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Not to be overlooked
I’m not sure I’ll do another Week on Disc before the holidays are out, so I wanted to draw attention to Carla’s Christmas Carols (Watt), a seasonal gem by legendary pianist-composer-arranger Carla Bley, her longtime collaborator Steve Swallow on electric bass, and the superb Partyka Brass Quintet. Beautiful arranging and hip detours on “Away In a Manger,” “O Tannenbaum” and
The week on disc (60)
In case you missed the last one… Nobuyasu Furuya Trio, Bendowa (Clean Feed) Ben Wendel/Harish Raghavan/Nate Wood, ACT (BJU) Yulia Musayelyan Quartet, Caminos (ind.) (Another) Nuttree Quartet (Liebman/Abercrombie/Anderson/Nussbaum), Something Sentimental (Kind of Blue) Bill Dixon, Tapestries for Small Orchestra (Firehouse 12) Jeb Patton, New Strides (MaxJazz)
Self-importance watch
“While there are many lessons that can be drawn from this historic upset, the main one is this: that ordinary people, banding together in solidarity, can change ANYTHING, be it the pop charts or the world.” — Rage Against the Machine, after a fan-driven effort made “Killing in the Name” the #1 Christmas single in the UK, beating out X
Afghan reality checks
From reading Robert Greenwald’s antiwar website Rethink Afghanistan, or the work of pacifist Derrick Crowe, one of RA’s house bloggers, you would think that Obama’s plan is to reenact the My Lai massacre on a regular basis and maybe drink the blood of the victims in ritualistic triumph. Crowe writes: I held my nose and voted for President Obama last
Johnny hates jazz
Via Peter Hum and Patrick J. — John McCain has taken to the Senate floor to mock federal funding for jazz: “Next time you’re in New York, go to the Lincoln Center. You’ll see that we’re spending $800,000 of your money for jazz at the Lincoln Center. Jazz lovers rejoice.” As Patrick notes, the federal sums going to jazz institutions
Most insane jazz video ever
If anything, that’s a colossal understatement. Via Josh Sherman:
No Intention
So few instruments, so much music. Hat tip Ben Ratliff:
The decade in jazz, 2000-2009
The decade now ending happens to have been my first spent as a jazz critic (I started in 1999). So the simplest way to encapsulate my view is just to point to some of the things I’ve done. My 2001 New York Times piece [pdf] on the resurgence of the Fender Rhodes — apart from my error in crediting Dave