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Hilton Ruiz update
Via JazzTimes.com, a follow-up on the unresolved death of pianist Hilton Ruiz: [T]he Associated Press reports that Ruiz’s family believes the pianist was attacked by several people in Club Utopia, while bouncers “failed to intervene in any meaningful fashion” or call an ambulance, leaving the injured pianist “abandoned” on the street. The pianist’s daughter Aida Ruiz filed a negligence lawsuit
Gaza again
The June 20 statement from Human Rights Watch makes clear that the organization is not backpedaling. I stand corrected, and I’ve amended my original post. Meanwhile, Israel has botched a “targeted killing” elsewhere in Gaza; three children are dead. The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade protests the killing of civilians by promising to kill more of them.
Feldman, Sibelius, Webern
Alex Ross has a great piece on the late composer Morton Feldman (1926-1987) in the June 19 New Yorker: [Feldman] loved to challenge students’ assumptions about what ideas were au courant, about which composers were radical and which were conservative. He proclaimed, for example, a love for Sibelius, who had long been derided in progressive circles as a retrograde Romantic.
Vision Festival highlights
The Vision Festival, which ran this year from June 12-18, is exhausting and invigorating in equal measure. This is a left-of-center music marathon concentrated in one venue, the Angel Orensanz Foundation on the Lower East Side. It just happens to take place around the same time as the more mainstream, multi-venue JVC Jazz Festival. The theme for 2006, Vision’s 11th
The Bad Plus revisited
Last year I penned a defense of the controversial jazz trio The Bad Plus for TNR Online. I’d like to take a moment to repeat and amplify that defense. Unexpectedly, I wound up at Carnegie Hall last night for a multi-artist tribute to Lorraine Gordon, owner and proprietor of the Village Vanguard. (This was under the auspices of the JVC
Happy Mornings
Sullivan links to this utterly insane TV ad for Folger’s coffee.
Gaza postscript
Now it seems that Human Rights Watch’s Marc Garlasco, who contradicted the IDF’s findings on the recent Gaza beach explosion, is backpedaling. According to this Jerusalem Post piece, HRW “could not contradict” the IDF’s finding that “unexploded ordnance” caused the blast. However, HRW continues to demand an independent inquiry, and rightly so. And Israel’s initial claim — that a Palestinian
JVC Jazz and beyond
Staying on top of New York’s jazz scene is a challenging task all year round. When the JVC Jazz Festival and the Vision Festival are happening at the same time, it’s just about impossible. The JVC festival, which lasts a week longer than the Vision, is of course better-funded, more visible and more mainstream, but it has its adventurous side.