(aus dem Jazzinstitut Darmstadt)
31 March - 13 April 2022 | Ausgabe 07/2022 (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 ...

Dan Epstein remembers flutist Herbie Mann who managed to even cross over to disco musically in the mid-1970s, revisiting his career from post-bop to a more groove-oriented music and influences from Asian, Middle Eastern and Eastern European sounds, reflecting about the jazz scene's skeptic view of his musicianship and journalist Hunter S. Thompson's different assessment who basically thought that Mann's music could cure any ailment (Forward). --- Giovanni Russonello talks to South African pianists Nduduzo Makhathini, Kyle Shepherd and Bokani Dyer about their respective career and the meaning of jazz for post-Apartheid South Africa (NPR).

Gary Gerard Hamilton talks to pianist Robert Glasper about his latest album, "Black Radio III", about musicianship "being cool again" in hip-hop and R&B, about his generation of musicians having reclaimed African American music, as well as about responding to people who deny that his music is jazz with: "Yes, it is – it literally is. It's just jazz with a heartbeat. It's still alive. What you like is dead. What we're doing is alive. And that's the difference" (ABC News). --- Jackson Sinnenberg talks to pianists Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn about performing as a duo, about playing the piano feeling like "playing the room", as well as about their mutual experience of working with Roscoe Mitchell (Capitol Bop).

Gordon Masson talks to German impresario Karsten Jahnke about the tour agency he started in 1962 which still is in existence, now led by his grandson Ben Mitha (IQ). --- Katharina Schnurr talks to German singer Uschi Brüning about the Berlin neighborhood she lives in as well as about her husband, saxophonist Ernst Ludwig Petrowsky who has been living in a nursing home for the past five years (Super Illu).

Ted Gioia discovers that there were streaming services before the internet, finding a mention of music streaming shows in Edward Bellamy's 1887 novel "Looking Backward" and actual streaming services to private homes by Muzak as early as the 1920s and the Multiphone offering music selections of up to 300 tracks over telephone lines from the late 1930s through the 1950s (The Honest Broker). --- Singer Renee Fleming talks about teaching long Covid patients hot to "extent breath" (Inquirer).

Uwe Bogen talks Georgia Lehn about her father, pianist Erwin Lehn who founded the SWR Big Band in 1951 and lived in a house the floor plan of which resembled a grand piano, as well as about Swedish singer Bibi Johns who regularly worked with the band and used to drive a flashy car during her Stuttgart time (Stuttgarter Nachrichten). --- Giovanni Russonello argues that it was inevitable that pianist and bandleader Jon Batiste was one of the big Grammy winners this year and quotes Batiste's acceptance speech: "I believe this to my core: There is no best musician, best artist, best dancer, best actor. Music is more than entertainment for me, it’s a spiritual practice" (New York Times).

Detlef Kinsler talks to John Steinmark and Lorenzo Dolce of Frankfurt-based initiative Jazz Montez (Journal Frankfurt). --- Colin Doherty attends an exhibition about Boston's jazz history throughout the 20^th century (The Suffolk Journal). --- Andre Paine reports about the Blue Note label launching Blue Note Africa to sign jazz artists from across the continent (Music Week). --- Georg Seeßlen (Deutschlandfunk) as well as Beate Sampson and Roland Spiegel (BR Klassik) remember German clarinetist and bandleader Hugo Strasser on his centennial. --- Ethan Iverson listens to Horace Silver's 1954 solo on "Doodlin'" as an example of how to play the blues (with transcriptions) (Do the Math). --- Kevin Beaty remembers violinist and bandleader George Morrison as a pioneer of Denver jazz (Denverite). --- Ben Lopez remembers Malay pianist and composer Jimmy Boyle (The Sun Daily). --- Sebastian Dingler attends the Freejazz Festival in Saarbrücken, Germany, and doesn't see too many women – neither on stage nor in the audience (Saarbrücker Zeitung). --- Yoshi Kato talks to Randall Kline, founder and artistic director of SFJazz Center in San Francisco (San Francisco Examiner).

Obituaries

We learned of the passing of journalist John Swensson at age 71 (OffBeat Magazine, JJA News), as well as British singer Tina May at age 60 (The Guardian).

From the World of Jazz Research

Journal of Jazz Studies
The Institute of Jazz Studies seeks manuscript submissions and proposals for the 2022 issues of the open-access, peer-reviewed online journal Journal of Jazz Studies (Journal of Jazz Studies, CfP).

Gender & Jazz Survey
Miranda Park and Talisha Goh report about a survey funded by the Australian Research Council about contemporary practices of gender inclusion, exclusion, and participation in the Australian jazz scene (Monash University).

Last Week at the Jazzinstitut

heimat@jazzinstitut, #2
For the second edition of our short residency program we invited the young Quartertone quartet to spend four days at the Jazzinstitut, practice their new program, have a photo session with Wilfried Heckmann, be coached by Florian Ross, and play a concert for a full room that was professionally videotaped and recorded. The four musicians proved that Arndt Weidler's idea for the residency series works out: musicians using the Jazzinstitut's resources to improve their art and successfully develop projects that need time for focusing and close cooperation. Next in line: Saxophonist Angelika Niescier's trio and the Orang Orang Drum Theatre: The Hidden Tune (Jazzinstitut Darmstadt).

Darmstadt – Poland jazz connections
Wolfram Knauer gave a talk at Lions Club Seeheim about the jazz connections between Darmstadt and Poland that started when Werner Wunderlich, who lived in our city at the time, was invited to bring an all-star band to the jazz festival in Sopot near Gdansk in 1957. Wunderlich brought Albert and Emil Mangelsdorff along with other musicians from the Frankfurt scene and some American guests (see JAZZpects #1). In the early 1970s a Darmstadt based couple took over the Jam Pott, a small club in the old part of town, and as they had Polish musicians among their friends, a number of Polish stars-to-be made Darmstadt their Western base, among them Wanda Warska, Andrzej Kurylewicz, Zbigniew Seifert, Michal Urbaniak, Urszula Dudziak, Tomasz Stanko and others. In the early 1980s Polish musicians such as drummer Janusz Stefanski and bassist Vitold Rek settled in the Frankfurt. The Polish jazz connections continue, celebrated for instance by a concert of Leszek Żądło’s European Art Ensemble in early May (Jagdhofkeller) organized by the Lions Clubs Krakow and Seeheim.

Duo:log
We continue to show an exhibition by Darmstadt-based graphic artist Nicole Schneider who took her iPad to the Jazzinstitut's concert stage in January to create her art in dialogue with guitarist Ronnie Graupe (Jazzinstitut). Since then, the concert evolved into an art installation at the Jazzinstitut's gallery that remains open until June. The exhibition gives an introduction to both Schneider's and Graupe's reaction to each other and re-groups some of the graphic and musical results in a 20-minute video projected over two walls in our upstairs gallery. To attend, please make an appointment as there is only limited space available for visitors.

Current opening hours of the Jazzinstitut
The Jazzinstitut is open to the public by appointment. Research slots will be given out with exact time slots for one visitor at a time. We ask our visitors to be either fully vaccinated,  recovered or officially tested (3G regulation). At the same time we continue our offer for 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.