minew

You will definitely sweat. You may want to set aside the hours from 12-7 PM for eating (indoors) and napping. Tourism in general and the House of Blues specifically have done a lot of damage to our local music scene over the past 5-10 years. To paraphrase Frank Rich, they have turned a culture into a commodity. Even the venerable Snug Harbor has become a guidebook staple; don't be surprised if you're seated next to Germans wearing Mardi Gras beads (in July) and conventioneers wearing name tags. That said, you can still catch some decent trad at Preservation Hall and the Palm Court (on Decatur). THE street is now Frenchman Street, not Bourbon Street. I like the Spotted Cat there for The Jazz Vipers, a dissolute trad-cum-Django outfit. Also try Cafe Brasil, usually for something Afro-Carribean. Free jazz occasionally breaks out at DBA or Dragon's Den. Hard-to-find trad CDs in stock at the Louisiana Music Factory on Decatur. More later...

Go for the box or bubble, I say. I've got two boys and that's what I'm contemplating. Actually, I am contemplating moving them to another culture. Now, I'm sure that other culture will screw them up in different ways but at least I won't see it coming.

YOU GOT A PROBLEM WITH SKIFFLE, RUDIE? TELL IT TO SHAGGY

another endorsement for Fripp/Eno "No Pussyfooting." Started digging this while in high school in the 80's, a first foray into creative/improvised music, of a sort.

Die Like a Dog trio plus Kidd Jordan at the CAC in New Orleans, Spring, 2001. Radically changed my listening habits forever.

Actually a tie between "Portrait" and the "Tony Bennett/Bill Evans Album"

Invitation accepted. I liked "Malkovich" best. It's originality, humor, and pacing just tickled me in the right spot. I also dug the point about our need to live vicariously through celebrities - even when they're eating leftover Chinese and ordering bathroom rugs from catalogs- to the point that we lose ourselves. The freshness of Kaufmann's style when this came out really grabbed me - an impact that can't be duplicated once you're inured to it a little. "Adapation" was, I'll admit, just a clever trick - but so very clever. Special resononce for writers (I'm not one.). Essentially, though, another movie about the movies. Again the humor and pacing kept me entertained throughout, even the final segment that many disliked. "Sunshine", for the most part, seemed an expansion of the ideas contained in the subconscious sequence from Malkovich - a slower and watered-down one. The big idea- we're better off with our experiences and pasts, warts and all- is a good one, but not unique. Think of Capra's "Wonderful Life"

A second for the nomination of Goodfellas. Maybe it wasn't the best film not to win an Oscar but the fact that it lost to "Dances with Wolves" is just appalling. Beyond appalling, almost comic, is that Kevin Costner won Best Director for "Dances" over Scorsese for "Goodfellas". Mulholland Drive, which should have also been recognized for screeplay, direction (Lynch), and acting (Watts) was also snubbed. Too weird, I guess. Also, in typical Oscar fashion, Charlie Kaufmann was recognized for his third best film this year after his best two (Malkovich, Adaptation) were passed over.

Definitely looking forward to this, esp. to the rare opp. to hear Ware and Shipp w/ Drake Sal- you may already be aware that Fred appears with Wm. Parker and Hamid in a quartet setting along with Kidd Jordan. (I enjoy local hero Kidd but comments from some other posters lead me to think he may be an acquired taste - one that I've definitely acquired.) They can be heard on Eremite release "2 Days in April" and on the "Vision Live" cd/dvd combo.

I agree that this film can sustain you through more repeated viewings than just about any other. After a while, it functions like a drug. The only film I've watched near as many times was 'Repo Man', another film that has a lot of its meaning in its structure ('lattice of coincidence').

The Fugs! On ESP, no less. http://www.thefugs.com/history_fugs.html

London Jazz Composers' Orchestra

Followup: Has there been any discussion of this group on this board? (Search didn't turn up anything.)

THE BAD PLUS AND THE STATE OF JAZZ. Jazz Beat by David Adler As Grammy Award categories go, "Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical" is far from the sexiest. But this year's slate of nominees merit a closer look. There was Smile by Brian Wilson, Feels Like Home by Norah Jones, The Girl in the Other Room by Diana Krall, and Genius Loves Company (last night's victor), the final recording by Ray Charles (on which Jones and Krall both appear). Then there was the underdog: Give, the second Columbia Records offering from The Bad Plus, an instrumental jazz trio with avant-garde leanings--on paper, not a strong contender for mainstream recognition, much less a Grammy nod. The group's unlikely success, and the resulting backlash, tells us much about the self-defeating outlook of many of today's jazz advocates. Pianist Ethan Iverson, bassist Reid Anderson, and drummer David King are old friends in their thirties, originally from Minnesota and Wisconsin. (Iverson and Anderson now live in New York.) In May 2000 they got together to play. On a lark, they tried a cover of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," which Iverson, immersed in jazz and twentieth-century classical music, didn't even know. Later in the year they recorded the Nirvana song, ABBA's "Knowing Me, Knowing You," Rodgers and Hart's "Blue Moon," and five smart and slightly disturbed original pieces. They released their first album, The Bad Plus, on the Barcelona-based Fresh Sound New Talent imprint. It was largely ignored, like most of the excellent music on that label (including three previous albums each by Iverson and Anderson). In early 2002, after some maneuvering and a few lucky breaks, The Bad Plus was signed to Columbia Records. Once the label of Duke Ellington and Miles Davis, Columbia today has hardly a jazz roster to speak of. But Yves Beauvais, formerly of Atlantic Records, came to Columbia's jazz A&R department wanting to shake things up. He did just that. Following the release of These Are The Vistas, The Bad Plus's 2003 Columbia debut (recorded by the influential rock engineer Tchad Blake), the trio received adulatory coverage in Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other publications that barely cover jazz at all. The tenor of the praise was striking. Andy Langer of Esquire wondered, "Can one album single-handedly make jazz relevant again?" Some of the niche jazz press was just as enthusiastic. In Jazz Times, the U.K.-based critic Stuart Nicholson proclaimed Vistas "one of the most important jazz albums in more than a decade." (I hailed the band's "strong melodies" and "broad emotional spectrum" in Downbeat.) The Bad Plus had vaulted from the jazz underground to the top of the media heap. Backed by Columbia's p.r. and financial muscle, The Bad Plus sold plenty of records and played to big and receptive crowds. It landed the most coveted gig in jazz: a week at the Village Vanguard in New York. Novice jazz listeners, won over by the trio's earnest but off-the-wall covers of songs like Blondie's "Heart of Glass," Aphex Twin's "Flim," Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive," and Black Sabbath's "Iron Man," were better able to digest the band's challenging original material, which filled about 70 percent of a typical set. Iverson, wearing a suit, would sometimes recite song lyrics in a grave monotone, or fling off his tie with operatic ardor, or stare catatonically at the audience while David King played a drum solo on "Freelance Robotics." Some jazz insiders loved it. Others, annoyed by the rock songs and the shtick, sharpened their knives. "The Bad Plus finally convinces me that the downfall of civilized humanity is upon us," said the Latin jazz drummer Bobby Sanabria last year in a Downbeat interview. Bill Milkowski, the author and critic, denounced the group in a special pro-and-con feature for Jazz Times. But Bill Frisell, the celebrated guitarist, defended them, telling Downbeat: "What they're doing is the real deal; it's what music is all about." Heated debates like these have roiled jazz at least since the emergence of bebop in the mid-1940s. Although the attacks on The Bad Plus sometimes entailed specific musical criticisms, it seemed the intent was more to swing the pendulum the other way: to answer the early praise with outright calumny. In the end this didn't reveal much about The Bad Plus. It revealed more about the jazz cognoscenti's tortured view of commercial success itself. One word describes the status quo in the jazz community, and in most arts communities: scarcity. Gigs, recording contracts, press coverage, and even health insurance (not to mention salaried writing jobs) are in short supply. Jazz was long ago overtaken by hip-hop, pop, and rock as the favorite music of America's youth. Club attendance is in decline. Jazz record sales are barely worth talking about. Under these circumstances, when an upstart trio is hailed as the future of jazz by an otherwise apathetic magazine like Esquire, many in the jazz world take it personally. African-American jazz writers have argued that when new artists arise to save jazz from its own supposed decrepitude, they are almost always (like The Bad Plus) young and white. Even before this controversy broke, Stanley Crouch sparked a firestorm with a Jazz Times column lambasting white critics for overpraising white artists and neglecting black ones. John Murph expressed admiration for The Bad Plus, but admitted that "witnessing [them] being so lovingly embraced ... leaves a slightly bitter taste." Writing in Jazz Notes (a quarterly that I edit), Willard Jenkins lumped The Bad Plus in with the crooners Peter Cincotti and Jane Monheit as the latest white heroes, the "flavor of the month." But creatively, The Bad Plus and Cincotti are from different galaxies. And the fact remains that the majority of white players--like their black, Latino, and Asian counterparts--aren't getting their due. Jazz artists are fighting over scraps. The Bad Plus's credentials have also been called into question. Joe Chambers, an important drummer and composer, told Downbeat that the three "haven't worked their way up through the ranks. ... These guys have just popped up out of thin air." But together, Iverson and Anderson have worked with Mark Turner, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Patrick Zimmerli, and the renowned Billy Hart. Anderson has supported bandleaders such as Stefon Harris, Orrin Evans, and the Chilean vocalist Claudia Acuña. King leads an extraordinary Minneapolis-based trio called Happy Apple. It isn't surprising for Joe Chambers to be unaware of these details. Not only is there a generation gap in jazz, but the scene's sheer diffusion makes it impossible for everyone to keep up--least of all esteemed veterans busy with their own careers. The very same information deficits, however, lead some to overstate The Bad Plus's importance. Well before he penned his heated praise of the trio, Stuart Nicholson had a reputation for making sweeping remarks, from across the pond, about the inherent conservatism of American jazz. Columbia's Yves Beauvais seemed to echo Nicholson when I asked him, sometime ago, about The Bad Plus's appeal. "I go to clubs, and I'm always shocked to see how many people are playing their grandparents' music," he said. "I don't really understand 22-year-old musicians playing music from the 1950s, even though they probably grew up with hip-hop and other things. I hear none of those influences entering their music." He must have been going to the wrong clubs. Jonathan Finlayson, Robert Glasper, Loren Stillman, Steve Lehman, and Miguel Zenon are just a few young composers whose cutting-edge influences are unmistakable. If even Beauvais can miss the boat, forget the glossy media. In his May 2003 Jazz Times column, Gary Giddins, who has written favorably of The Bad Plus, nonetheless gave Andy Langer's Esquire piece an effective lashing. He argued that Langer's effusive take on the trio "involves the writer's presumption that the reader, like himself, lacks the 'decoder ring' to understand jazz, and that a jazz disc he likes must be, ipso facto, a groundbreaking moment for western civilization." Taking aim at the two distorted premises underlying most mainstream coverage of jazz ("jazz is dead!" and "jazz is back!"), Giddins wrote: "Both stories are fabrications of convenience: Only the dead can be resurrected, and since jazz has never actually died, it can never actually return. The clever journalist is thus free to manufacture either at will. And the beauty part is he doesn't have to waste precious time listening to music." Sometime last year at the Village Vanguard, The Bad Plus brought Ornette Coleman's "Street Woman" to a colossal finish. The audience erupted in a standing ovation, in the tiny club, in the middle of the set. A colleague and I wondered aloud about the last time such a thing had happened. I thought back to the countless panel discussions and online forums, to the communal handwringing over how to make jazz popular again. Jazz diehards can't seem to make up their minds. They want jazz to be popular, but they often loathe popular bands. They lament jazz's marginality but somehow prize it as well. About Give, Bill Milkowski wrote, "This album works if you truly believe that Kurt Cobain is as valid a musical influence as Miles Davis or John Coltrane." There are no Nirvana covers on Give, but even so, how can one Nirvana cover be seen as an attempt to upend the jazz pantheon? Moreover, countless jazz musicians have covered rock songs by now. A pianist once told me that the essence of the jazz sensibility is "an aversion to popular taste." It wasn't always so, and today it might be an attitude jazz can no longer afford. That's not to say we should applaud jazz's trivialization or dilution. But when an advanced instrumental trio goes head-to-head with Brian Wilson and Norah Jones at the Grammys, isn't that a good thing? In part, what makes jazz a treasure is its specialized, arcane language. But as The Bad Plus reminds us, jazz can be an art music and still floor people who don't necessarily look to music for art. This very week, the Village Vanguard celebrates its seventieth anniversary with a different band every night. Wynton Marsalis will play on Wednesday, The Bad Plus on Thursday. Cynics deride the club's embrace of The Bad Plus as merely about money. Sure, the Vanguard is a business, but there is more to the story than that. These acts represent two entirely opposite approaches to the music. With 70 years' worth of wisdom, the most historic venue of all is making room for both. May that be the future of jazz. David Adler writes for Jazz Times and other publications.

Today's supermarket chicken breasts are huge, dry, tasteless but I found a way to redeem them: stuff them like whole chickens. Cut a large slit along the bone deep into the breast on the large side. Stuff with any combination of starch (e.g., rice, breadcrumbs, or cornbread) and flavoring (ham, sausage, onions, garlic, herbs, and/or raisins). Add some moisture (stock, wine) and fat (butter, bacon fat, olive oil). Often, this can all be gleaned from leftovers and tidbits in the fridge. Saute it all together until it becomes a coherent stuffing. Stuff, season, and roast for 45-55 min at about 400.

Naughty boys and girls get red bottoms here: http://www.spare-rods.com/ Free of charge!

Just went through this myself on Christmas Eve. Aside from not having slept since then, it's survivable. The 21-month-old running around the house is a different story. How does this keep happening?!?

The station at Tulane University, WTUL, has a nightly "World of Jazz" 6-8 PM. Very open to submissions. Listenable at wtul.fm. Sunday and Monday are my favorites: Dave and Rodney playing tomorrow's best music.

I am not a number! I'm a free man!

and this does not even include the aforeposted Henry Threadgill shows on 12/17 and 18 at the Hothouse Friday · · · · · December 17 ====================== * Tatsu Aoki - bass, Jeff Chan - reeds, Jimmy Ellis - reeds 9 PM at the Candlestick Maker - 4432 N. Kedzie - 773-463-0158 ($10) * Ernest Dawkins, Fred Anderson, Hamid Drake, Darious Savage 10 PM at the Velvet Lounge - 2128½ S. Indiana - 312-791-9050 Saturday · · · December 18 ====================== * 14th Annual Winter Solstice Concert - Hamid Drake, Michael Zerang 6 AM at Link's Hall - 3435 N. Sheffield - 773-281-0824 ($15) * Scotland Yard Gospel Choir accompanies shadow puppets; Virginia Brass Quartet; Philippine Rondalla 6 PM at North Park Village Nature Center, 5801 N. Pulaski - 312-744-5472 (free) * Laurie Lee Moses, Ed Ludwig, Andrew Sadock, guitar, Nate 9 PM at the Candlestick Maker - 4432 N. Kedzie - 773-463-0158 ($10) * Kahil El'Zabar's Ritual Trio - Ari Brown, Yosef Ben Israel w/ Billy Bang; Osunlade 9 PM at River East Art Center - 445 E. Illinois * Yakuza; Lair of the Minotaur; Minsk 10 PM at the Empty Bottle - 1035 N. Western - 773-276-3600 ($8) * J + J + J; Far Rad; Lost Robot 10 PM at the Logan Square Auditorium - 2539 N. Kedzie - 773-252-6179 * William Perry Group w/ Alejandro, Junius Paul, Avreeayl Ra 10 PM at the Velvet Lounge - 2128½ S. Indiana - 312-791-9050 Sunday · · · · December 19 ====================== * 14th Annual Winter Solstice Concert - Hamid Drake, Michael Zerang 6 AM at Link's Hall - 3435 N. Sheffield - 773-281-0824 ($15) * Avant-garde jam session w/ Nicole Mitchell, David Boykin, Karl Seigfried, Mike Reed 6 to 9 PM at Cafe Mestizo - 2123 S. Ashland - 312-942-0095 (donation) * Velvet Lounge jam session 7 to 11 PM at the Velvet Lounge - 2128½ S. Indiana - 312-791-9050 ($4) * Joshua Abrams w/ Nori Tanaka, Tim Daisy; Jeffrey Kmieciak w/ Garen Gaston, Sean Burke 8 PM at 3030 W. Cortland - 773-862-3616 * Grey Ghost - Arm Shelton, Jonathan Crawford * Sounds of Now - Bill MacKay, Greg Ward, Kyle Hernandez, John Celebi 10 PM at the Hungry Brain - 2318 W. Belmont - 773-935-2118 (donation)

Hear, hear! Catching Fred at the Velvet is a moving experience. I caught the CD release party for "On the Run" there and haven't been the same since. It's our era's equivalent of hearing Webb at the Savoy or Jamal at the Pershing or Evans at the Vanguard. I usually stop in when I'm in Chicago even if I have no idea who's on the bill. Fred seems almost apologetic when he says "it's ten dollars tonight." I always feel like saying, "Are you kidding? It's worth ten times that."

We'll agree to disagree. Meanwhile, if you want to part with any of 'Hank's' work, I'd be glad to take it off your hands for a fair price. I've enjoyed the all the castoffs you've sent me so far.

to paraphrase Johnson: if you're burnt on Hamid, you're burnt on life

Stanley Clarke, School Days

Actually, I think there's a New York bias in the rest of the American jazz press, like it's still the center of the jazz world or something. Dream on. In New York, if you're lucky, you can hear Joe Lovano. In Chicago, it's Von Freeman. Take that, extrapolate it outward, and case closed afaic. New York's still the center of the jazz industry, no doubt, but I'd venture to say that you could hear more interesting music on a regular basis more frequently elsewhere these days, and Chicago would definitely be towards the top of the list (and quite possible at the top of it) of places to do so. Although "interesting music" means different things to different people, so let me say that what I hear coming out of NY for the last decade or two very often doesn't qualify. But that's just me. Couldn't agree more about Chicago. I live in New Orleans where there's plenty of live jazz on offer. Of all kinds. But it's when I go to Chicago once or twice a year (to visit in-laws) that I really start drooling over the music schedule (often a month or so before we go). I usually find I'm physically and financially unable to make every show I'd like to see. Regular performances of Freeman, Anderson, Drake, Vandermark, Ewart, et al, and that's not counting who might be passing through town. In contrast, last time I was in NY in September (granted it was a two-night early week stay) I had trouble finding a gig that was worthwhile. I strongly considered the VV orchestra but ended up hanging out at the late-nite Japanese snack bar all night. Cheaper and maybe more fun. I know it's not always like that but if I'm gonna hop a plane somewhere for jazz, the first fare I'm gonna look up is Chicago. (Who'm I kidding - I've got a 19-month-old and another coming in 4 weeks.) (Speaking of which: what will probably be the last Drake-Zerang solstice shows at Links Hall ever are scheduled for Dec 18-19-20. All at 6 AM. I won't be able to get up there this year but anyone who can should for a potentially life-changing experience.)