Just like a lot of us, 2021 was a down year for me. Health issues, hand surgery that kept me from taking advantage of spring gardening, a mountain bike crash later in the summer that sidelined me for 6 weeks, and the continuing shit-show of covid was plenty enough to make the last 12 months …
Tag: jazz
The world doesn’t need any more John Coltrane reissues. There, I said it. Here’s why.
A couple of weeks ago an email appeared in my inbox from the good folks at Universal Music Group, inviting me to download a sampler from a new 5 CD/8 LP box set that contains all the recordings John Coltrane made for Prestige in 1958. Here's a screen shot of part of that email: Minutes …
A Brief History of the Origins of Jazz’s Sexism
"Still, the male jazz musician accepts and takes for granted that at every step he'll be dealing with other men—from club owners to booking agents to bandleaders, fellow players, reviewers and writers in the press: a male-dominated profession. The language that describes jazz, and jazz musicians, reflects this reality. . . . The actor in …
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2018: My Year of Musical Self-Care
"Tell them they can take that bullshit elsewhere, Self care, I'm treating me right." —Mac Miller As I write this on Christmas Eve, the Dow Jones just closed over 600 points down, hundreds of thousands of government workers are out of a job and going without pay, and the folks in California who lost everything …
Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly: Beyond Hip Hop, Beyond Genre
It would be hard to find anybody who would call Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly anything but a hip hop album. Notable for its lyrical, musical, technical, and conceptual brilliance, Butterfly is a profound expression of and meditation on the African American experience in the context of a nation plagued by anti-black racism. It …
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With You’re Dead, Flying Lotus Puts a Nail in the Jazz/Hip Hop Intersection
My next installment of challenging the oft-declared "jazz/hip hop intersection" takes on Flying Lotus's 2014 album You're Dead. You're Dead—which features an impressive list of musicians including Snoop Dogg, Kendrick Lamar, Herbie Hancock, Stephen "Thundercat" Bruner, and Kamasi Washington—is the end result of Flying Lotus's seamless amalgamation of myriad stylistic influences. The album is adventurous, …
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Beyond Intersection: Thundercat’s Drunk
To continue the intersection of jazz and hip hop theme I wrote about in my last post, I thought I'd take on the music of Stephen Bruner, aka Thundercat, whose 2017 album Drunk demonstrates his genius ability to make music that is "beyond category"—or rather "beyond intersection." Thundercat, who spent nearly a decade playing bass in …
Karriem Riggins and the “Intersection” between Jazz and Hip Hop
A lot has been made recently of jazz artists working with rappers and hip hop producers, especially folks like Kamasi Washington and Robert Glasper's work with Flying Lotus and Kendrick Lamar. A key focus of jazz critics and journalists writing about these musicians is the "intersection" of jazz and hip hop as if the two …
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Thomas Valentine’s Joyful Noise
Psalm 98:4 of the King James Bible reads: "Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all the earth: make a loud noise, and rejoice, and sing praise." While I'm not a religious man, something about the words "make a joyful noise" really resonates with me. It's not "play a symphony in a black tuxedo" or …
That time Fred Goodman likened the bari sax to the fat girl at the school dance
A few weeks back I was lucky enough to find a Pepper Adams LP for a buck at my local record store. It's pretty solid. After I put it on the felt I read the liner notes, written by Fred Goodman, who wrote for Cash Box magazine, which I had never heard of. Then in …
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Outside-Inside-Out 