here. So I gave Lehman a call yesterday to find out about it. During our conversation, the words "state-of-the-art" kept coming up.

 

"['Mr. E'] really represents, as far as I'm concerned, state-of-the-art composing for small ensemble," Lehman said. Then he continued. "And also, I think it's important to document the recent work of all these amazing musicians which we look up to, whether it be Jackie McLean or Andrew Hill or Wayne Shorter, all of whom are people who wrote really amazing, seminal works in the '60s, but also continued to do so right up until the ends of their lives — or are continuing to do so, in Wayne Shorter's case. When it feels appropriate, it's really important to underline the fact that people like Jackie really stayed active and really kept pushing himself throughout his life."

Another, related example: "In the late '90s, before he got sick, I think young saxophonists were really looking for him for the state of the art of the instrument. Which I think is really amazing, considering the fact that he was 68."

Lehman was one of those young saxophonists who looked up to McLean. As an undergraduate student at Wesleyan University, he commuted twenty-five minutes north to the nearby University of Hartford to audit classes with McLean, who was on faculty.

By the time McLean started teaching at the University of Hartford in 1968, he had already made many of the recordings which now cement his legacy as jazz royalty. McLean started as a drug counselor — drawing upon his own, previous addiction to heroin — and eventually began teaching music history and performance. Around that time, he also founded the Artists Collective, a cultural center in a poor section of Hartford. By the mid-1970s, he had established a department of African-American Music, and today a program at the University of Hartford's Hartt School conservatory bears his name: The Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz.

Lehman encountered McLean nearly three decades into his teaching career. He recalled how in the classroom, McLean's social skills and sense of humor combined with his "unassailable musical pedigree."

"In the course of one class, you might get very specific instructions of how to play a Bud Powell composition, based on feedback that he himself received from Bud Powell," Lehman says. "And later on, in the same class, he might take a four-minute solo — either in an open setting, or on 'Giant Steps,' or on a composition of his own — that defined state-of-the-art alto saxophone improvisation in the late '90s. So just to be confronted with that historical continuum, and also be put in the position to engage with the fact that all of this information and learning was oriented toward doing something incredibly unique and contemporary in the present — it really leaves an indelible mark on everybody who was able to study with him."

Lehman studied with McLean in the late 1990s. At that time, McLean was working with a young drummer named Eric McPherson — another former student. In fact, "Mr. E." is a dedication to McPherson, complete with a section for a drum solo. (Among many others, McLean's former students include trombonist Steve Davis, saxophonists Wayne Escoffery and Antoine Roney, and his son René McLean, also a saxophone player.)

Later, Lehman himself worked extensively with McPherson, who is now on faculty at the Hartt School.

"Eric is one of my favorite drummers of all time, and somebody that I've really been lucky to perform with and record with quite a bit," Lehman says. "He's somebody that I've been listening to since I was about 14 years old."

Toward the end of our conversation, Lehman reemphasized how vital McLean was as an artist throughout his entire career — how many fellow young saxophone players admired McLean. But was also clear that Lehman had a personal history with his idol too.

"I often, when I'm talking to non-musicians, will describe it as being a basketball player who idolized Michael Jordan for most of his life, and then actually getting to study with him, work with him," Lehman said. "That's really what it felt like — every time we got to work together, every time I got to take a car ride with him, it was in the presence of that greatness."

As an acclaimed pianist and composer, Vijay Iyer is able to perform his music in concert halls and jazz clubs around the world. But few venues are quite like the one he played May 1-2 of this year.

Yesterday the BBC's Jazz on 3 posted a live recording of a new song by the Vijay Iyer Trio — too new, even, for the band's 2012 album Accelerando. The song is called "Hood":

"Hood" is a tribute to the Detroit techno pioneer Robert Hood, and I think you'll agree it's an incredible thing for an acoustic piano trio to do. (Iyer's trio has actually been performing the song for a little while, as it did when NPR Music recorded a full concert in January.) If you listen carefully, you'll notice the applause is that of an intimate room, not a cavernous performing arts center or theater. Indeed, the credits reveal: "Recorded at The Vortex, London on 1 May 2012."

Being a guy who helps to record jazz concerts, I wondered: What kind of club is The Vortex that the Vijay Iyer Trio would play there, and that the BBC would record it? It's certainly not the first Vortex recording for the BBC, I gather, so I searched for more about the venue.

I found that The Vortex is a lot like many small jazz clubs — except nobody is paid to work there. Check out this short documentary video:

 

The Vortex is a small non-profit venue in Dalston, London, with a capacity of around 100 people. (That's even smaller than the hallowed Village Vanguard in New York, capacity 123.) It specializes in "left-field" music, as you can tell from the soundtrack. It was founded in the northeast London neighborhood of Stoke Newington, where it helped to develop the area into a thriving commercial district. After it was forced out, community support helped the club move to nearby Dalston in 2005. From the outside (see around 3:00) it looks like a glass enclosure jutting out from the Dalston Culture House. Located literally around the corner is the Dalston Kingsland rail stop.

It's all the more remarkable, then, that it's primarily a volunteer operation. That fact is the first thing the documentary hits you with, and it's also prominent on the "about" section of the club's website. All staff, including sound guys and directors, are volunteers.

This scheme actually makes for a rather effective business plan. It allows for both quality and quantity: With reduced overhead, the club can pay a (presumably) reasonable amount to world-class bands like the Vijay Iyer Trio, but also host music seven nights a week, including local artists. Amazingly, this is done while receiving no "regular source of public funding" and keeping admission prices "reasonable, generally in the range of £8 to £15" ($13 to $24).

It seems as if the volunteer focus also helps to develop a good vibe — a sense of community and shared ownership. Musicians have a safe place to play without anyone trying to rip them off, and staffers feel invested in running the operation. Certainly, it wouldn't work out for every jazz setting, but it's certainly worth noting that it seems to work here.

As for Iyer, here's a quote from a review of the Vortex show (actually a two-night residency) on the LondonJazz blog: "Iyer said how much they enjoyed playing the Vortex — perhaps one of the few places left where undivided audience attention is guaranteed — and said that they'd love to return, 'if we are invited'."

In a recent Huffington Post submission, pianist and composer Kurt Ellenberger writes about what he calls "the education fallacy": the premise that an increase in music education will lead to increased audiences. He's writing here about classical music, but draws a parallel with jazz:

On the education spending issue, it's common to hear musicians say, "well, we're not spending enough, that's why we're not building classical music audiences — we need to spend more on education." I return to Jazz Education, where we went from spending very little, to spending hundreds of millions, with nothing to show for it in regards to audience development. Why did the jazz audience decline, not grow, as the spending rapidly increased? Is there any reason to think that more spending would succeed with classical music where it has failed with jazz?

As evidence that jazz education has "failed" to produce new audiences, Ellenberger cites data demonstrating the proliferation of jazz education in colleges, summer camps and high schools. At the same time, he also states that discussions like the Jazz Audiences Initiative are responses to declining jazz audiences.

Ellenberger, I gather, is also on faculty at Grand Valley State University, and from that perch once helped to produce jazz concerts himself. (He plays in the Grand Valley State New Music Ensemble once featured on NPR's Weekend Edition.) That is, he's seen the shifts in education spending and audience decline in person. As he is paid to be a jazz educator, it seems unlikely that he's attacking the entire system that supports him — just its efficacy at seeding jazz audiences.

I find this perspective compelling, but also a bit frustrating.

 

The logical next question is: Why? Why did this fail; why isn't there a correlation? It would seem that producing lots of jazz-literate former students would create the next generation of professional musicians and its dedicated fans. If students seem to engage with the music deeply when they're studying it, why aren't they going to shows when they grow up?

In a separate post on his own blog, Ellenberger submits an answer:

Music is a cultural artifact, and the culture has moved on. Jazz has moved on as well, further and further away from being "popular music," and yet jazz culture (particularly jazz education) stubbornly adheres to a stodgy conservatism which is hopelessly mired in romantic notions of the Golden Age (circa 1950-1960). (This decade has been reified by many performers, critics, and academics for a variety of legitimate reasons which I will not go into here.) Here we are, a half century later, and jazz musicians continue to foster the attitudes, behaviors, and sometimes even the hopelessly worn-out hipster lingo from that bygone era. While I'm sure this is emotionally comforting as subculture signifiers, to the outside world, this nostalgic indulgence must appear archaic, comical, and desperate. Jazz and its affectations certainly aren't "cool" anymore, and haven't been for decades; these signifiers no longer identify the user as a slick, modern, and rebellious hipster.

Read that carefully: He's not saying that the music is stuck in a notion of the "golden age," but that the culture around jazz is. It's actually remarkably similar to Nicholas Payton's declaration that "jazz," as a construct that supports the music, lost its appeal a long time ago.

But frustratingly, that's where Ellenberger stops. Nicholas Payton has suggested "Black American Music" as a better frame of reference than "jazz." That suggestion frustrated a lot of people, but at least it got those people thinking. Here's where I would have liked to see Ellenberger's recommendations as to attracting an audience in addition to his critique of what didn't work. How can so-called jazz music catch up to culture?

This question has been implicitly answered by a number of folks discussed on this blog lately. The band BADBADNOTGOOD seems to be rejecting a lot of jazz culture outright. In contrast, the pianist Christian Sands seems to be embracing the jazz tradition, but infusing his music with contemporary influences. And a bunch of musicians are taking cues from punk rock (and under-emphasized parts of jazz history) with intimate DIY shows.

Another person who I think has some useful recommendations is the pianist Jason Moran. Conveniently, he was on NPR's Talk of the Nation two weeks ago, on the excuse of International Jazz Day, and these very issues came up:

I mean, you know, there's a thing that happens when we start to take the form for granted. So, I mean, even stylistically, if I'm looking at photographs of Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington with his 18-piece orchestra, impeccably dressed, sitting behind, you know, equally formatted music stands, all with the title 'Duke Ellington' — you know, like an immaculate set for a stage, as well.

You know, we take that form for granted about how to present the music. And I think to a degree, we have to rethink just how do we present this music in 2012 and for the future. I mean, it can't be on the same model that happened in 1908 or 1958, you know. It has to continue to move because the way the world works is not the same.

"For me, it's the recontextualization," Moran said earlier in the conversation. The music may be top-notch, and emotionally powerful to those used to its conventions — but how will it fit into modern lives? Moran is now curating jazz shows for the Kennedy Center, so starting next season, he'll have many more chances to recontextualize for audiences.

Moran's is hardly the only vision for presenting music in new ways, and we need to hear others. The last time the jazz community collectively agreed to argue about its audience was around Terry Teachout's 2009 op-ed "Can Jazz Be Saved?" I pointed it out then, and I will continue to now: Lamenting the loss of concertgoers is a lot more useful when you also suggest ways to win new ones.

More links from this week:

• Interesting discussions at George Colligan's blog this week. An informed opinion on the charge that music schools produce "cookie cutter" musicians. Some thoughts on sight reading, that misunderstood skill among the jazz community. And a low brass forum erupts.
• At the WBGO blog, there are interviews with master drummer and educator Charlie Persip and saxophonist Kenny Garrett, who you may know has recently put out a new studio album. Also, memories of Ron Carter and Jack DeJohnette from the JazzSet vaults.
• Capsulocity is a short video interview series with young (mostly jazz) musicians in New York. We mentioned it earlier this week but only in passing.
• This week in Esperanza Spalding: JazzTimes cover story. From one of A Blog Supreme's newest contributors.
• Guitarist Vernon Reid briefly talks Spectrum Road, the new jazz-rock supergroup with Jack Bruce (of Cream), John Medeski and Cindy Blackman Santana.
• Pianist Myra Melford is one of five winners of the 2012 Alpert Awards in the Arts. The award is worth $75,000.
• Lester Young, clarinetist. He was known as a tenor saxophonist, of course, but also kept a cheap metal clarinet on his arsenal. From Aesthetic, Not Anesthetic, who also recontextualizes, say, early cornetist Red Nichols.
• A new film about jazz in India is out. And the Times article manages to avoid all "Calcutta Cutie" references.
• The Jazz Gallery, a New York venue supporting emerging artists, needs to move and raise a whole bunch of money to do it. (NPR Music has recorded live from the Gallery in recent years.) Howard Mandel reports.
• More on Cecil Taylor, who is being feted this month in New York. Seth Colter Walls reviews an early tribute.
• At last, an obituary for iconic jazz matron Phoebe Jacobs.
• Bix Beiderbecke's prep school dorm room is being destroyed.
• Destination: Out posts a rare Cecil Taylor bit.
• The Jazz Session spoke with pianist George Colligan and saxophonist Steve Lehman.
• The Checkout features student jazz ensemble recordings, from WBGO's celebration of Jazz Appreciation Month.

Elsewhere at NPR Music:

 

• Endangered Blood: Tiny Desk Concert.
• JazzSet features a Miles Davis/Gil Evans tribute from the Monterey Jazz Festival.
• Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz features Daryl Sherman's tribute to Johnny Mercer.
• Violinist Scott Tixier is featured on Song of the Day.

I was an 18-year-old saxophone student at Berklee College of Music when my new best friend, a trumpeter named Willy Olenick, told me about The Fringe. "You've got to hear this band," he said. "They're an amazing trio. You can hear them any Monday night at Michael's and you're nuts not to go."

Willy didn't mention anything about what style they played, and I didn't ask. I just took his advice and went.

Michael's was a small, narrow bar behind Symphony Hall in Boston. There was a WPA mural on the wall. They only served beer and wine, and let's just say a contingent of a few regulars might have been there just for the Rolling Rocks. (In fact, they may have been there all day for the Rolling Rocks.) A man named Bill was at the front door at night, collecting the $2 cover charge. Michael himself manned the bar.

Frankly, on first hearing The Fringe, I wasn't sure what was happening. The trio took the stage, and I don't think I was even sure when the set started. At some point, I realized that this music was not like the other jazz I had heard. Until that time, my jazz listening had been mostly big bands and straight-ahead, swinging jazz groups.

I'd never really heard so-called avant-garde music before, but I stayed for the set, trying to make sense of the sounds. I remember thinking, "I've got to check this out more. There's something here and I don't understand it." I didn't know why, but I found myself looking forward to the next Monday. And then the next Monday, and the next.

After about a year of Mondays, Michael spoke to me: "You're here every week — why don't you be the bartender?" I thought for two seconds and said, "Sure."

 

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The Fringe is the trio of virtuosos George Garzone (saxophone), Bob Gullotti (drums) and John Lockwood (bass). All three members teach at Berklee College of Music, but they also meet on Mondays to improvise freely together. The Fringe has met on Mondays for 40 years now; that's four decades, two score.

For three of those years, I heard the band play every week. As my musical sensibility was taking on a new dimension, the band became akin to an addiction. No matter what was going on in my life, from college-student drama to bigger issues like my father's death during freshman year, I found myself counting down the time to Monday night. Many times, I've likened it to therapy. No matter what's going on in my life, I leave a Fringe gig and know that everything is going to be all right.

I was delighted recently when drummer Bob Gullotti told me the same thing, in an interview with the band I conducted for DownBeat. A student of master percussionist Alan Dawson, Gullotti lays down intricate webs of rhythmic foundation under the band in a demonstration of true effortless mastery. His steady thunder is a driving force in the music, but it isn't overbearing. There was a period when he brought a huge gong every week and wrenched bowing sounds from it.

Tenor saxophonist George Garzone grew up in a family band and has the most remarkable sense of melody you'll ever hear in free jazz, coupled with a harmonic depth few have achieved. (Cosmically apropos, he shares a birthday with John Coltrane.) Bassist John Lockwood is at his best when his feet are to the fire and he has to invent a new path through the music.

The bass chair is the only one that has changed in 40 years. After 12 years, original Fringe bassist Rich Appleman left to balance his responsibilities of being the chairman of the bass department at Berklee, gigging in Boston and raising his growing family. He retires from Berklee this year.

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Eventually, Michael's closed, and The Fringe moved on to The Willow in Somerville for the next 17 years. By that time, I was on the road with a rock band six nights a week, but any Monday I was home, I was at The Willow.

Over the years, I've seen many wonderful players sit in with the band, notably saxophonist Joe Lovano, pianist Kenny Werner and bassist Scott Lee. I always thought that these three world-class musicians were the only ones who could keep up with The Fringe. Usually, if someone sat in with them, it just slowed the band down — or, worse yet, got in their way. I suppose this makes me a bit of a "Fringe purist," although I recently heard Lovano sit in (all these years later) and it was still delightful. Joe is tuned in to the band's wavelength.

Saxophonist Jerry Bergonzi's quintet shares Mondays with The Fringe at The Lily Pad in Cambridge now. He and Garzone have a great mutual admiration, and I'm told Jerry sits in with them sometimes. I can't wait to hear this.

I've lived in New York since 1985, but I still try to see The Fringe when I can — I've made the journey twice in the last two months. Really, I've gone to hear The Fringe every chance I've had since 1976, and I expect I'll continue doing so as long as I'm physically able. In fact, I expect that when my time on earth comes to a close, my personal soundtrack will be the music of The Fringe.

But I have no plans to leave this planet now. The Fringe's 40th-anniversary concert is this weekend, and I'm driving a contingent of New Yorkers up to see it.

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Claire Daly is a saxophonist and composer. She is touring the Pacific Northwest with her quartet in early June. You can follow her on Twitter at @cdbjazz.

The Undead Music Festival, which lifted off last night, has grown every year. On Friday, it will outgrow New York City.

Now in its third year, this jazz festival typically seizes small pockets of Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, as it did yesterday, building immersive urban playgrounds where largely young audiences flood venues with colored admissions bracelets. It is jazz as both heady experience and social happening. But on Friday's Night of the Living DIY, the venues scatter across five Brooklyn neighborhoods, as well as a half-dozen cities across the U.S.

Still, the festival's expansion — and its use of "do-it-yourself" spaces rather than traditional clubs — is really a way of asking audiences to think smaller, to look closer to home. To turn off (computers and stereos), tune out (from your MP3 collection) and drop in (on a snug, local gathering).

As the head of Capitalbop, an organization that seeks to engage local jazz audiences in Washington, D.C., and presents informal shows in service of that goal, I find this development exciting. Search & Restore, one of the groups responsible for Undead, has decided to feature living-room venues simply because they are already thriving: A quiet movement of artist-produced, anti-corporate jazz concerts is creeping across the country. Here are a few of the motivations that I've perceived for this idea, and for Undead's decision to embrace it.

 

1. Jazz thrives in unmediated spaces. The venues at the Night of the Living DIY range from artist studios to musicians' lofts. Some don't have event permits, let alone liquor licenses. One, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, is the living room of Search & Restore director Adam Schatz's friends. In these settings, "You're just in a room with the music, and that's what's important," Schatz told me earlier this week. "On the artistic side, that's usually where it starts — people playing this music in their homes — and it's kind of cool to perform it in a similar, raw setting. Not just physically raw, but emotionally raw: There's a kind of vulnerability to [these spaces] that I think really magnifies the humanity of the music, which is what makes it so special."

In my experience, Schatz is exactly right. With a crowd of curious listeners bunched up in a small room, nothing but a share of the floor or a spongy couch to sit on, the musical experience is remarkably direct. It's no coincidence that historically, jazz's most generous gardens of innovation have included low-lit New Orleans brothels, Harlem brownstones and Soho lofts.

2. A technology-drowned society demands raw experiences. The critic Whitney Balliett famously described jazz as "the sound of surprise." As I see it, this is the music's strongest claim to importance today.

Many of us now attach ourselves to machines, and they're increasingly engineered to deny us surprises. The Google ads that accompany our browsing form a closed circuit, tailored to the terms we've searched or the subject line we've sent. The IT age has brought us mammoth businesses with a firmer grip on our everyday actions than ever before, and a more insidious ability to invent their own necessity. Last month, in a New York Times op-ed, psychologist Sherry Turkle weighed in: "We've become accustomed to a new way of being 'alone together.'" (The jazz allusion seems incidental.) "[W]e are together, but each of us is in our own bubble, furiously connected to keyboards and tiny touch screens."

The focus at the Night of the Living DIY combats all that by building community, one makeshift room at a time. Close-knit gatherings, where women and men are urgently making music just feet away from their listeners, are an excellent way to encourage triumphant compassion. Schatz is conscientious about the importance of such lifelines to humanity. "For the large part, social media makes me sick to my stomach," Schatz said. "The question for me is, 'How can I connect people with things that are so explosively real and present that they can sort of combat the idea that everything you need in life is on the Internet?' [Jazz] is something that happens differently every single time."

Lucas Gillan is a drummer who co-runs a concert series called House Party Starting in Chicago. For the Night of the Living DIY, he's helping to present a show in a gallery. "I feel like it is very appropriate" to showcase jazz in homes, he said. "It's a conversational music. You go to a party to talk to people you've never met before and to have a conversation, and hopefully you can learn something new about somebody. And you go to a party to hear some music that's going to be in the moment and part of the atmosphere."

3. Doing it yourself is easier than ever before. For all that the Internet has done to lure us out of the crowd and into a cloud, it has also fostered an equal and opposite force: democratizing the tools of making and doing. Individuals now have remarkable means for entrepreneurship. No matter the realm — presenting live music, assembling a recreational sports league, community organizing — it's relatively simple to build something that guides people to each other. Inviting all your friends to a house concert, and encouraging them to invite all of their own friends, is as simple as creating a Facebook event.

Search & Restore, which started in 2007 as a small concert-presenting outfit, blossomed online. Schatz launched a website in 2009 as a hub for promoting the organization's shows, plus other mutinous elements of the New York City jazz scene. The following year, a crowd fundraising campaign on Kickstarter earned him more than $76,000 and a profile in The New York Times' Sunday edition. Schatz used the money to launch a video documentation initiative, and today Search & Restore's website features about 100 videos of live jazz performances around New York.

The means of growth might have been digital, but the ends remain planted in the real world. "I'm always conscious and concerned about the thousands of people who have never gotten the chance to experience this music," Schatz said, defaulting to talking about its live expression. "For now, doing it through the videos is an important first step."

Jamie Breiwick is a trumpeter and the co-founder of Milwaukee Jazz Vision, an advocacy organization that will present a Night of the Living DIY show at a multipurpose arts space. His group's website is robust, offering a calendar of Milwaukee jazz events, a guide to the scene's hotspots and a multimedia archive. However, "the ultimate goal in our case is to get people to come out and see shows live — get people out of the digital world and into the real world," Breiwick said. "Using Facebook and Twitter and all that stuff is just another method by which to let people know what's really happening."

4. The punk ideal of DIY resonates among alternative-minded youth. When Schatz named the festival Undead, the idea was to resist the idea that jazz is "dead" or "dying," while evoking some accepted tokens of outré youth culture: namely, zombies. The term DIY, as it applies to music, dates back to punk rock's origins in the late 1970s, when bands resisting or rejected by commercial venues and record labels struck out on their own. They held their own concerts, self-released records and published stapled-together fanzines. Undead appeals to a similar type of audience: young, educated, imbued with (perhaps more vague) anti-establishment notions of hipness, searching for genuine experiences.

This isn't without its perils. To me, Undead and its sister jazz festival Winter Jazzfest fail to attract enough young people who aren't middle-class, white males. Aligning with an underground method of presentation potentially brings us further from inclusivity: Who is being invited to the performances, and who feels welcome?

5. From musicians' perspective, DIY pays. Schatz thinks traditional jazz clubs, with drink minimums and hounding wait staffs, have done as much to harm jazz's popularity as have those clubs' own scarcity. (It's why Search & Restore typically favors standing rock clubs and other alternative venues.) But as a saxophonist, Schatz also sees clear advantages for musicians to playing at house parties and artist-run spaces. "Aside from the fact that it's hard to get a club to even check out your music, it's much more likely you'll have a crowd [at a DIY show]," Schatz said. "It's much more likely you'll have people there who actually care. And it's a good way to meet people."

Some of the shows at Friday's nationwide Night of the Living DIY are being organized by people whom Schatz met while crisscrossing the country with his band. "Adam actually played in my living room last May," Gillan said.

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Giovanni Russonello is a regular contributor to JazzTimes and the founder of Capitalbop.

As a follow-up to yesterday's thoughts around BADBADNOTGOOD, the improvising band that many folks are talking about, I'd like to submit this brief video interview with young pianist Christian Sands.

Sands is a product of the modern jazz education system — he graduated from the Manhattan School of Music, one of the most prestigious jazz programs out there, and studied with both Jason Moran and Dr. Billy Taylor. He got his first big break when he joined Christian McBride's Inside Straight, which brought him on tour around the world. He's currently studying composition with Vijay Iyer — he was literally in the middle of a lesson when All Things Considered interviewed Iyer in March.

As you can see, Sands carries himself with a soft-spoken humility. He also happens to be a very good and very in-demand musician. I met him briefly when he stopped by NPR with Ben Williams' band, and you can hear him on Piano Jazz and playing with the Olatuja Project.

All this would seem to make him the anti-BBNG musician: possesses a music school pedigree, is polite, demonstrates competence in straight-ahead jazz, plays a lot of seated shows in suits, actually looks up to older musicians. But he's but a 23-year-old with a voice that occasionally cracks — merely two years older than BBNG's oldest member. And check out the tune Sands is playing throughout in the background: Kanye West's "Runaway." (It becomes more obvious around 6:21, when you can hear Sands' riff on the signature "repeating single note on beat three" motif.)

Like BBNG's members, who cover Kanye's "Flashing Lights," Sands came of age musically as Kanye West rose to pop culture superstardom. Naturally, Kanye's beats are part of Sands' musical lexicon too. (So is the popular hip-hop duo OutKast, whose song "Prototype" Sands also briefly talks about arranging.) Just because he came up in jazz's mainstream doesn't mean that Sands doesn't think about how his art interfaces with pop culture today. I like to think it's given him more tools to deal with that, actually.

I'd like to point out one more bit of this interview I find revealing:

 

A strong thing that me and Dr. Taylor spoke about was how to keep [jazz] going. In this kind of society now, is everything is Internet driven, and television driven, and radio driven. And a lot of the stuff that we do as jazz musicians caters to just jazz musicians, you know? It doesn't really cater to TV, or doesn't really cater to mainstream radio. And it's not on purpose — it's just because we just like to have fun, and a lot of our stuff borders [on] 10, 12 minutes. And they don't have that kind of time sometimes. So the thing that Dr. Taylor really talked about was: Bring your audience with you.

The success that BBNG enjoys owes a lot to the fact that the band has brought its audience with it. The band has done more than meet its young fans halfway — it's given away plenty of free downloads and YouTube clips and cover tunes, and booked its shows in standing-room venues, and communicated often in photos and Tweets and strongly-worded interviews.

In comparison, the jazz community of recent decades — musicians, fans and even bloggers like this one — could generally do a much better job of communicating why live improvisation is still relevant, and why swing and the blues are forever relevant. But Sands is at least thinking hard about this issue, much as Billy Taylor still was not long before he died in late 2010, at age 89. If you were listening to Kanye West like most other 23-year-olds, and simultaneously wearing suits to time-out-of-mind jazz clubs and fancy performing arts centers — for gigs that your non-musician peers rarely attend — how could you not think about it?

Something like Capsulocity, the folks behind this series of video interview/performances with young New-York-based musicians — well, it's not the answer. But it certainly could be a part of the storytelling, the translation to the present tense, that more jazz artists deserve.

Hello, fans of the Toronto band BADBADNOTGOOD. Thanks for stopping by, truly. I'm delighted that somebody turned you on to the joys of improvised instrumental music; as you can see, it's an experience like none other.

The three young band members — "No one above the age of 21 was involved in the making of this album," their new mixtape claims — create music that could theoretically be called "jazz," but you probably heard about them from a friend or media outlet for whom jazz isn't a top priority. (In fact, the consensus among professional jazz musicians and journalists seems to be notably against them, and further remarks still trickle in.) Their repertoire merges jazz training with their musical milieu: covers of songs by au courant musicians, extrapolations upon hip-hop beats and a few original compositions too.

BBNG is currently on a short U.S. tour, including a New York City stop and a gig backing singer Frank Ocean at Coachella. That's led to another wave of press about the band's connection to the music of today. Being a jazz journalist, I'd like to point out that this connection essentially describes the entire history of jazz: Musicians have always adapted pop music of the age to their own ends. So if you're into what BBNG is doing, here are five other bands who think similarly, but aren't as well-known outside the jazz world. For the sake of simplicity, I've picked only trios of keyboards, bass and drums — just like BADBADNOTGOOD itself.

 

So if they're so great and attuned to the present moment, why aren't these bands I've discussed — with the exception of Robert Glasper's — attaining the buzz that BBNG is? Part of it has to do with the inflammatory nature of BBNG's public comments toward jazz education and jazz tradition in certain recent interviews. That makes it easy for journalists who don't know much about current jazz (one Vice magazine interviewer wrote that "jazz blows" in the first sentence of her lede) to contrast this band to an incompletely-portrayed establishment. Meanwhile, musicians whose careers have benefited from immersion within the jazz community — even those who eventually make art their mentors may not approve of — are much less likely to spurn their peers, elders and teachers.

Another part has to do with BBNG's savvy in online self-promotion. The band has released two free mixtapes, two free live recordings, a Tumblr, a Twitter feed and several YouTube videos of their covers, all with elegant graphic design and CPTL LTTR branding and aesthetic in-jokes. (Pig mask, anyone?) Jazz PR representation, on balance, has failed to execute this sort of 21st century grassroots promotional activity. A general lack of institutional wherewithal accounts for some of this. More importantly, making music videos and free studio recordings requires financial resources that professional musicians and record companies aren't willing to risk. (This is especially true for cover songs, which require copyright clearances to record legally.) Record companies don't expect to recoup their investments on most jazz artists, whose track record of commercial success is not stellar. And professional musicians aren't as apt to self-promote for free as BBNG is: They have careers and often families, and expect to be paid for their services, not unreasonably.

I do admire BADBADNOTGOOD for making original music that feels personal to its members, and articulating its connection with the zeitgeist. Frustrated by a flat-footed prevailing order that wasn't comprehending its ideas, the band took its message directly to fans. That's a lesson in hustle many in jazz might learn from.

But I also believe that plenty of astounding bands have a similar outlook when it comes to creativity. All of those mentioned here have more years of study and bandstand experience under their belts, which translates to greater depth of creative possibility. There are many more, too: Fellow piano trios The Bad Plus, the Brad Mehldau Trio, Medeski Martin and Wood or Jason Moran and the Bandwagon have been celebrated for their pop music connections for over a decade now.

The fact that you haven't heard much about these bands is a problem the jazz community ought to address. But in the correct light, their art ought to speak for itself.

From the first downbeat of the first Center City Jazz Festival in Philadelphia, you could hear history in the air — and maybe history being made.

The Wade Dean Enspiration, a gutsy young quintet, led off the festival with "Gingerbread Boy" by Jimmy Heath, one of Philly's many homegrown jazz legends. It was 1 p.m. last Saturday, and the dim carpeted room upstairs at Fergie's Pub was starting to fill up.

For the next six hours, Dean, a saxophonist, and his fellow bandleaders would strive not only to honor the legacy embodied by Heath and others, but also to bring forward their own art, a music of today. There was a larger goal as well: to revive a year-round jazz presence in Philadelphia, where the jazz club scene has all but collapsed.

The Center City Jazz Festival is the brainchild of trombonist Ernest Stuart, 28. Buoyed by a Kickstarter campaign, which exceeded its goal of $16,000, Stuart took a cue from New York's Undead and Winter Jazzfests. On Saturday afternoon, he booked 16 bands at four venues within short walking distance.

Of these, Chris's Jazz Café and Time Restaurant book jazz regularly. Fergie's, an old-school Irish bar, and Milkboy, a coffee shop and rock venue, do not. But for one day — possibly the most significant day for Philly jazz in years — these establishments came together for a grassroots showcase of one of the city's greatest cultural assets.

"I'm so proud of my good friend Ernest," said drummer Justin Faulkner as the day ended. "This festival was what we needed to lift our spirits."

Wade Dean concurred: "He did a damn good job. Ernest came through."

 

The four CCJF venues are mostly dotted along Sansom Street downtown, near the stretch of Broad Street known as the Avenue of the Arts. (One venue, Milkboy, is on neighboring Chestnut Street.) Val Brown, a patron at Fergie's and an area resident in the '70s and '80s, recalled how Sansom was once blighted, a shell of abandoned industry, "the street you hurried past to get to Market Street."

Today Sansom Street is hardly pretty — a narrow and often malodorous lane of dumpsters and parking garage exits — but also decently sprinkled with businesses. To walk here is to see immediately how events like CCJF can brighten urban spaces.

Unfortunately, City Hall didn't bite. Stuart sought government help early on, but a meeting with officials "wasn't very fruitful," he said. (In fairness, he added, "We had just launched the Kickstarter a week before, and we'd only raised about $1,500 at that point.") To his credit, Mayor Michael Nutter held a press conference on Jazz Day (April 13, as declared by the U.S. Conference of Mayors) and spoke of his own personal stake in Philly's jazz culture. But in spite of this, the CCJF had to fend for itself.

Stuart did line up advertising support from Yelp and Philadelphia Magazine; a donation from the coffee maker L'Aube Torrefaction; and free live sound and recording from Turtle Studios. Otherwise, he said, "We just went to the people, and the people showed up, just like they showed up today."

Bassist Mike Boone, a mentor to many younger players in town, looks at Philly as an undervalued music capital. "When people think of us they think of Rocky, the sports teams, they think of cheese steaks and hoagies," he says. "Music is kind of way down on that list."

But Philly music history is easily as rich as Nashville's, Boone noted, and its stylistic range is arguably broader. John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Lee Morgan, Benny Golson and countless others came from the city. The impact of organ greats Jimmy Smith, Don Patterson, Shirley Scott and Trudy Pitts is still widely felt. Gamble & Huff, the famed soul and R&B producers, pioneered a "Philly Sound" that rivaled Motown in influence, and many jazz musicians came on board as session players. All these elements converge to give Philly jazz a kind of gritty, groove-oriented populism, readily apparent at the CCJF.

The city boasts a rich avant-garde legacy as well. It remains the home base of Marshall Allen and the Sun Ra Arkestra, who have done DIY music promotion for decades. And some of Philly's more "outside" players were already engaged elsewhere on Saturday: A big band led by saxophonist Bobby Zankel was performing in collaboration with AACM leading light Muhal Richard Abrams. Ars Nova Workshop spearheaded the event as part of its ongoing concert series.

Philly's network of left-of-center improvisers, not unlike their brethren in Seattle, have had some success tapping alternative spaces and forging opportunities through sheer will. With the CCJF, might the straight-ahead jazz scene be poised to do the same?

At Time, a four-year-old restaurant and bar with no bandstand, soul-jazz and Hammond B-3 organ ruled the day. Leading off was Three Blind Mice, a cooking and subtly inventive trio with saxophonist Victor North, organist Lucas Brown and drummer Wayne Smith. In fact, Chris' Jazz Cafe was the only venue with an acoustic piano. The Roland digital keyboard at Milkboy wasn't ideal, but the Fender Rhodes at Fergie's Pub lent a warm and enveloping modernism to bands led by tenor saxophonist Dahi Divine, bassist Alex Claffy and drummer Joe Truglio. Years ago, when jazz could be heard in Philly's innumerable neighborhood bars, the Rhodes was a necessity. These days it can be a benefit.

At Milkboy, festival founder Stuart led a group with Boone, Faulkner and pianist Jason Shattil, courageously featuring his trombone as the only horn. Vocalist Venissa Santí followed with Afro-Cuban jazz of high spirit and technical accomplishment. Then Faulkner returned for a smashing trio set led by altoist and Roy Haynes bandmate Jaleel Shaw, with Luques Curtis on bass.

By the time the formidable young pianist George Burton played around 5 p.m., Chris' was turning people away (including me). "It's difficult with the four-venue thing," said Terrance Leach, manager of Time, earlier in the day. "So many tickets sold, and I'm a little worried that everyone's going to rush to one venue at once." Problems like these have bedeviled the New York festivals, but they're good problems to have.

You could barely squeeze into Chris' for the 8 p.m. headlining set by renowned trumpeter Sean Jones. (Lo and behold, there was Burton on piano, Luques Curtis on bass and the indefatigable Faulkner on drums, with Brian Hogans on alto.) Jones, an Ohio native now based in Pittsburgh, had a moment when he looked out and saw Dolores Fambrough, widow of recently-departed Philly bassist Charles Fambrough. "My first professional recording was with Charles Fambrough," he said, eyes welling up. "He was like a father to me, and you are like a mom."

The impact of losing elders like Fambrough can't be overstated. Nor can losing community-fostering venues like Ortlieb's Jazzhaus (though Ortlieb's Lounge is now presenting jazz once a week). Younger players, in Philly and everywhere, face tough odds as they build careers.

But Philly's resounding success stories are many. Faulkner, now playing with Branford Marsalis and Kurt Rosenwinkel, is just the latest. Rosenwinkel belongs on the list himself. So do Uri Caine, Christian McBride, Orrin Evans, Ari Hoenig, Joey DeFrancesco, Jaleel Shaw and Johnathan Blake.

There's no reason to think the list will stop growing. The question is whether Philadelphia can rebuild a bustling jazz-club culture of its own.

Standing in Chris' waiting for Sean Jones to start, Ernest Stuart seemed elated, no doubt exhausted. "There are so many unknowns with an event like this," he said. "I woke up this morning just full of nerves. But I was so pleasantly surprised.

"The people coming up to me are people I don't know. I'm so happy that they gave the music a chance, and they loved it. It's up to the venues to keep this momentum going."

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David R. Adler is a freelance writer formerly of Philadelphia.

More from this week:

• International Jazz Day concert videos are up. JazzTimes had a writeup. So did Jazz Beyond Jazz.
• Cecil Taylor in The New York Times. Ben Ratliff sits down with the great pianist for "five hours over two days," and then some with his artistic progeny. There's also a series of Taylor solo and tribute performances coming up soon in New York.
• Don Was, new head of Blue Note Records, is profiled by Nate Chinen in the Times. Public revelations: The label has signed Wayne Shorter, Terence Blanchard, Derrick Hodge, Jose James, Aaron Neville, Van Morrison. New Ravi Coltrane, Lionel Loueke and Joe Lovano records are in the works.
• An alternate list of 50 great jazz albums, from Phil Freeman. New, old, both.
• Cuban pianist Omar Sosa is coming "home" to the San Francisco Bay Area for a gig. Here's a look at how musicians meet musicians and make themselves feel at "home."
• Dan Morgenstern, eminent jazz critic/historian, speaks with WBGO after retiring from the Institute of Jazz Studies. Also: For a look at some throwbacks, check out "This week in JazzSet history."
• Three Monk Competition winners, all vocalists, talk about the effect of the award on their careers. This story is actually written by a jazz vocalist for the Washington Post.
• A new documentary film paints a portrait of jazz in Washington, D.C. right now. A trailer is up.
• Neneh Cherry (daughter of Don Cherry) and The Thing (Scandinavian free-jazz trio) cover rapper MF Doom. Wild, no?
• Lessons for all teachers, from jazz-band instructors.
• JazzWax spoke with composer-arranger Van Alexander.
• The Jazz Session spoke with guitarist Anders Nilsson and pianist Dan Cray.
• The Checkout replayed this gig.

Elsewhere at NPR Music:

 

• Lynne Arriale plays the KPLU studios with a trio. There's video here.
• Jason Moran was on Talk of the Nation for International Jazz Day. A wonderful interview.
• Our intern Dominic listens to Bitches Brew for the very first time.
• JazzSet features the Moshier-Lebrun Collective's Studs Terkel project.
• Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz features Ellis Larkins.
• Alfredo Rodriguez is featured on Song of the Day.

Today is the 75th birthday of Ron Carter, one of the most influential and widely recorded bassists in jazz history. With appearances on more than 2,000 records, his career has spanned the past six decades and is still going strong today.

Carter achieved international attention as a member of Miles Davis' legendary "second great quintet" during the mid- to late 1960s. With nimble and accurate technique, his clear lines always kept the pulse steadily moving and synchronized perfectly with everyone on stage. This reliability landed him sideman gigs with countless other musicians: McCoy Tyner, Eric Dolphy, Herbie Hancock and Horace Silver, just to name a few legends.

Carter's soloing ability is not to be ignored, of course, and he has made his mark as a bandleader since the 1970s. Nevertheless, the biggest legacy he leaves today for younger generations of bass players can be summed up in an anecdote that I've heard from him, via D.C.-area bassist Herman Burney: A $100 bill slipped under the strings of an upright bass stays under the upper section of the neck (the instrument's lower pitch range), but falls if placed farther down the neck (in the higher pitch range). It's symbolic — bassists make the bulk of their money by supporting groups, not by taking solos in the higher register.

Five recordings are not enough to fully reflect the entirety of a career spanning more than half a century, but the following selections provide an adequate sample.

 

NPR Music intern extraordinaire Dominic Martinez is soon to graduate college and leave us with a lot more work. But before his last day tomorrow (sob), he also left us with some of his own writing.

Our friends at the All Songs Considered blog have "a recurring series in which we ask our unimaginably young interns to review classic albums they've never heard before." Because we have awesome interns, and because everyone has lacunae in their listening histories, the series lends fresh perspective to the classics. Young Dominic is a jazz bassist — a quite capable one, I say — so he decided to put his ear to Miles Davis' Bitches Brew. As he tells it, he may have just learned to like jazz fusion. Sort of.

More from Dominic soon. Hooray Dominic! [NPR Music: "You've Never Heard Miles Davis' 'Bitches Brew'!?"]

P.S. Oh, like you had heard every single great canonical jazz record when you were a senior in college. Come now.

Today is International Jazz Day, as decreed by Herbie Hancock and UNESCO. The centerpiece events are two all-star concerts, held at sunrise and sunset. The sunrise show was held in Congo Square in New Orleans, seemingly a nod to the dawn of jazz. Tonight's evening program takes the "international" part of International Jazz Day quite literally:

The worldwide programs and events will conclude in New York City at the United Nations General Assembly Hall with an historic sunset concert certain to be one of the most heralded jazz celebrations of all time, with confirmed artists including Herbie Hancock, Tony Bennett, Terence Blanchard, Richard Bona, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Candido, Ron Carter, Vinnie Colaiuta, Robert Cray, Eli Degibri, Jack DeJohnette, Sheila E., Jimmy Heath, Hiromi, Zakir Hussain, Chaka Khan, Angelique Kidjo, Lang Lang, Joe Lovano, Romero Lubambo, Shankar Mahadevan, Wynton Marsalis, Hugh Masekela, Christian McBride, Danilo Pérez, Tineke Postma, Dianne Reeves, Troy Roberts, Bobby Sanabria, Wayne Shorter, Esperanza Spalding, Susan Tedeschi, Derek Trucks and Tarek Yamani. George Duke will serve as Musical Director. Confirmed Co-Hosts include Robert De Niro, Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman and Quincy Jones.

That lineup promises improvising musicians from Cameroon, Cuba, Israel, Japan, India, Benin, China, Brazil, South Africa, Panama, The Netherlands, Australia, Lebanon and, of course, the multicultural United States.

Tonight's show begins at 7:30 p.m. ET and can be streamed live online at jazzday.com. This morning's show is already archived, along with the International Jazz Day kickoff event last week in Paris.