By Larry Blumenfeld
Shortly after I arrived in New Orleans recently for the annual Jazz & Heritage Festival, I was handed a copy of “New Orleans Jazz Playhouse,” a coffee-table book full of reflections and ruminations, photos and memorabilia from trumpeter and bandleader Irvin Mayfield. It contained seven accompanying CDs of music featuring, among many fine musicians, Mayfield on every track.
The book draws its title from the name of the nightclub Mayfield founded in 2009 in partnership with the Royal Sonesta Hotel, which has hosted worthy gigs in a smart and swanky atmosphere on a storied French Quarter street that hasn’t seen much real jazz in decades. Its three guest essays—from trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, Mayfield’s clearest mentor, and celebrated authors Walter Isaacson and Ernest Gaines—reflect the ease with which Mayfield—who was named to the National Council of the Arts by presidential appointment—negotiates a world of movers, shakers and big ideas.
Most of the book’s pages are devoted to cultural things, iconic and less well known, that Mayfield thinks define his hometown and, by extension, have shaped him. Page 103 is something of a paean to “three great institutions”: The University of New Orleans, where Mayfield once studied (he dropped out), and where he is now a professor teaching “New Orleans as Discourse”; WWOZ-FM, the listener-supported radio station that introduced him as a boy to quintessential New Orleans musicians like James Booker, and which helped build the audience for his own Grammy-winning music during the past 20 years; and the New Orleans Public Library System, which in Mayfield’s childhood offered him a free source of jazz LPs for pleasure and study, and for which he has, since Hurricane Katrina, leveraged his star power to help raise substantial sums from leading national foundations.
That book is big and bold and anything but humble. Yet the boldest manifestation of Mayfield’s outsized ambitions to date is The People’s Health Jazz Market, a new $9.6 million venue established by the nonprofit organization that supports Mayfield’s New Orleans Jazz Orchestra (NOJO). The Jazz Market occupies the space of a long-abandoned department store at the corner of boulevards named for two 1960s civil rights leaders, Martin Luther King Jr. and Oretha Castle Haley, in New Orleans’ central city neighborhood.
With its inaugural public concert in late April, during Jazz Fest’s opening weekend, Mayfield’s Jazz Market joined Manhattan’s Jazz at Lincoln Center and San Francisco’s SFJazz in the ranks of urban arts center buildings dedicated to jazz. The architecture is similar to SFJazz in appearance, right down to the lettering on its nameplate; as home for the orchestra Mayfield founded in 2002, the project draws obvious comparisons to Marsalis’ jazz center.
Opening night didn’t lack for star power. Soledad O’Brien, who serves on NOJO’s board, was in an orchestra-section seat. Up in a balcony box, small white dog on her lap, was Dee Bridgewater, for whom Mayfield named his concert stage; her forthcoming CD is in collaboration with Mayfield’s orchestra.
The Jazz Market provides, like those other centers, a concert hall designed with jazz acoustics in mind. The lobby area, which includes a bar named for Buddy Bolden and will house digital jazz archive, becomes a community center by day, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. And despite the formality of his orchestra in suits and ties onstage, Mayfield began his opening concert by inviting audience members to “come hang out here during the day, use the wifi, do your business, have some coffee and hang out.”
By Tuesday, May 5, however, a dark cloud had gathered over Mayfield’s latest achievement, his much-lauded involvement with the city’s library system covered in mud.
The front- and back matter in his book, a mock-stamp from the public library, began to seem like a bad joke.
Continue reading “New Orleans: Ballad Of The Trumpeter, The Library, The Market And The Money”
Harlem and DC: Back and Forth, Then and Now
Jazz has always drawn from and expressed a sense of place. I’ve been thinking about what that means—how those places relate to the shapes and forms of music, and what it means for jazz when those places experience drastic change.
This weekend, pianists Jason Moran and Marc Cary will present what should be an illuminating project along those lines, and focused on the contributions and connections between African American communities in Harlem and Washington D.C. “Harlem Night/U Street Lights” will be presented on Saturday May 9 at at the Apollo Theater, as part of the Harlem Jazz Shrines Festival, and Sunday May 10 at the Kennedy Center. (The title’s reference to “U Street” honors what has long been a center for DC music and culture.)
Moran and Cary are both Harlem residents, and their lives and careers have also drawn them into Washington DC’s music scene. (Moran is the artistic director for jazz at the Kennedy Center, and Cary, who was born in New York City, was raised and schooled in D.C.)
Among the other musicians involved are trumpeter Roy Hargrove, drummer Jimmy Cobb, pianists Bertha Hope and Gerald Clayton, and singers including Queen Esther, Brianna Thomas and, in DC, Howard University’s vocal jazz ensemble, Afro Blue. As befits these or any other black neighborhoods, the aesthetic will naturally spill beyond any strict definition of “jazz”—in DC, the program will explore connections between Miles Davis’ electric bands and DC’s influential “go-go” scene.
Moran and Cary will aim to capture the particular vibe that, historically, was born in each of these places and that still can be felt. And they’ll hope to make a larger point: As Moran put it to me, “Harlem for jazz and hip-hop is like Salzburg for European classical music.”
I posed a few related questions to each of them, and here’s how they replied: Continue reading “Harlem and DC: Back and Forth, Then and Now”
Spillage and Flow at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival
Jazz culture spills out in New Orleans each day of every year in many ways, into clubs and concert-hall seasons, onto streets and in the mundane details of daily lives. (Which is why laws and policies that impede or restrict that flow are both insensitive and bad for business).
“Initially, New Orleans jazz was a reflection of a way of life,” clarinetist Michael White told me back in 2006 at his professor’s office at Xavier University, while peering over a jagged pile including the red notebook in which, during the weeks following the floods that resulted from levee breaks following hurricane Katrina, he jotted down the names and whereabouts of friends and colleagues. “It spoke of the way people walk, talk, eat, sleep, dance, drive, think, make jokes, and dress. But I don’t think America ever truly understood New Orleans culture, because the mindset is so different here. So that whole tradition was hidden from most of America.”
One thing Jazz Fest does quite well is bring that tradition into focus, as expressed on stages by musicians, in the Fair Grounds via second-line parades and Mardi Gras Indians, through food and art and, if you make it to the insightful interviews on the Allison Miner stage, with one-to-one conversations. The casual fan of, say, Wilco or John Legend or T.I. will come face-to-face with feathers, beads, chants, second-line rhythms, and the constellation of music that forms New Orleans jazz culture.
It’s a manufactured environment, sure, yet it opens doors and jumps across barriers. And it highlights the very pleasures and pains, the issues and ideas, I’ve been tracking for nearly a decade. Get my two-part reflections from Jazz Fest here and here. Continue reading “Spillage and Flow at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival”
Remembering Bernard Stollman, Founder of ESP-Disk
I was saddened to hear of the passing of Bernard Stollman. As a New York Times obit by Nate Chinen begins:
Bernard Stollman, whose staunchly independent record label, ESP-Disk, provided an indispensable chronicle of the free jazz of the 1960s, and a series of provocations from the psychedelic counterculture, died on Monday in Great Barrington, Mass. He was 85.
The case was heart failure related to complications of prostate cancer, his brother Steve said.
In tribute, here’s a 2010 piece I did for The Wall Street Journal:
The sign outside the Universal Outreach Ministries of Deliverance on Bedford Road, just off DeKalb Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, quotes Scripture. The one across the street, atop a nondescript storefront, says this: “You never heard such sounds in your life.”
Continue reading “Remembering Bernard Stollman, Founder of ESP-Disk”
At 50, The AACM Keeps Collecting Individuals
Greetings from New Orleans, where the annual Jazz & Heritage Festival begins tomorrow. And where, courtesy of something called the “United States Postal Service’s Jazz Fest Postal Cache,” those of us packed into the new (and quite nice) performance space at the George and Joyce Wein Jazz & Heritage Center got a three-song set from the original Meters—keyboardist Art Neville, bass player George Porter, Jr., drummer Joseph “Zigaboo” Modeliste and guitarist Leo Nocentelli.
New Orleans is in Louisiana, a state whose governor, Bobby Jindal, has an Op-Ed. piece in today’s New York Times compelled by his apparent concern for “the musicians, caterers, photographers and others” contracted for same-sex weddings,” because, as he writes “a great many Americans who are not members of the clergy feel just as called to live their faith through their businesses.”
Well, Mr. Jindal, guys like Zigaboo appear to live faith through his business, but that business is about funkiness as a belief system, not bigotry masquerading as religiosity. (But I digress…)
Speaking of faith-based endeavors (faith placed in the power of music and art and education and social justice) below is my piece in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal honoring the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), which turned 50 this year. If you’re in Chicago, where the group was founded, head to Mandel Hall for a celebratory concert on Sunday.
If you’re in NY, where there’s a notable chapter, try Manhattan’s Bohemian Hall April 28&29 for some notable concerts, including a rare trio of George Lewis, Muhal Richard Abrams and Roscoe Mitchell).
Here’s my Wall Street Journal piece marking the AACM’s 50th in The Wall Street Journal: Continue reading “At 50, The AACM Keeps Collecting Individuals”
Old Friends, Deep Truths and New Music at the Annual NEA Jazz Masters Awards
I checked neither raincoat nor briefcase on my way into Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Hall for the annual National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters Award Ceremony and Concert.
But I did check my cynicism—I always do for this thing.
My thoughts and some excerpts from the acceptance speeches here.
Remembering Dale Fitzgerald, Founder of New York's Jazz Gallery
Dale Kelley Fitzgerald, who co-founded New York’s prestigious Jazz Gallery in 1995 and was its Executive Director until 2009, died on March 20 at Calvary Hospital in Bronx, N.Y., after a long struggle with cancer. He was 72.
Writer Ted Panken described Dale accurately in an obituary distributed by Fitzgerald’s family:
“A strapping man with a well-trimmed goatee, Mr. Fitzgerald possessed an impeccably cool demeanor, a fiery spirit, ample amounts of personal charisma, and a pedagogical bent that emerged during pre-concert introductions that he delivered in an authoritatively resounding baritone voice.”
(That full obit, which is worth reading, can be found at the end of this post.)
I’ll write at greater length about Dale, probably in connection with what promises to be a large and moving memorial later this Spring at the Jazz Gallery. (Stay tuned: For now, in lieu of flowers or other gifts in the wake of Dale Fitzgerald’s passing, his family is asking that donations be made to his son Gabriel’s education fund, HERE.)
So I’ll just speak a bit from my heart and my archives here, with more to come.
Dale was a major force and influence in my career, on matters both very large and even very tiny. His work transformed the environment for New York City jazz during a formative period in my own jazz life, and a transitional moment in New York’s scene. During my first trip to Cuba, in the late 1990s, Dale was not only my man on the ground, but he managed to change that place a bit, too. Dale hipped me to what was what in Havana, and he ended up getting me to write the liner notes for Roy Hargrove’s Grammy-winning “Habana” album. Dale was a gentleman and a scholar, a cool cat of a type they don’t really issue anymore. So he taught me important lessons in life. Plus, he was a true basketball head. He loved a lot of things, including people who were for real. And I loved him. Continue reading “Remembering Dale Fitzgerald, Founder of New York's Jazz Gallery”
Shoulda Been in NOLA: The Glory of (and Troubled Backstory to) St. Joseph's Day
People who talk about New Orleans from afar, who long to be in New Orleans and get there whenever they can—people like me—talk about Mardi Gras. They talk about jazzfest. They book their flights and set their sights on hitting the ground running for these and other moments.
My sacred pilgrimage?
St. Joseph’s Day, once the sun is setting and on into the night. When Mardi Gras Indians do the inscrutable, essential and brilliant things they do, and have been doing for a long time.
It’s been that way since I first experienced the event in 2006.
And it’s killing me that, for the first time in nearly a decade, I didn’t make it on Thursday night. Luckily, a lot of friends and associates sent photos, including the one above, from Bryan C. Lee Jr, at the Arts Council New Orleans, and this one below, from Katherine Cecil, a wonderful filmmaker and photographer.
The best context came via an article in The Advocate by Katy Reckdahl, who has deep knowledge of her city and its culture (and how the two relate), and is my favorite reporter to read on any topic concerning New Orleans. Her piece begins with some unfortunate but important history: Continue reading “Shoulda Been in NOLA: The Glory of (and Troubled Backstory to) St. Joseph's Day”
"Oye Cuba! A Journey Home," Documents Arturo O'Farrill's Personal Search and His Grand Vision Through Film
I’ll never forget the trip I took to Havana in 2010 with Arturo O’Farrill and his family, chronicled in a Village Voice cover story. At the start, I was focused on a very personal quest. As I wrote:
The dream was simple, really. Through the support of his Alliance organization, Arturo wanted to bring the orchestra he leads in his father’s name back to Cuba, which Chico left for good in 1959. He had toyed with the idea for some time, but it became a firm goal, a mission, in 2002, after his own first visit to Cuba. “I’m going to do this,” he’d told me toward the end of that trip. “And even though Chico never made it back to the island physically, his music will be played there. I feel like he’ll be there with us. The people will embrace his music. And somehow, to some degree, all will seem right with the universe to me for just a split-second.”
Yet by the end of trip O’Farrill’s focus, and mine, grew grander:
“I’ve been thinking long and hard about this,” Arturo said. “The reason I went was not to canonize my father. I did want to hear his music in Cuba and to see my mother there. But there’s another thing: I want jazz to stop dying this awful death, this strangulation. I think the future of this music has to do with the acceptance of a larger picture of it, which has always been the deeper truth anyway.”
Fresh off his Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra’s second Grammy win, O’Farrill prepares for a landmark cross-cultural concert at Manhattan’s Symphony Space May 1 and 2, and readies his next CD, recorded in Cuba last year. Both are titled “The Conversation Continued,” which, O’Farrill told me, was inspired by the ending of my Voice piece:
“That final Sunday night in Havana, after the premiere of his new piece, the Mella’s massive brown curtain drew slowly shut, until finally only Arturo was visible. He was speechless. He simply waved. The curtain closed. The door had been thrown open, the larger conversation to come.”
Little did we know how the context for all this would change.
During that 2010 Cuba trip, director and producer Diane Sylvester had her cameras focused in the same direction as my pen. Like me, she’s stayed on O’Farrill’s story. Her remarkable film, “Oye Cuba! A Journey Home,” six years in the making, is nearing completion. It traces both an intimate personal tale and a transformation of culture, attitude and politics that has far-reaching implications—that continuing conversation.
I can’t wait to see the scenes she’ll screen at a celebration and fundraiser on March 23rd at Drom, 85 Avenue A, in Manhattan’s East Village. O’Farrill will also make play a rare solo-piano set at the event.
TO PURCHASE TICKETS IN ADVANCE:
VIP Benefit Reception at 8pm & Concert 9pm | $150
Purchase VIP Reception Tickets here.
General Admission Concert & Screening 9pm | $50/ $25-Student & Senior
Purchase General Admission Tickets here.
“I was first moved by Arturo’s story and that of his father,” Sylvester told me, “and what seemed like such a tragic loss on their part in terms of their ability to connect with their own history. What Arturo ended up championing and creating was an incredible movement; he was among the leaders of artists who pushed to move history and policy.”
In a way, the arc of Sylvester’s project has mirrored O’Farrill’s work of late. Continue reading “"Oye Cuba! A Journey Home," Documents Arturo O'Farrill's Personal Search and His Grand Vision Through Film”
80 Years On, Still in the Vanguard: Reflections on a Celebration, and Comments from Jason Moran
The Village Vanguard celebrated its 80th anniversary last week.
The occasion made me recall what Lorraine Gordon told me a decade ago, when the Vanguard was turning 70. She’s been running the jazz club since 1989, after Max Gordon, the Vanguard’s founder, died.
“I like the coziness of the room when it’s full, when the people seem happy and they’re at one with the artist,” she said. “There’s just a certain feeling you get because it’s small enough to reach out and back and forth between the audience and the artists. So, that’s a palpable feeling. I feel it myself when I sit in the corner and I see everybody’s face is absolutely glued to the stage. It’s like a painting but it’s real life, every night.”
The real life of jazz, as it plays out—set after set, night after night—and the picture it paints for those who care to listen would be unimaginable in New York (and based on the many iconic recordings made at the club, anywhere) without the Vanguard as incubator and home.
Lorraine was sitting there, in her customary spot in the corner, on the way to the kitchen (which stopped being a kitchen long ago, and serves as both green room and office). Beside her most of time was her daughter, Deborah, who runs the club with her and, hovering nearby, Jed Eisenman, the club’s longtime manager.
To celebrate turning 80, the Vanguard turned to Jason Moran, a pianist and bandleader half the club’s age. Moran is a musician who has demonstrated, both on and off the bandstand and in various ways, that he has a singular and secure grasp of the connection between what has preceded him and where he (and we) are headed—and on the intellectual and artistic streams that have always informed and been fed by the scene at the Vanguard and the jazz scene in general. Continue reading “80 Years On, Still in the Vanguard: Reflections on a Celebration, and Comments from Jason Moran”