Last week at the Village Vanguard was wonderful! Thanks to everyone who come out, everyone at the club, and to Ben Street and Nasheet Waits.
Upcoming gigs:
July 15 — trio with Butler Knowles and Dorien Dotson at Sharp Nine in Durham, NC
July 27 — Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue at the St. Endellion Festival conducted by Emilie Godden, Cornwall
August 3 — “jazz night” at the St. Endellion Festival, program TBD
August 5 — trio with Conor Chaplin and Martin France at the Vortex, London
August 10 thru 14 — all-Iverson program (Easy Win, Adagio, Dance Sonata) for Dance Heginbotham at Jacob’s Pillow, the Berkshires
August 19 — trio with Larry Grenadier and Kush Abadey at the Jazz Gallery, NYC
September 5 — trio with Larry Grenadier and Nasheet Waits at the Detroit Jazz Festival
If you see me out there, please say hi!
Time to take a break from DTM, Twitter, and FB. I’ll be back sometime in late August. (Probably I will not be able to resist posting photos on Instagram.)
Sign-up for Transitional Technology to be directly informed about my return. Sign-up is free…although sincere thanks to those paying for a subscription. Paid subscriptions help keep fresh DTM content coming after all these years.
New! DTM is easily searchable. The “search box” is located different places on different devices and screens, but the upper right corner is a likely place on a laptop, while the bottom of any given post is likely on mobile. Find the search box and enter your favorite jazz cat. I haven’t written about everybody yet, but I’d be surprised if your favorite wasn’t here somewhere.
Big interviews and essays of 2022 so far:
A “New” (meaning “Old”) Approach to Jazz Education
50 ECM tracks for ECM at 50 (2018)
More modest endeavors:
Vicissitudes: John Heard, Leroy Williams, and Grachan Moncur III RIP
The Second Piano Sonata of Poul Ruders
Andrew Hill: Shades and Strange Serenade
Lupu plays Brahms, Angelich plays Rachmaninoff
Ellen Raskin, Lee Server, Andrew Vachss
RIP Terry Teachout (with a guest contribution from Heather Sessler)
RIP Charles Brackeen and Mtume
Barry Altschul, You Can’t Name Your Own Tune
George Crumb, Ancient Voices of Children
guest posts:
James P. Johnson Gets Dressed by Matthew Guerrieri
New Cecil and the Old Crew in ’70s NYC: A Remembrance by Richard Scheinin
Stanley Crouch on Classic Cinema by Paul Devlin
Recent reading…
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness. Terrific sci-fi novel that digs deep into the topics of love and gender. Le Guin has some amazing passages of descriptive prose:
It had not rained, here on these north-facing slopes. Snow-fields stretched down from the pass into the valleys of moraine. We stowed the wheels, uncapped the sledge-runners, put on our skis, and took off—down, north, onward, into that silent vastness of fire and ice that said in enormous letters of black and white DEATH, DEATH, written right across a continent. The sledge pulled like a feather, and we laughed with joy.
Elmore Leonard, 52 Pick-Up and Swag. Somehow I never explored the two earliest crime novels that the author himself considered canon. They are far more downbeat and esoteric than later Leonard, and must have been a non-ironic influence on Charles Willeford’s Hoke Moseley series. I’m planning to keep reading Leonard in sequence; perhaps more to come from me on this topic. The Library of America edition Four Novels of the 1970s includes an extensive chronology as part of the endnotes.
Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends. While I rarely look at contemporary literary fiction, my wife encouraged me to read this recent smash hit. Rooney follows the thread just so in an utterly compelling fashion. “My ego had always been an issue. I knew that intellectual attainment was morally neutral at best, but when bad things happened to me I made myself feel better by thinking about how smart I was.” Put it on my tombstone, baby!
DO THE M@TH 