Josef Woodard
Josef’s Contributions
02/21/09 Concerts
Portland Jazz Festival
If a visitor to this year’s Portland Jazz Festival hadn’t been privy to the behind-the-scenes drama already, it didn’t take long to hear the tale. As intrepid director Bill Royston repeatedly explained in concert introductions and everywhere he could, this...
01/21/09 Concerts
Berlin Jazz Festival
A change in the directorship guard at the Berlin Jazz Festival, one of Europe’s oldest and most intriguing “off-season” fests, always brings speculation about how the specific aesthetics might. After five strong and artful years helmed by Peter Schulze...
January/February 2009 Albums
Randy in Brasil
Randy Brecker
Brazilian music has been in the public ear more than usual during this past year, given the 50th birthday of bossa nova and its multiple celebrations. Bossa, in fact, doesn’t figure much into Randy Brecker’s new Brazilian adventure, Randy in Brasil, but...
January/February 2009 Albums
Pass It On
Dave Holland Sextet
Given the power and familiarity of Dave Holland’s longstanding sextet and the quintet before that, going back to the early ’80s, one point of surprise with his new band and recording is a fundamental change: the presence of piano. Mulgrew Miller does the...
January/February 2009 Albums
Sound Proof
Greg Howe
Jazz-rock fusion, contrary to some reports, did not die. It just splintered off into various sub-cultural cul-de-sacs, appreciated by small, rabid fanbases. One of those is the rock-jazz (vs. jazz-rock), more-is-more school of guitar, lorded over by the...
December 2008 Features
Wadada Leo Smith: Onward & Upward
It’s fair to say that veteran trumpeter-composer-educator Wadada Leo Smith has been in the midst of a renaissance during the last several years. Yes, it has been a good millennium for him so far, in terms of public visibility. But appearances are deceiving...
December 2008 Albums
Woot
Garaj Mahal
As its band name suggests, Garaj Mahal is a half-serious band, with a healthy portion of its focus on the party aesthetic that has rendered it something of a self-made sensation in the network-machined world of jam bands. But the group is one of the rare...
December 2008 Albums
The Suitcase, Live in Köln ’94
Steve Khan
Contrary to the implications of detractors, all electric jazz is not created equal, or with a common pool of aesthetic values. Take the case of guitarist Steve Khan’s trio, which never quite got the respect it deserved, partly because of its subtlety. Khan’s...
11/12/08 Concerts
Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra in New York
To the now happily relevant question Where were you when America voted for its first black president?, a roomful of music lovers can say they were at the Blue Note in Greenwich Village, as the politically fueled Liberation Music Orchestra was smack dab in...
10/02/08 Concerts
Monterey Jazz Festival
Coming off the radiant glow and hoopla of a major milestone year could be a natural comedown for a jazz festival, especially when the milestone was the Monterey Jazz Festival’s 50th anniversary celebration. Confronted with the impressive fact that Monterey...
09/24/08 Concerts
Chris Walden Big Band with Tierney Sutton in Los Angeles
Presently one of the more compelling young figures on the Los Angeles big-band scene, the German-born-and-bred Chris Walden’s trajectory so far is an interesting, cross-cultural line, lined with some kind of implicit geo-logic. Trained in the hotbed of the...
09/10/08 Concerts
Bossa Nova at 50
Los Angeles has long been a natural geo-cultural way station for Brazilian music, and not only because of the parallel weather realities and an easy-does-it spirit between Brazil and Southern California. Musically, there have also been certain affinities...
08/04/08 Concerts
Estoril & Allgarve Jazz Festival
Jazz has a faithful friend and source of support in Portugal, as it does in most European countries. But Portugal’s jazz love and jazz lore run especially deep. As any jazz lover in Lisbon will tell you, the city sports the oldest jazz club in Europe, a...
August 2008 Albums
Flag Day
Adam Kolker
For the first minute and a half of saxist Adam Kolker’s calmly brilliant new album, the sound we hear is his probing, playful and relaxed horn by its lonesome. Enter the band, and not just any band: Drummer Paul Motian gently folds in his unique and slippery...
August 2008 Albums
Moravian Gems
George Mraz & Iva Bittova
Noted musical Czechs George Mraz and violinist-vocalist Iva Bittova have made international names for themselves, but mostly in relatively separate corners of the jazz universe. Mraz has gained a reputation as one of jazz’s more protean “mainstream” bassists...
August 2008 Albums
Two Men With the Blues
Willie Nelson & Wynton Marsalis
Ah, together at last—outlaw country eminence gris Willie Nelson and jazz icon and lightning rod Wynton Marsalis. While the phrase “Willie and Wynton” might fall awkwardly off the tongue for some, history has in fact shown that Willie Nelson and jazz have...
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ReportAbout Josef Woodard
Josef Woodard has covered jazz for JazzTimes and other magazines since the late 1980s, classical/contemporary music for the Los Angeles Times since 1993, opera for Opera Now, and pop and jazz for Rolling Stone, among countless other associations. At the moment, he is working on a book on Charles Lloyd. Also a guitarist, songwriter, co-owner of the 20-year-old Household Ink Records label (householdink.com) and general “situationist,” Woodard tries to maintain a balance between looking at music from the outside and burrowing into creative machinery.