*The 2013 edition of the Coleman Hawkins Jazz Festival includes Matt Otto, Stan Kessler with Kathleen Holeman, the Doug Talley Quartet and the Wild Men of Kansas City. The free event takes place June 14-15 at Coleman Hawkins Park in St. Joseph, Missouri.
*The headliners of the fourth annual Jazz Winterlude are Terri Lyne Carrington and Arturo Sandoval. The festival at Johnson County Community College is January 24-25.
*Deborah Brown was interviewed by Joe Dimino of Neon Jazz.
*Michael Pagán praises the Green Lady Lounge.
*Beau Bledsoe offers a fascinating peek behind the curtains at Fado Novato's successful fundraising campaign to finance an extended trip to Portugal.
*Jim Mair has been recognized for his work at Kansas City Kansas Community College.
*Hermon Mehari provides background about a young musician in legal trouble. (Via Tony's Kansas City.)
*KC Jazz Lark commends the vitality of Kansas City's jazz scene while taking an apparent swipe at the author of this blog. Noting the cancelation of Kanrocksas, my good friend implies that had the festival been a jazz-oriented event, I would be "wetting myself" in a rush to "morbidly declare jazz is dead." The failure of the rock/hip hop/EDM-oriented Kanrocksas to sell 25,000 advance tickets at $200 a pop bears no relationship to the "lively but peaceful" status of a handful of small-capacity jazz venues. I reject the notion that I "hold the mortality of jazz to a different standard." Just last night, almost 2,000 fans paid $40 each to hear the XX- a band with rock, hip hop and EDM elements- perform at the Uptown Theater. The harsh reality is that far less than 2,000 people will attend jazz live jazz performances in the Kansas City area during the first ten days of June.
*In response to the previous Plastic Sax post about Charlie Parker, T.J. Martley kindly reminded the excitable author of this blog of his video transcription of "Little Willie Leaps."
*UMKC's Jazz Camp is June 23-27.
*Dean Minderman of St. Louis Jazz Notes analyzes the outstanding 2013-14 season of Jazz St. Louis. Highlights include Rudresh Mahanthappa, Joe Lovano's Us Five and the Bad Plus.
*Here's a promotional video for the Parkville River Jam, Jazz, Blues and Fine Arts Festival.
*Tweet o' the Week: Kyle Broussard- If @jpwayman post 1 more time about jazz in the woods I am un-following him.
*Comment o' the Week: Anonymous- I made it 90 seconds before I turned it off, but that's because I was distracted, shoving needles in to my gonads and extinguishing cigarettes on my forearm. (A less acerbic discussion is taking place here.)
*Clint Ashlock reports that his gig at Take Five Coffee + Bar this Saturday, June 8, features "a new project called Forward." The band includes Ashlock, Ryan Lee, Michael Shults, Andrew Ouellette and Karl McComas-Reichl "doing all original stuff."
(Original image by Plastic Sax.)
1 comment:
Actually, I had several commentators and media sources in mind when writing the Kansrocksas comments. I was even thinking back to the 1980s, when a movie on jazz played for one night at The Bijou Theater, then in Westport Square. A then-music columnist for the KC Star wrote that few people showed up, proving nobody attends jazz events in Kansas City anymore (I'm paraphrasing). I wrote a letter to the editor, which The Star published, responding that maybe the sparse crowd proved nothing more than jazz fans don't see a lot of movies at The Bijou. Equating failed events to jazz is dead dates back a long time.
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