Nate Chinen
Nate’s Contributions
November 2008 Features
Bill Stewart: The Tie That Binds
Picture the late set at Smalls in Manhattan’s West Village on a mid-August evening. Kevin Hays at the piano, rhapsodic and fluid. Doug Weiss on bass, intently attuned. And if the craning of necks can be trusted, a sizable portion of the audience focused...
October 2008 The Gig
Of Horns & Hard Drives
Perhaps you’ve heard of the android trumpeter. Developed by Toyota, it was unveiled in 2004 as part of a suite of so-called Partner Robots designed to “embody kindness and intelligence and to assist with human activities,” in the parlance of a company press...
September 2008 The Gig
Collective Visions
For the ambitious jazz listener in New York City, a kind of haze descends around the second week of June. With the JVC Jazz Festival just stirring and the Vision Festival gathering steam, concertgoers can gravitate to the aesthetic extreme of their choice...
August 2008 The Gig
Pump Up the Jamz
On one level it wasn’t an unusual scene: Nicholas Payton and James Carter carving up rhythm changes on trumpet and tenor saxophone, respectively. Beside them: the indubitable bassist Christian McBride and the irrepressible drummer Roy Haynes. Boppish head...
June 2008 The Gig
Conflict & Conversation
On March 25, 1963, an alto saxophonist named Jimmy Woods entered a Los Angeles studio to record an album, his second, for the Contemporary label. He had assembled some musicians of note, including tenor saxophonist Harold Land, pianist Andrew Hill and drummer...
May 2008 The Gig
Commission This!
One night last summer in Lower Manhattan, the Chicago-based flutist Nicole Mitchell premiered a long-form composition inspired by the work of Octavia Butler, the pioneering science-fiction author. Created and conceived for Mitchell’s nine-piece Black Earth...
April 2008 The Gig
Bass-Less Accusations
Absence, they say, makes the heart grow fonder. Another bolt of conventional wisdom holds that wherever three or more jazz musicians are gathered, a bass player shall be among them. Put those credos together and you might come to this conclusion: Any jazz...
March 2008 The Gig
Watch the Tapes
Word came hard and fast: Michael Brecker was gone. And for a number of musicians and fans at the 2007 International Association for Jazz Education Conference, there was comfort in solidarity. My experience with the news was more private: I was working at...
January/February 2008 The Gig
2007: The Year in Gigs
I missed Sonny Rollins at Carnegie Hall. Likewise John McLaughlin with his new fusion band, and the Keith Jarrett Trio in their latest New York appearance, and Branford Marsalis in his Jazz at Lincoln Center tribute to Gil Evans. I couldn’t make it to the...
December 2007 The Gig
Two Ways to Tango
Let’s see if this sounds familiar: We’re at the turn of the last century, and an irrepressible new music has coalesced in a teeming port city. Its sound is ebullient, even impertinent, but also rich and refined: an unlikely brew of flavors extracted from...
November 2007 The Gig
Haynes, His Way
Fifty years ago, a United States Senator named John F. Kennedy delivered a speech to mark the first anniversary of a Hungarian student uprising against Communist rule. Noting ruefully that the subsequent revolution had failed, he issued an exhortation: “So...
October 2007 The Gig
Brass Class
Wynton Marsalis. Terence Blanchard. Dave Douglas. Jon Faddis. Ralph Alessi. What do these people have in common? Well, they’re all jazz trumpeters, of course. But beyond that, each currently plays a significant role in the realm of jazz education, and in...
October 2007 Albums
The Complete On the Corner Sessions
Miles Davis
Picture this: You’ve stumbled onto a construction site where impressive work is under way. The builders appear to know their trade, pouring concrete and hauling steel. But no one cops to knowing the design, and the contractor, however carefully observant...
September 2007 The Gig
Dream of Life
“It was a dream,” says Chet Baker, in a whispery and faraway tone. “Things like that don’t happen. Just to very few.” Arriving near the end of Bruce Weber’s strange and impressionistic film Let’s Get Lost, the scene and its sentiment feel emblematic. Baker...
July/August 2007 The Gig
Beyond Elasticity
Perhaps you’ve had a similar experience with Moreno, who set up shop in New York precisely a decade ago. You noticed him on tour with Joshua Redman’s Elastic Band, or backing the neo-gospel powerhouse Lizz Wright. Maybe you’ve heard him carving up “Suspicion...
June 2007 The Gig
Oprah's Bop Club
Around this time last year, an issue of GQ ignited the sort of minor flare-up now commonplace in our entertainment culture. What set it off was an interview with Chris Bridges, a.k.a. Ludacris, which included a complaint about Oprah Winfrey. Apparently some...
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ReportAbout Nate Chinen
JT columnist Nate Chinen, who also regularly contributes to the New York Times, is one of jazz journalism’s brightest young talents. For the past three years he has won the Jazz Journalists Association’s Helen Dance-Robert Palmer Award for excellence in writing. He also won the Association’s Best Book About Jazz Award in 2004 for his work with George Wein on the memoir Myself Among Others: A Life in Music.