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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.
MUSIC
The Blue and the Great
Malcolm Jones 1/31/2009 12:00:00 AM
At 2:30 on March 2, 1959, the 32-year-old trumpet player and bandleader Miles Davis took six sidemen into a New York City studio, where they spent the afternoon and early evening recording three songs. On April 22, the same cohort, minus one of the two piano players who worked on the first date, returned to the same studio and recorded two more songs. As far as the musicians were concerned, that was the end of the story. For the rest of the world, it was just beginning. Four months later, the five selections were released on the album "Kind of Blue." The record became an immediate success, embraced by jazz fans, critics and musicians. Two songs on the album, "So What" and "All Blues," quickly became staples in the jazz repertoire. "So What" even became a favorite of college and high-school marching bands. Meanwhile, the record kept selling, and selling and selling. Today, 50 years after it was released, "Kind of Blue" remains the bestselling jazz album of all time. More than 4 million copies have been sold, and the album still sells an average of 5,000 copies a week. If you have a jazz album on your shelf, odds are it's "Kind of Blue."
CULTURE
A Hip-hop Survival Tip
Seth Colter Walls 1/3/2009 12:00:00 AM
Real art guards its stature carefully. New styles and schools and stars can spend years in the woodshed, working to prove their claims on cultural immortality. In its early decades, Hollywood movies were dogged by an aura of low-culture disposability—it would take French critics to suggest Hitchcock as an auteur on par with novelists and painters. So it makes sense that hip-hop, pop music's most recent invention, still endures slights 30 years after its birth, even when it dominates the charts. But as dissertations on the genre begin to fill the halls of academe—Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute officially adopted an online "Hip-Hop Archive" earlier this year—rap scholars will have the case of Q-Tip to cite when staking their claim to High Art. More likely to rhyme about vegetarianism or painters than pimps dealing drugs, Q-Tip became a forebear of today's "conscious rap" movement as the de facto frontman in A Tribe Called Quest. Now with his latest solo release, "The Renaissance," Q-Tip is closing on 20 years of relevance. As always, the new CD features the rapper delighting in sophisticated, slightly left-of-field rhythms and eschewing the outlaw posturing of generic MCs. The week after its release, "The Renaissance" debuted on the Billboard 200 chart at No. 11, without any major radio or video promotion—a testament to Q-Tip's staying power in a game where a span of months can render a rapper yesterday's news. "My thing is not like McDonald's, where you go in and get fast results," Q-Tip told NEWSWEEK. "My thing is like a gumbo or a turkey dinner—you got to let it cook and marinate."
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.