David Adler

So sayeth the Supreme Court. Dahlia Lithwick makes a great point at Slate. Justice Scalia wrote in his Boumediene dissent, concerning the habeas corpus rights of Guantanamo detainees, that “today’s decision will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.” No such concern in the case of handguns, which kill more Americans in a year than terrorism has in the

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Read my column on jazz and politics, in the July/August issue of Jazz Times, here [pdf].

My review of Philly-based Cuban-American vocalist Venissa Santí, in today’s Inquirer.

In case you missed the last one… Huong Thanh & Nguyên Lê, Fragile Beauty (ACT): A three-hour rain delay on the JFK tarmac caused me to miss Huong Thanh’s concert at last week’s Fes Festival. But I’d forgotten about this gem of a disc sitting on my shelf, a truly odd mix of traditional Vietnamese instruments/vocals and fusion guitar. Thumbs

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After Wednesday’s JJA Jazz Awards event I club-hopped with award winner Nate Chinen, first to the new Poisson Rouge — kind of a fussy, disorganized space on first impression — for Charlie Haden’s Quartet West. I’m not a keen follower of the band, but Ernie Watts on tenor really grabbed me by the lapels. Haden’s lines on rhythm changes (“Passport”)

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I was tremendously saddened to learn of the pianist’s death in a scuba diving accident on Saturday. A few years ago, around the time of EST’s first U.S. release, the group did a special industry showcase at Tonic, and Columbia invited a handful of music journalists to a pre-show dinner with Svensson and the band on the Lower East Side.

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Had to put up just one more…

At 11pm every night during the Fes Festival, Morocco’s Sufi Brotherhoods would perform in a courtyard at a cultural center called Dar Tazi. These concerts were open to the public, although the cops seemed to be on high riff-raff alert, so the scene at the door was something like a velvet rope. The shows ran the gamut, from hypnotic a

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