Marsalis Family Kicks Off White House Music Series

So maybe President Obama WASN’T just giving lip service when he said he liked jazz.

Read more here.

Jazz Jam Sessions Booming in Tampa

Things are tough all over for musicians, journalists, radio hosts, educators, magazine publishers, publicists, artist managers, festival operators and others whose livelihood depends on jazz.

So it’s nice to see jazz jam sessions proliferating, at least in my neck of the woods — the Tampa Bay area.

Read more here.

Jazz Times: R.I.P.?

(The bulk of my blogging, on music and other subjects,  is now done at Scribe Life, my old blog. Please follow me back there).

It’s hard times for print publications everywhere, and not just newspapers.

Jazz mags are no exception.

Jazziz, which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary, has announced that it’s becoming a quarterly. And this after shifting from a monthly to a 10-times-a-year publication a while ago.

I was one of the original writers for Jazziz, a participant in those very early meetings in Mike Fagien’s condo in Gainesville, and I’ve been a part of the mag off and on since those days. I’ve reviewed hundreds of CDs for the mag, along with several live performances and festivals. Among my features (including cover stories) for Jazziz are pieces on Terence Blanchard, Branford Marsalis, Larry Coryell, Pat Metheny, Bela Fleck, and New Orleans music.

Here’s hoping that Jazziz continues long into the future as a quarterly, or, better yet, begins publishing monthly again.

And now the latest disturbing news: Jazz Times is temporarily — we hope — going out of print while it’s being sold to new owners. That’s according to a message posted on the mag’s web site (scroll down to read). The mag’s staff members are being “furloughed,” and word on the street is that pay for freelancers is “in limbo.” Bad news.

I’m hoping for a resurrection of the mag, which has its origins in a newsletter that began publishing in 1970. But I can’t say that I’m too optimistic.

Meanwhile, Down Beat, still considered the “jazz bible” by many jazz listeners and musicians, is celebrating its 75th year of publication. Here’s to another 75!

(Full disclosure: I’ve contributed extensively to both Jazziz and Down Beat, and I’ve occasionally written for Jazz Times.)

Howard Mandel, longtime jazz journalist and president of the Jazz Journalists Association, recently noted the closing of Coda, the Canadian jazz mag dating back 50 years, and traditional jazz publication Mississippi Rag.

See Mandel’s blog posts on the jazz magazine crisis, and the impact of the JVC Jazz Fest failure on the woes of the jazz industry.

As an old-school reader (you know, 35+), I’d much rather read about jazz (and almost everything else) by way of the printed page rather than via a computer screen. Same goes for books. Thanks, but no thanks, Kindle and other digital readers. That said, I spend many hours absorbing information from online sources, obviously.

On the other hand, it’s probably a reality that print publication — not to mention the costs of packaging and mailing — is just too expensive for many magazines to sustain, and the only viable option is to take everything online, as the altcountry/roots music mag No Depression has done.

The major obstacle: So far, publications haven’t figured out a way to make online ads generate more than a small fraction of the ad dollars they once reaped via full-page print ads. And without that big income, you can’t afford to pay for salaries and operating expenses.

Read the message from Jazz Times, below:

———-
An Important Message From JazzTimes Management

By JazzTimes

To our readers and members of the jazz community:

JazzTimes has temporarily suspended publication of the magazine and has furloughed the bulk of its staff while it finalizes a sale of its assets. The brand and operation will undergo reorganization and restructuring in order to remain competitive in the current media climate. Print publishing is expected to resume as soon as a sale is closed. New information and statements will be posted at www.jazztimes.com as they become available.

Thank you for your patience during this challenging period.

JazzTimes Management

———

As a post script, I guess I’ll have to say that all of this confirms the soundness of my decision to leave full-time freelancing several years ago. I still contribute, fairly extensively, to publications including Down Beat, Jazziz, Bass Player, Las Vegas City Life, the St. Petersburg Times, and Folio Weekly. But I no longer depend on newspaper and magazine assignments as the sole source of my income.

So … support your local arts-journalism freelancers!

Listening Post #8: Bobby Broom, Joe Lovano, John Scofield, Harry Skoler, TV On the Radio

(The bulk of my blogging is now done at SCRIBE LIFE Come on over)

Five releases in rotation at home and in the car – a list without comment (in alphabetical order):

Bobby Broom with Dennis Carroll & Kobie Watkins, Plays for Monk (Origin)

Joe Lovano Us Five, Folk Art (Blue Note)

John Scofield, Piety Street (Emarcy)

Harry Skoler, Two Ones (Soliloquy)

TV On the Radio, Dear Science (DGC/Interscope)

Follow me back to Scribe Life

Scribe Life

It turns out that I don’t have the time — d’0h! — to devote to TWO blogs, so for the time being I’ll be blogging at my original space, Scribe Life.

Please follow me over there.

thanks,

Philip

Ghetto Love Sugar show + press coverage

As mentioned below, my old jamband, Ghetto Love Sugar, is reuniting after seven years for a show this Friday night at Yeoman’s Road Pub in Tampa.

The band, with guitarist Joel Lisi, keyboardist Raulton Reichel, drummer Jon Priest (now living in N.C.) and me on bass, draws from a mix of jazz, funk, rock, experimental music and reggae. We’re playing a triple-show with mighty roots-reggae outfit Rocksteady@8 and jazz/funk group Infinite Groove Orchestra. Show starts at about 9 p.m., and admission is $7.

For more info on the band and the show, please visit www.groovewell.com

Our friends in the local media have had some nice things to say about the show (and THANKS to those writers for all the coverage; it’s invaluable in getting the word out).

Below are links to some of the pieces and blurbs. I’ll add more later.

Eric Snider’s story in Creative Loafing

Leilani Polk’s mention in Creative Loafing

Carole Giambalvo’s “Concert Pick” in the St. Petersburg Times

Jazz Fest review (Billboard)

My review of the first weekend of Jazz Fest in Nola was published Wednesday in Billboard. Click here to read.

Full text is below:

New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival/April 24-26, 2009/New Orleans (Fair Grounds Race Track)

At 40 years old and still going strong, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is slipping into middle age with its musical mission evolving and its devotees skewing somewhat older and more musically literate than average concert crowds.

Jazz Fest, as the two-weekend event is better known, remains a sprawl of energetic and relentlessly eclectic sounds adored by attendees, a large percentage of whom return year after year. And it’s an affair that’s none the worse for wear: the festival continues to offer an irresistible smorgasbord of top-shelf talent from New Orleans and throughout Louisiana, with big-name national pop and rock acts added to the mix in a bid to bring more ticket buyers through the gates.

This year’s festival, with 5,000 or so musicians playing on a dozen stages, opened strong with several special performances. Veteran organist and hitmaker Booker T. Jones was joined by the Drive-By Truckers (right) for material from Potato Hole, their celebrated new collaboration. The bluesy keyboard man and the Southern-fried roots rockers looked and sounded genuinely excited to be playing together, and the results were as tangy and as hard hitting as anything heard during first weekend at Jazz Fest.

Wynton Marsalis (top of page), a New Orleans native, allied his Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra with Ghanaian percussionists Yacub Addy and Odadaa! for a rare performance of their “Congo Square,” appropriately enough held at the fest’s Congo Square stage. The long-form composition, at 2 1/2 hours, comprised Mardi Gras Indians rhythms, African percussion, bluesy swing, and traditional New Orleans music.

Jazz Fest first-timers seemed to flock to the well-known headliners, a group that included the likes of James Taylor, Joe Cocker, the Dave Matthews Band, Wilco, Spoon, and Earth, Wind and Fire, acts that are generally easy to find at arenas everywhere.

Connoisseurs of the region’s music, though, tended to seek out the homegrown talent, a rangy mix of styles that included edgy, jammy funk inspired in part by the Meters — Galactic, with special guests Shamarr Allen on trumpet, and Corey Henry on rap vocals; Papa Grows Funk, led by keyboardist John “Papa” Gros; and trombonist Big Sam’s Funky Nation.

Long-running Crescent City quartet Astral Project, with saxophonist Tony Dagradi, seven-string guitarist Steve Masakowski, bassist James Singleton and drummer Johnny Vidacovich, offered muscular post-bop tinted with New Orleans rhythms and colored with funk and experimental touches. Inspired modern jazz was also represented by groups variously led by drummer Herlin Riley, trumpeter Marlon Jordan (left), and trumpeter Terence Blanchard, the last of whom closed his set with a gorgeous, chilling reading of a piece from his A Tale of God’s Will (a requiem for katrina).

The fest’s myriad choices — resulting in tough decisions for open-minded listeners — also included the rugged, swampy blues of Louisiana slide guitarist Sonny Landreth’s trio; the flickering strings and ambling West African grooves of Morikeba Kouyate, a Senegalese master of the 21-string kora, and his Crescent City-based Kora Konnection band; the brassy, rambunctious punch of the New Orleans Nightcrawlers; and the rousing gospel of Mavis Staples, who lifted spirits high with a triumphant “I’ll Take You There.”

Those not fully sated by the music get another chance this year — Jazz Fest’s second weekend runs April 30 through May 3. Headliners include Neil Young, Los Lobos, Tony Bennett, Kings of Leon, The Neville Brothers, Sugarland, Bonnie Raitt, and, oddly enough, Bon Jovi.

Jazz Fest “On the Upswing,” says USA Today

Well, sure it is.

Read the story (coverage of first weekend) here.

Louis Maistros’ The Sound of Building Coffins (Review)

The Sound of Building Coffins, by New Orleans author Louis Maistros, is an intriguing tale of jazz and voodoo. I recently reviewed the novel for the St. Petersburg Times.

Click here to read the review, published Sunday. Maistros’ creative web site devoted to the book is here.

Read the full text (“director’s cut”) of my review, below:

The Sound of Building Coffins

By Louis Maistros

Toby Press, 358 pages, $24.95

New Orleans fiction has its comic juggernauts (John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces), literary reveries (Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer), gothic horror stories (by Anne Rice) and crime novels (by James Lee Burke).

Now comes The Sound of Building Coffins, by first-time novelist Louis Maistros. It’s a macabre and utterly hypnotic feat of literary imagination, an extended tale of voodoo and jazz in the Crescent City, circa the turn of the 20th Century. The novel is so fluently delivered that it sometimes feels as if it were being channeled via the same spirits — evil and good — that inhabit these richly drawn characters.

Maistros, a New Orleans record-store owner and former forklift operator with no formal training as a writer, has crafted a work, spiked with historical characters and events, so striking and original that it probably deserves a place on the shelf of great fiction from his adopted hometown.

The novel, written before Hurricane Katrina, closes with another mighty flood, as a fictitious version of real-life musical innovator Buddy Bolden — sometimes credited with inventing jazz — stands on the roof of a building that’s being dismantled by the storm. He raises his beloved cornet to his lips, and sends a song of salvation into the darkened skies. The same night, corpses, loosened from graves built in a city below sea level, rise by the dozens.

“As the city dies, so the city is reborn,” Maistros writes, wielding a sentiment of hope that’s been expressed frequently in New Orleans in recent years.

That’s just one of many engaging set pieces, if you will, that sustain a distinctively strange narrative centered in part on the vibrant life and tragic loss experienced by the Morningstar family, a clan led by a gospel preacher who chose to name all of his children for diseases.

“The Sound” opens with a singularly bizarre sequence, as nine-year-old Typhus Morningstar pulls a trio of aborted babies from a burlap sack, and places them in the waters of the Mississippi River. There, he performs an act of magical realism, his pure love and his singing of an old spiritual combining to provide the fetuses a “water birth” during which they are transformed into catfish.

The book’s extended cast of characters, including the Morningstars, whose home is located little more than a mile away from storied Congo Square, live in a world that’s often unkind and seldom gentle. The men, aside from Bolden, are mostly gamblers, drinkers, con men, abortionists, sailors on leave, prison guards, gravediggers, and Yankees looking to make a killing down south. The women, other than Gloria Morningstar, who died giving birth to Typhus, and voodoo queen Malvina Latour (another historical character), are hangers-on, mourning mothers, barmaids, and Storyville sex workers, some of whom claw their way up from claustrophobic street-front “cribs” to upscale houses of ill repute.

An historical event forms the backdrop for the story: In 1891, nearly a dozen Italian immigrants were lynched by a mob seeking revenge for the murder of Police Superintendent David Hennessey. The imagined sequel to the hate crimes has a group of seven including Noonday, Typhus and daughter Diptheria Morningstar, Bolden, and a newspaper reporter face down a demon possessing the soul of Dominick Carolla, the one-year-old son of one of the lynched Sicilian man.

The exorcism results in bloody murder, and the events of that day resonate throughout the novel, as Buddy’s playing grows in power and stature, Diptheria gains fame as a high-class lady of the evening, and Typhus runs headlong into a twisted love affair. And the Mississippi rushes on, playing witness to and sometimes participating in multiple acts of birth, death, and rebirth.

Maistros handily gets inside the heads of his characters, using vivid descriptions and apropos vernacular to bring to life a wildly conceived world, one informed by accounts of the actual place and time. He occasionally takes risks, gambling that readers will follow him through dark byways with no clear payoff. The results, more often than not, are transporting.

Tampa writer and musician Philip Booth blogs at www.flickersandlit.wordpress.com

Jazz Fest, Day 1

Jazz Fest in New Orleans opened with a day of spectacular weather — sunny, breezy, no rain — and great performances.

Above and below are pix from sets I caught by trumpeter Marlon Jordan’s quartet (left), with drummer Jason Marsalis and bassist David Pulphus, the New Orleans Nightcrawlers (right), the Drive-by Truckers with Booker T. Jones (below left), Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra with African drummers (performing “Congo Square”) (further below, left).

I also heard performances by rootsy bluesman Spencer Bohren, the High Grand Drifters Bluegrass Band, and New Orleans rockers the Vettes.