(aus dem Jazzinstitut Darmstadt)
2 – 15 March 2022 | Ausgabe 05/2023 (English)

We read the morning paper for you!

Dear jazz friends,

The Jazzinstitut's JazzNews keeps you up-to-date with news of the jazz world, which we collect, summarize, and issue via e-mail about once a week. This service can also be accessed on our website (www.jazzinstitut.de), where it is updated on a daily basis.

If you need bibliographies of the musicians named in our JazzNews, please click on our website’s Jazz Index page. This is a bibliographical reference to jazz-related books, magazines, journals and other sources that you can access without charge. If you don't find the name(s) you’re looking for, feel free to e-mail us! We will send you Jazz Index digests of articles about musicians as they make the news.

Now, have fun reading about the jazz week that was!

... brief news ...

Marc Myers remembers saxophonist Frank Socolow in the 1940s (JazzWax). --- Marcus J. Moore talks to musicians and others about their favorite piano tracks in jazz history and gets recommendations by Dan Tepfer (Thelonious Monk), Samara Joy (Barry Harris), Hanif Abdurraqib (Duke Ellington), Vijay Iyer (Geri Allen), Keanna Faircloth (Ahmad Jamal), Marcus J. Moore (Herbie Hancock), Cosmo Baker (Stanley Cowell), Attiyah Khan (Abdullah Ibrahim), Jacqueline Schneider (Horace Silver), Ashley Khan (Bill Evans), Nduduzo Makhathini (Bheki Mseleku), Martin Johnson (Mal Waldron), Michael J. West (Andrew Hill), and Giovanni Russonello (Erroll Garner) (New York Times). Ethan Iverson is intrigued, yet suggests 10 other recordings (Transitional Technology).

Lewis Porter continues his review of film clips of Charlie Parker with an outtake in which Parker amuses himself watching Coleman Hawkins trying to fit his finger movements to the pre-recorded music, and he also shows the final result, a 4 1/2 minute film with the two saxophonists performing "Ballade". Porter also focusses on another piece recorded at the same session, "Celerity", and points out the meaning of the title and its musical source (Playback with Lewis Porter). Porter reflects on the late saxophonist Wayne Shorter's first recordings (Playback with Lewis Porter [1], Playback with Lewis Porter [2]). And he listens to an interview excerpt with Duke Ellington by Swedish journalist Claes Dahlgren, in which Ellington talks about personally experienced racism in the United States (Playback with Lewis Porter).

Mathias Maschat talks to German saxophonist Alfred Harth about his long career, about the Frankfurt avant-garde scene of the 1970s and 1980s, about his musical and performative aesthetic, as well as about activities in Seoul, Korea since the early 2000s (Exploratorium Berlin). --- Martin Burkhalter reports about a panel in Berne, Switzerland, that discusses cultural appropriation in jazz, concluding that it's okay for male white musicians to play jazz as long as they acknowledge where the music comes from (Thuner Tagblatt).

Eliza S. Banbury talks to jazz historian Maxine Gordon about her upcoming book covering the lives and music of four women musicians, Maxine Sullivan, Velma Middleton, Melba Liston, and Shirley Scott, about her own road into the jazz world, hanging around the Village Vanguard, working as a road manager, and being married to saxophonist Dexter Gordon, about her approach to research, as well as about using reflections upon Black feminist thought and the meaning of geography / place for her discussions of musicians' lives (The Harvard Crimson). --- Ted Gioia reminds us that etymologically "sax" and "sex" actually are related (The Honest Broker).

Alexandra Flieth talks to German photographer Harald Dayot, some of whose pictures are currently being shown in an exhibition called "Jazz Is My Life" in Frankfurt (Frankfurter Neue Presse). --- Nate Chinen reflects on listening to saxophonist Tim Berne since the mid-1990s and shares his liner notes for Berne's album "The Sevens" from 2002 (The Gig).

Richard Brody watches "Rewind & Play", Alain Gomi's film using footage of a 1969 concert by Thelonious Monk in France (The New Yorker). Ethan Iverson watches the film as well (Transitional Technology). --- Tobias Lehmkuhl remembers saxophonist Ornette Coleman, focusing on "Lonely Woman" which he identifies as a "classic, i.e. a piece mostly performed as notated" (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung).

Vinnie Sperrazza listens to some early recordings by saxophonist Wayne Shorter with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers (Chronicles). --- The museum Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in Berlin, Germany, shows a new exhibition called "Broken Dreams, Vol. 2" that is both a celebration of the 70^th anniversary of the vinyl record and presents sound works by contemporary artists (Hamburger Bahnhof).

Obituaries

We learned of the passing of saxophonist Wayne Shorter at age 89 (New York Times [1], New York Times [2], Washington Post [1], Washington Post [2], Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, The Honest Broker, WBGO, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Zeit), vocalist Ida McBeth at age 70 (KSHB), Georgian bassist and composer Tamaz Kurashvili at age 75 (Jazz Passings), German clarinetist Harry Künzel at age 90 (Leipziger Volkszeitung), Panamaian saxophonist Carlos Garnett at age 84 (Marlbank), German saxophonist Helmut Forsthoff at age 78 (Jazzkeller 69), British keyboardist Robin Lumley at age 75 (Rockaxis), Canadian-British clarinetist Wally Fawkes at age 98 (Evening Standard), architect of Jazz at Lincoln Center Rafael Vinoly at age 78 (New York Times), vocalist Toni Harper at age 86 (JazzWax), Australian promoter Lynette Irwin (The Music), pianist David Kamien at age 94 (Legacy), Brazilian flautist Bebeto Castilho at age 83 (Globo), as well as saxophonist and tap dancer Ronald McFadden at age 66 (KCUR).

From the World of Jazz Research

The Jazz Centre UK

The Jazz Centre UK in Southend on Sea is the only centre of its kind in the UK. It was founded in 2016 as a registered charity. With the support of Southend on Sea City Council, it has grown from a single room to occupy a complete floor of the Beecroft Gallery at the heart of the city. Now, the city council has decided to withdraw its primary support for The Jazz Centre UK, serving the Centre notice to leave its premises by 1 August this year. A search for a new home that is practical and affordable has been unsuccessful so far. The trustees of The Jazz Centre UK are seeking support to persuade Southend on Sea City Council to think again and work with the Centre to avoid closure of the charity (The Jazz Centre UK, Petition).

Last Week at the Jazzinstitut

George Gruntz Collection

In mid-February Felix Gruntz, son of Swiss pianist and composer George Gruntz, donated the George Gruntz Berlin Jazzfest collection to the Jazzinstitut's archive, comprising 35 thick binders full of correspondence connected to Jazzfest Berlin for which his father had served as musical director between 1972 and 1994. The collection contains letters to city officials, letters to journalists, letters to musicians, letters concerning Gruntz's predecessor and the festival's founder, Joachim Ernst Berendt (not many of them friendly) or concerning the festival's financial director into the 1980s (eventually not friendly as well). It's an immensely interesting bag of material documenting behind-the-scenes discourses on the European jazz scene of the 1970s and 1980s, and thus complementing both the Berendt collection at the Jazzinstitut as well as other material we had received in 2014 containing GEMA listings, playbills and tapes from between 1981 and 2013. The Gruntz papers have been boxed and will eventually be fully catalogued and scanned for (on-site) research.

Annex

Apart from our daily workload (preparing the Kathrin Preis residency in May, the Jazz Conceptions workshop in July, the Darmstadt Jazzforum conference / festival / exhibition in September, guiding visitors through the archive, answering e-mail requests from researchers, caring for several networks we are involved in to improvise the situation for the jazz scene in Germany and beyond) we will spend the next months packing, re-packing, and un-packing. The city of Darmstadt has built a new art depot for the Mathildenhöhe, Darmstadt's major museum and center for Jugendstil (art nouveau), the municipal archive, the Internationales Musikinstitut (for contemporary composed music) and the Jazzinstitut. It is a state-of-the-art, climate-controlled, safe archival warehouse built specifically for art and historic documents. We are currently identifying material in the three spaces we occupy (the main Kavaliershaus building, a small annex in the direct neighborhood as well as a warehouse on the outskirts of town) that will eventually be held in the new depot building. Our new neighbors there are already moving their stuff; we are set for early June. Our main location will remain the historic Kavaliershaus in the Bessungen neighborhood of Darmstadt, however we are happy to find a professional solution for the off-site archive.

Destination Unknown: The Future of Jazz

We have managed to plan an excited program for our fall conference. There will be a pre-opening concert on Wednesday, 27 September 2023 at the Jazzinstitut's concert space with the trio of Estonian pianist Kirke Karja, French bassist Étienne Renard and German drummer Ludwig Wandinger. Formed just before the pandemic the trio literally explodes in powerful interplay.

The first conference day starts on Thursday afternoon, 28 September 2023, focusing on PAST AND FUTURE with a keynote by André Döhring and a paper in which Harald Kisiedu places the statement that "jazz is dead" (for example on Theo Croker's latest album) in a larger historical context, discussing the consequences of a view of jazz as a genre as well as the continuous disregard for Afro-diasporic composers.

A panel moderated by Sophie Emile Beha will ask "Jazz – but for whom really?" For this we have invited bassist James Banner to talk about classism and his work-class project, vibraphonist Evi Filippou who will share her experiences with school children, and a futurologist who can help us think ahead. The first day will end with a visit to the Jazzinstitut for all participants, as the conference is being held on the other side of town and many have not yet seen the archive.

The next JazzNews will unveil more papers and discourses covered at our fall conference. Eventually you will find the whole program including titles, biographies and more detailed abstracts, on our website. You may want to already mark the conference date: 27/28-30 September 2023. And keep revisiting our website (Destination Unknown) together with a corresponding blog that outlines some of our own thoughts on the subject. By the way: the main conference language will be German.

Current opening hours of the Jazzinstitut

The Jazzinstitut is open to the public by appointment. We also offer research help by phone, e-mail or video-call. If you would like to schedule a video call, please send an e-mail to make an appointment and give us an idea what you want to talk about. We will then reply with a link for a Webex video session for your meeting.