Solo
March 2007 By Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Jazz and Basketball
There can be no doubt that jazz has made me a better person than I would have been without it. The music inspires my passion to participate fully and richly in life. And the jazz greats I’ve known, from Miles Davis to John Coltrane to Louis Armstrong to...
May 2006 By David R. Adler
The Trial of Tarik Shah
By now, JazzTimes readers may be familiar with the case of bassist Tarik Shah, who is awaiting trial on charges of conspiring to support al-Qaeda. It is a stretch to include Shah “among the top 1% of jazz bassists on the scene today,” as it says on his support...
October 2005 By David R. Adler
Assessing Atzmon
In his keynote address at the recent National Critics Conference in Los Angeles, Norman Lear drew laughs with a reference to On Bullshit, the best-seller by Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt. But the message from Lear, the visionary sitcom writer, activist...
April 2002 By Bob Blumenthal
More Jazz and Sex
The December 2001 issue of JazzTimes raised a host of pertinent questions regarding the packaging of female musicians and the obstacles anyone encounters who does not fit the music’s longstanding heterosexual-male norm. It was a pleasure to see the analysis...
December 2001 By David Chevan
Mid-East Scales Provoke Western Fears
The Afro-Semitic Experience is a multicultural jazz band that performs a mix of gospel, klezmer, spirituals and Jewish and African-American liturgical song. Our group played at a museum in Connecticut just days after the attacks upon the World Trade Center...
October 2001 By Ian M. Dogole
Jazz Bubbles in Music’s Melting Pot
Jazz may have been born in America, but more than ever it is the music of the world. From its inception more than a century ago, jazz thrived in a spirit of multiethnic inclusion—the “gumbo” that Ken Burns refers to in his controversial documentary, Jazz...
September 2001 By Bill Shoemaker
The New Euro-Jazz Chauvinism
American jazz musicians have considerable exposure in Europe, the breadbasket of jazz, with well-funded tours and media coverage. If they are lucky, however, they will evade the growing anti-American sentiment among European critics, which is coalescing...
April 2001 By Stuart Nicholson
Evansing the Score: The Politics of Exclusion in Ken Burns’ Jazz
A quick stroll down the shopping malls of cyberspace is enough to confirm that at the moment we are not enduring a dearth of jazz history books. Like mayflies in permanent hatch they seem to be in a state of constant renewal, as one disappears several more...
March 2001 By Lara Pellegrinelli
I Guess I Would Notice. But That Doesn’t Mean You Shouldn’t.
On the evening of Nov. 7, an Election Day that will live in infamy, I only left my TV briefly: to walk from my apartment and pick up the new edition of the Village Voice. The paper included a feature I had written, “Dig Boy Dig: Jazz at Lincoln Center Breaks...
January/February 2001 By Willard Jenkins
Audience Development
Jazz is not reaching its broadest potential audience. Unfortunately few jazz magazines, writers, editors, record companies or even the musicians appear to properly grasp or address this issue. Listening to one of my colleagues rant about the lack of stylistic...
