Related Articles: His Time After a While

• The New Jazz Singers

  9/25/2009 12:00:00 AM

  Once upon a time, the emblematic jazz singer was an African-American woman, serenading a smoke-filled room. Think Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. Today, a talented crop of cosmopolitan young singers are creating a new breed of jazz vocalist: the globalized chanteuse. They come from multicultural backgrounds, live all over the world, and are infusing the traditional American sound with new energy. Take today's rising star, 26-year-old Sophie Milman. Born in Russia, she fled with her family to Israel at the age of 7, then settled in Canada at 16. Now she sells out the Blue Note jazz club in Tokyo. Her roots and her reach are global. In looks and language, she couldn't be further from the pioneers who came more than a half century before.

• He’s Going to Have a Rough Year

  Louisa Thomas 7/30/2009 12:00:00 AM

  Time has been Mad Men's costar from the start. It provides the jokes, the fears, the gadgets. It's behind the haunted look in Don Draper's eyes. But when season three begins on Aug. 16, time may play its biggest role yet. Creator Matt Weiner won't pin down the year, but the evidence points to 1963—and 1963 was no ordinary year. For men who thought they ruled by right, it was the year things fell apart.

• Battle Of The Bands

  Malcolm Jones 5/21/2009 12:00:00 AM

  The history of popular music in the 20th century is old news. It begins, depending on who you believe, with Scott Joplin and ragtime. Or maybe when the Original Dixieland Jazz Band first performed in 1916. At that point, the story marches through Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and the swing era to bebop, then to R&B, followed by Elvis and the Beatles, then free jazz, maybe a little nod to disco, and wraps up with punk, grunge and hip-hop. Class dismissed. Or not. There's always some smart aleck in the back of the room with a hand up, looking to make trouble. Yes, Mr. Wald, what's your point?

• MUSIC

  Jazz Standards That Aren’t

  Seth Colter Walls 4/25/2009 12:00:00 AM

  In high-school jazz bands there's always a group of players who yawn at the song list. Even when the music isn't that old, it sounds that way to them. Once rehearsals are over, though, the kids pop in headphones to get their fix of their kind of music: maybe Charles Mingus, but more likely hip-hop, punk or dance. It's not hard to see why, since there hasn't been a common language between big band and the large swath of modern pop forms for a long time. Though big band has produced many (mostly unheard) innovators since the days of Count Basie and the Duke—think Sun Ra or Carla Bley—a lot of that music has belonged to the free-jazz fringe. By contrast, the gentler innovators who snuggle up close to classical music might seem a tad tame to listeners who need their jazz to cook. This isn't the fault of the free-jazzers or the classically minded composers. It's just that jazz has needed writers and players to reconnect the tradition to more modern forms, without falling victim to pastiche.

• The Blues In High Cotton

  The House of Blues might also be called a historical nightmare-at least it would surely seem so to the sharecroppers, field hands and prison chain-gang inmates who created the Delta blues. Those luckless souls hated the Delta and took the first chance they could to get out. One thing they took with them to Northern cities was their music, which they literally electrified into the souped-up urban blues of Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon. The last thing these migrants would ever expect to see was a joint that reminded them of home. Yet the mostly white customers who wander into this blues theme park today don't seem to mind the slick repackaging. Despite charges that its owners were slow to hire African-Americans--in a club that capitalizes on their heritage--the House of Blues is doing turn-away business. With financial backers ranging from Dan Aykroyd to Harvard University, Tigrett plans to open Houses of Blues in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans and London.

• MUSIC

  There's Blues In The News

  Someone must have their mojo workin' over at Columbia Records. While the company futzed around for years, pondering how to market an artist who accompanied himself with his foot instead of a drum machine, a blues revival slowly spread across America. Veteran players like John Lee Hooker and B. B. King got elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and started playing to jampacked halls. Major labels began reissuing the work of Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon. New blues clubs opened in New York, L.A. and Chicago's Yuppified North Side. And the time got ripe for Robert Johnson.

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