BB 5
Links, gossip, and Business Blast
The new class of NEA Jazz Masters is Marshall Allen, Marilyn Crispell, Chucho Valdés, and Gary Giddins. (Press release.)
Congratulations to four greats, but it’s almost like the committee wants to spurn the center of the idiom. Perhaps next year they could give it to Charles McPherson, Tom Harrell, Buster Williams, and Al Foster. The advocacy/literary slot should be a fifth and separate entry.
RIP Jim Rotondi. Nate Chinen has an obituary.
Richard Williams visits Robert Wyatt.
Earl Hines documentary, 1975. Amazing footage.
BUSINESS BLAST
Tonight I’m playing with Vinnie Sperrazza at Lunatico. Nice band with Stacy Dillard and Vicente Archer.
I really like this Thomas Conrad piece in Stereophile on the Jazz Cruise, and not only because I’m featured quite a bit. “Jazz Without the Poverty: The Jazz Cruise Rides the Waves in Style” has an unusual angle about the music and economics.
Hot House also had a nice preview of my Smoke engagement in their “Spotlight” section.
What you wrote about the NEA Jazz Masters is spot on and, I think, incidentally pretty close to what Gary Giddins would have written when he had a page a week in a healthy Village Voice. I think the NEA committee that decides these things is doing its best, but I suspect we'll see Kamasi Washington win one of these things before we see Kenny Washington win one. Which raises questions of definition.
Nice review.