Gary Giddins
Gary’s Contributions
April 2004 Cadenza
Fatha's Day
Stop the clock: We have unfinished business from 2003. While much praise will be heaped, deservedly, on pianist Ethan Iverson for the Bad Plus' Give (the dynamics, the interaction, the unusual repertoire) and on Brad Mehldau for Joel Frahm's Don't Explain...
March 2004 Cadenza
Ellington's Legacy
This month Columbia/Legacy is finally releasing three important Ellington CDs originally scheduled for 2003. This music has been unavailable far too long, especially Ellington Uptown and Masterpieces by Ellington , which collect key works from a remarkable...
January/February 2004 Cadenza
Breaking Into the Vaults
It's fitting that a record company's holdings are said to reside in a vault. The word brings to mind Dracula's crypt or a dungeon outfitted with pit and pendulum or the phantom's subterranean grotto or, for those less Gothically inclined, a bank's most inaccessible...
December 2003 Cadenza
All Strung Out
To paraphrase a couple of old songs, strings are here and strings can really hang you up the most. A spate of recent CDs demonstrates a profusion of horsehair, which for me was capped by David Murray's October 15 concert with quartet and strings at Zankel...
November 2003 Cadenza
Always Au Courant
Amid the constant blare of new recordings, it's easy to overlook a work that later generations deem classic-easy to lose sight of the elements that define classic. The allure of originality and au courantness can blind us to achievements wrought with an...
October 2003 Cadenza
No Umbrage in Umbria
The Umbria Jazz festival, in Perugia, celebrated its 30th anniversary in July. In 1987, Umbria invited me to show a film I had made about Charlie Parker, and during my brief visit I attended two unforgettable performances: Gil Evans leading his orchestra...
September 2003 Cadenza
Alive at the Village Vanguard
I'm always dismayed when a New Yorker says that he or she has never visited the Village Vanguard, the world's premier jazz club. An acoustic marvel to rival Carnegie Hall, the Vanguard is likewise a cathedral of aspiration and genius and a temple to time...
July/August 2003 Cadenza
Goodman's Bad Movie
At summer camp in 1960, when it rained too hard for outdoor activities, the campers were herded into a rec building to watch 16 mm movie rentals. One night we were subjected to The Benny Goodman Story, released five years earlier. Even at that tender age...
June 2003 Cadenza
Bypassing Byas No More
On January 27, Sonny Rollins accepted the Living Legend of Jazz prize at the first annual Nightlife Awards, an event honoring performers in jazz, cabaret (living legend Julie Wilson) and comedy (Robert Klein, who said that seeing Rollins backstage was like...
May 2003 Cadenza
Jazz is Dead! Is Alive
Every experienced jazz journalist knows that there are two jazz stories one can always sell to high-paying slick magazines. The first is: Jazz is dead!-an ever-popular gloss available in two flavors (sorrow and anger) that serves two purposes. It confirms...
April 2003 Cadenza
Bottled and Sold
The U.S. Supreme Court's decisi-on, on January 15, to uphold the longest copyright extension in this country's history is a victory for the grasping Congress that passed it and the multinationals and wealthy heirs that lobbied for it. Even Justice Ginsburg...
March 2003 Cadenza
Beastly Boys
As I write, in early December 2002, the litigation between James Newton and the Beastie Boys is gearing for a rematch that could help redefine jazz composition (written or improvised) in copyright law. On November 22, the Beastie Boys filed their Opposition...
January/February 2003 Cadenza
I Remember Chirpy
Not a bad year on balance, though slow to start. JVC's New York jazz festival disappointed, and Carnegie Hall's dismantling of the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band underscored the malaise triggered by a widespread capitulation to jazz lite, jazz pop and jazz not...
December 2002 Cadenza
The Technicalities of Technique
In the throes of research, I recently chanced upon a 1941 story in Variety. Benny Goodman was set to play the Mozart Clarinet Concerto at Philadelphia’s Robin Hood Dell under the baton of Jose Iturbi. The once-popular Spanish pianist balked. “It would be...
November 2002 Cadenza
Sophisticated Rhythm
Duke Ellington called his 1956 television revue “A Drum Is a Woman”—a title that gives uneasy pause to the dyslexic who fear he is saying the reverse. In fact, he was attempting to subvert the most ubiquitous of clichés, where “drum” is the object and “beat”...
October 2002 Cadenza
Rosemary Clooney, 1928-2002
Rosemary Clooney died in the late afternoon of June 29, at her Beverly Hills home, surrounded by her husband, five children and other family members. She had been suffering from lung cancer and in discomfort for six months, following surgery in December...
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ReportAbout Gary Giddins
Arguably the world’s greatest living jazz critic, Gary Giddins has earned his field unprecedented credibility in the public sphere. His innovative, unconventional history Visions of Jazz won the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism in 1999, and he’s authored award-winning volumes on Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby. Giddins has won more ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards for Excellence in Music Criticism than any other music writer, and his 30-year run authoring the Village Voice’s Weather Bird column yielded some of jazz journalism’s most deftly written and insightful pieces. Giddins’ Cadenza column debuted in JT’s June 2002 issue, and he continues to incite new debates and mine the annals of jazz history here each month.