by Patrick Jarenwattananon
Last Tuesday’s blogroll update highlighted two things: 1) a lot of cool Jazz Internet 2) my forgetfulness. So here’s an appendix of more great sites I meant to mention, but forgot to. I’m probably forgetting something else — let me know if I am in the comments.
–The Jazz Session is an interview podcast by Jason Crane, in association with All About Jazz. He’s been talking to a lot of great musicians all over the stylistic map, and posting three long interviews a week. I know I’ve mentioned his work once before, but I forgot to add it to the blogroll (Doh!) so here it is again. Some recent highlights: Vijay Iyer, Ellis Marsalis and NPR’s own Marian McPartland. He also gave us a Jazz Now list too.
Jason also recently hipped me to two smart responses to Larry Blumenfeld’s Wall Street Journal article about Jazz at Lincoln Center. Peter Breslin at Stochasticactus and Chris Rich at Brilliant Corners both come to the article with more venom than I would have, but their main points are valid: with a $38 million annual budget, JALC is a resource hog. Regardless if you admire anything at all that JALC does, that’s a lot of money for the jazz world. Imagine if a tenth of that were spread throughout the jazz and creative improv community.
–A young lady named Ines Kuusik recently e-mailed ABS to tell us that she had discovered the site via a stack of postcards I left behind on a recent visit to The Jazz Gallery in New York. (Apparently, from her photograph, I was sitting right behind her.) Ever since she moved to the city from her native Estonia, she’s been blogging about the many jazz concerts she goes to, mixed in with personal reflections in Estonian. (Sweet.) We need more people in jazz doing what she does, I think: going to lots of shows, and then giving some immediate feedback. Check it out at All the Things … New York Jazz and More.
–Dean Minderman keeps tabs on the St. Louis scene for the local alt-weekly and at St. Louis Jazz Notes. He’s also compiling some great jazz YouTubage at a sister site. Minderman also informs me that Plastic Sax is watching the scene on the other side of Missouri, in Kansas City.
–At Twenty Dollars, Vikram and Matt talk about lotsa stuff — jazz being one of them. They strike me also as fairly young persons and musicians, and often bring up a number of interesting issues, like the coolness of jazz fandom. Speaking of which, pianist Vijay Iyer has once again said something intelligent about this in the comment section:
if this is about anything at all, it’s about money, specifically the lack thereof. if anyone sees jazz as pathetic it’s because there doesn’t appear (to the average hypothetical ignorant person depicted in the average anecdote) to be any capital swirling around to support it. … to hell with “looking cool” or “coolness p.r.” throw some money at us and suddenly we’ll be cool as s—.
I like this a lot better than my blabbing on about hipster-infiltration strategies. Coolness is a small battle, economics the war; if jazz weren’t so marginalized in the first place, we wouldn’t be having this problem. Iyer also wisely points out that anti-jazz sentiments seem to be espoused almost entirely by white people about a practice with a history of black innovation and achievement, which makes these guffaws a lot more troubling.
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