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The “record” business continues to make an impressive comeback.  Although actual record sales make up a small fraction of the $8.7 billion music industry, according to Nielsen, the 14.32 million records sold in 2017 was up 9% over the previous year, and the Lp format accounted for 14% of all physical album sales.

This resurgence is evident in my city, Portland, where many neighborhoods are anchored by restaurants and coffee shops spinning record albums, and often include

As Time.com’s Billy Perrigo reminds us in his excellent December 22 piece “How the U.S. Used Jazz as a Cold War Secret Weapon,” the U.S. State Department “hoped that showcasing popular American music around the globe would not only introduce audiences to American culture, but also win them over as ideological allies in the cold war,” and that jazz, in particular the music of Armstrong, Gillespie and Brubeck could help “keep communism at bay by whatever means possible.”

The history Perrigo brings up is itself well-traveled, having been explored in depth by several writers, notably

In a just recorded podcast, two of this era’s most accomplished jazz writers — the New York Times’ Ben Ratliff and Nate Chinen — discuss the two first-run biopics now out on Miles Davis and Chet Baker, the ingenious trumpeters who each experienced great drama in their professional careers and personal lives, most obviously their chemical dependency and great personal charisma. You can hear the journalists discuss

So many great songs to choose from for marking Valentine’s Day…The standard that most immediately comes to mind is an obvious choice, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s “My Funny Valentine.” Written for their 1937 Broadway musical Babes in Arms, the piece was overshadowed on Broadway (and in the film version starring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland) by “Where or When,” “I Wish I Were in Love Again,” and “The Lady is a Tramp,” and was not made relevant until Frank Sinatra’s recording of it in 1953. It was eventually recorded by more than 600 artists on countless albums, and became synonymous with Chet Baker, who recorded it over 100 times. Will Friedwald, author of Stardust Melodies: The Biography of Twelve of America’s Most Popular Songs — an entertaining and essential work of popular music history — wrote that “the tune could be said to follow Baker from the grave, since it’s usually included in memorial tributes to him.”

Friedwald writes, “What makes the whole [song] so remarkable is the happy/sad nature of the lyric, brilliantly mirroring the major/minor nature of the music. It’s a love song, but far from those ‘I love you and everything’s rosy’ tunes so popular in the twenties (vis-a-vis Iriving Berlin’s ‘Blue Skies’). It’s vaguely optimistic, but it couldn’t

From a recent edition of Slate comes a lovely blog post from Isaac Butler, who rediscovered his passion for jazz after challenging himself to find the fragment of music originally responsible for his interest in jazz. It is a brief, satisfying read…

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November 23rd, 2015

I awoke this morning to the sound of a Gene Ammons ballad, “Stella by Starlight.” As a disciple of the sound of Ben Webster and Lester Young, and having been in the forefront – along with Von Freeman — of the “Chicago school,” where a bluesy “expressiveness” was paramount to their style, his music has always moved me. His personal life had its challenges, having been incarcerated on a couple of occasions for narcotics possession, but his sound overcame that, evidenced by the contract he signed with Prestige Records following his 1969 release from prison, which at the time was the largest ever offered by the label.

While some critics questioned the relevance of his style, the pianist

I finally got around to watching Whiplash over the weekend, accurately described by The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw as the “Full Metal Jacket of jazz drumming.” Other than being recommended by several friends and casually knowing it involved a young musician attending a music conservatory, I did no research of the film prior to watching and had no expectation for it. I was struck by the brilliance of the performances – both acting and musical – but taken aback by the bizarre, near sadistic relationship between teacher (Terence Fletcher, played by Academy Award winner J.K. Simmons) and student (Andrew Neyman, played by Miles Teller).

It was great, but ultimately dispiriting art. How could anyone who purports to love music as much as Fletcher treat

Pantoum, Kissed.

The elderly woman, crippled, wrinkled and Sitting in her wheel-chair
was once a sex-symbol, just as wild as you are now
you, who look down upon her with your slim thighs and golden hair,
bubble-gum and smooth talk, look at her thick veins in dismay.