articles & Interviews from recent Winter Jazzfest Program Guides

2025 Program Guide Editorial

An interview with Ganavya

For Take Two at Winter Jazzfest 2025, Ganavya chose the album Les Filles de Illighadad by the group of the same name, released on Sahel Sounds in 2016. The album was recorded informally, including village songs with guitar and calabash: Les Filles’ Fatou Seidi Ghali is the first woman to play Tuareg-style guitar, and there's a meditative nature to the album without losing the playfulness that the sense of village has. In Ganavya's performance inspired by the album, she will take traditional pilgrimage songs—songs from her desert lands—and perform them alongside guitar and simple percussion, the same way that Ghali does.

By Jared Proudfoot and Samuel Ngahane of Pique-nique

Pique-nique: This event is presented as part of the Winter Jazzfest. What does the word Jazz mean to you?

Ganavya: I think all language and expression is, at its best, us reaching towards each other and collectively reaching towards something together. The only difficult thing about this practice is that sometimes it depends on us being seen in finite ways and in definitive ways. With the attention span, there's a kind of relationship to certainty that has to be established.

Very often the way that we show that we deserve something is by proving our mastery. And even that word itself is quite difficult for me to understand. I don't wish to be a “master” over anything. I just want to be in this world and learn how to love it. Knowing fully well that I will make many mistakes along the way. And one of them is naming things.

I cannot tell you what is Jazz and what is not Jazz. I ended up being the first graduate student accepted into Berklee College of Music's graduate program, which is hilarious because at that time, and probably still to be honest, if you asked me what was Jazz, I couldn't tell you. I was just the girl who bumped into this without knowing what Berklee even was. As things usually happen, you just kind of bump into the next thing.

What I can say is that the musicians who are often described as Jazz musicians are the ones who have taught me a very specific way of living and loving, a relationship to liberation, listening to each other, and moving through the world together. 

The closest I have to an answer is that to me, music is a way of life, so must Jazz also be. I understand that elders who walk this way of life profoundly and longer than I have have opinions about the word. When I hear it, I think of a village, and I think of what that village has done to help me want to be in this world and love this world.

PN: Who will be joining you for this performance?

G: The core people will be myself, a guitarist and singer named Lau Noah, and Max Ridley will play bass. Our idea is to take the guitar lines that are playing and then sing our prayers and folk songs over it. I'm not going to try and sing what they're saying, but it'll be familiar because you would have just heard it.

But full disclosure, knowing me, that number might balloon very much by the time we perform. The village will gather as it always gathers, like tumbleweed, getting larger and larger.

PN: You've collaborated with many people in your career. From Vijay Iyer to Shabaka to esperanza spalding. What is the essence of a good collaborator/collaboration?

G: I refer to this as "musico-anagogical methodology" – anagogy is basically the way of reading a text where we keep connecting it to many stories. It's the only English word I could find that was close to the process that I was raised in, where we open a song or a poem, and we keep talking about it, and before we know it, we're all speaking in metaphor. It's only when we actually walk away from direct language that the real truth comes.

The most profound teachers are those who teach through metaphor and daily actions. For instance, when I had an accident, esperanza noticed that my father had come and taken a smaller vacuum to clean the larger vacuum. She looked at me and said, "the healer needs to be healed too." Then there's Nils Frahm – how he handles the music is one thing, but then also how careful he is to hand wash all of the coffee mugs in the studio. The cleanliness speaks to what we call in Tamil "ozhungu," or discipline in the music.

A lot of musicians in the old school way in India, we grew up in Gurukulavasa systems, which means that you actually live with your teacher and stay with your teacher. It's not just the music that you learn, but how they live life. Because you want to know how to be a loving, full adult. It's kind of useless if we're good musicians but don't know how to live.

PN: How does Les Filles influence you and how is this music similar to–and different from–the music you grew up listening to?

G: Musically, the reinterpretation and the album are different in that there's a guitar being used in both, but it's similar in that the music as it was originally sung did not have a guitar. Fatou Seidi basically picked up her brother's guitar and started playing – the guitar is not a native part of the music that they're making. Similarly, these are melodies that you actually might hear me singing on the pilgrimage trail – the melodies are very similar, but didn’t originally use guitar.

Also, something about their facial expression is very familiar to me. It reminds me of one particular teacher that I had growing up who was not very facially emotive. But she was really good at doing her thing, so she didn't have to be facially emotive. People were just stunned when she was singing.

That kind of casualness – in the video, they're not performing. It doesn't feel like it's a performance. It feels like they're doing a thing, and we were just witnessing it. The utterances are like thoughts – they don't feel like it's a performance. The repetitive nature of it is also very familiar.

PN: Why is it important to publicly recognize and celebrate your influences?

G: I think humility is the only way we can survive this mess – this mess where whether or not we can take care of our parents as they're aging, whether or not we can afford healthcare – just so much of whether or not we can live basic, healthy lives depends on whether we're able to carry this image of success or this relationship to being the "star." It's almost a trained relationship to narcissism – that we somehow have to stand out, we have to be the center. Otherwise, it doesn't seem to work. I don't want this. I don't need this. I think it's dangerous and it can only end in loneliness and death.

What I hope for instead is to remember that we're just one part of an endless life. This idea that I was born in a vacuum or void – look at me, this brilliant thing that just shot out from the sky into the earth with my creative burst or whatever creation myth has to be created – it just feels dangerous. Being able to celebrate, to say "these are all the people who have fed me and these are all the things that have made me" feels like a much more loving, gentler, kinder, sustainable and honestly joyful life.

PN: How does your cultural and musical upbringing influence the balance you strike between composition and improvisation?

G: I didn't really understand composition until Berklee – that was the first time when someone came up to me and asked, "Do you write?" We just didn't use those words. Sometimes I sing the same melody with the words twice the same way, and then we call it a song. And then the next day I'll sing the same words with a completely different melody. And the next day I'll sing that same melody with a different set of words. Because this is the world I came from – everything was interchangeable.

Recently, I asked Peter Gabriel what advice he wished he could give himself for when he was in his mid-30s, and he said, "sort out publishing." I had to ask what publishing was because the world I come from, its musical grammar is so fluid. Where do we begin to capture a form, to report the form back? But he had a beautiful response – when I gave him this long spiel about what we own when it passes through us and creativity and spirit, he asked if I'd ever consider buying a house. I said yes, because it's responsible – at some point I shouldn't be paying rent, I should be paying mortgage because I have to retire. He asked if I own the earth. I said no. And he said, "Great, sort out publishing."

I want to be responsible enough to take what I do seriously, but I don't want to take it so seriously that I become spiritually irresponsible. I don't know what that line is yet. For now, there are many things I have composed, but really I don't think about it too much. 

This is my twenty-first year of touring–I started touring when I was 12. In one way it feels like I've been doing this for a really long time, and in another way, it feels like I'm just starting. I grew up singing among thousands of voices singing together–and I'm not exaggerating when I say literally thousands–and then suddenly to be one singular voice broke me, and I didn't want to do that. And it feels like only recently, after leaving home...it feels like the village now is strong. And if I start walking the wrong way, I feel like people will look at me and say, "Hey, I don't think that's what you want." And then that gives me the confidence to run as quickly as I want to and do things with full strength.

PN: What are you looking forward to in music today, either personally or communally?

G: The word confidence actually means "coming together, feeling faith." I'm most excited by feeling that we can all have faith in each other. Especially now, it feels like the fabric of faith is getting stretched uncomfortably. I really do believe that what will save this world is neither language nor certainty. Right now, it feels like everyone's walking around wearing the weight of having to be certain about things. And in music and in prayer, whatever prayer is for us, I feel we have a loving future.

PN: What is one thing you would hope the audience will take away from your performance?

G: On the best of days, all of us will go home feeling like we have been heard and seen and witnessed something together. Listening to each other is simple and beautiful. And singing together is simple and beautiful. I will ask the audience to sing with us–they always do. I've never met an audience that didn't eventually sing with us. I hope we all go home remembering that some days it may feel frayed and distant, but no matter what, we are always part of some village.

An Interview with Charles Tolliver on Strata-East Rising

By Angélika Beener

An all-star roster is set to honor a living jazz legend in a monumental event at the 2025 Winter Jazzfest. Strata-East Rising: A landmark concert will celebrate trumpeter and record label co-founder Charles Tolliver’s pioneering achievements, both on and off the stage. The lineup features Tolliver himself, along with Strata-East luminaries such as Cecil McBee, Billy Hart, and Billy Harper. Joining them are jazz heavyweights Steve Jordan, Christian McBride, aja monet, Endea Owens, Keyon Harrold, Camille Thurman, and others.

When I asked Tolliver what the upcoming recognition meant to him, he replied, “Well, [it’s] a surprise. But it's nice that this is happening... luckily I kept things going with the little label so we could get to this time.”

That “little label,” sparked by an idea between friends and born from humble beginnings in New York City in 1971, became Strata-East Records, a first-of-its-kind destination lauded for creating an essential space for artists whose musical aesthetics – often pro-black, spiritual and progressive – could thrive outside the mainstream. Over fifty years and more than sixty albums later, the legendary niche label is a testament to the power of independent artistic vision.

In our interview, we explored Tolliver’s immense contributions to music and culture, the impact of Strata-East, his self-taught musical journey, and his enduring legacy. He also shared his excitement for the upcoming tribute concert and what drives his artistic motivation at its core.

AngéIika Beener: I’ve had the great fortune of talking to you about Strata-East in the past and its meaning to the culture and to black music. What I found fascinating is that you and Mr. Cowell didn't necessarily consciously set out to make a radical cultural statement when you established the label, and yet the legacy of Strata-East is seen as pivotal, largely because it did just that. Can you share what the actual idea and function was when you started this label 54 years ago?

Charles Tolliver: So, the initial idea was wanting to do a big band record. Stanley set it up, and we created that first recording, which would eventually launch the label. [The purpose] wasn't to get to where we are now, it was ‘let's shop it.’ Which would have been the normal thought at the time because a lot of musicians were going into the studio for the express purpose of getting a label to market it.

AB: Can you take me back to 1971, from a social and cultural place? How are you navigating as an artist? Are you fueled by the times? By the musical shifts that are happening?

CT: At that time, we're still reeling from the Vietnam War...  Nixon. That period was still a hotbed of all the social issues that we are now dealing with as well. With the music opening up to the avant-garde thing that came in at the top of the 60s...it had ten years to see how it was going to fit into the lexicon of this music. If a musician was off into that, he more or less would be labeled a reactionary musician, because the music was reactionary. And some people would probably say [it] was music being played by musicians who are mad at the world or something. What we started with Strata-East didn't come out of necessarily wanting to have an Uhuru type thing. But the music that we were playing was definitely Uhuru. And I would say that if Stanley and I had continued to issue only our product, that slant on the social meaning of Strata-East may not have gotten to where it did. 

AB: 50 years ago this year, the Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson landmark album Winter In America was released on Strata-East. Can you talk about how they came to the label and how that success impacted the label?

CT: One day, this tall guy came into our office in the Flatiron district and said he had an album he wanted to release with us. It was Gil Scott-Heron. This was a stop-off place for him, which I knew, because the main thing about Strata-East, which people didn't get at first, was we didn't put artists under contract, which meant that they could go elsewhere, but the product had to stay there. There was a place called the Hit Store, down on 8th Street just off 6th Avenue. And [the owner] called me early one morning and he says, “You guys have a new product out, right? It's called ‘The Bottle.’” I said, “The Bottle?” I hadn't paid attention to all the tracks on Winter in America. He says, “’The Bottle’... that's going to go!” I said, “What do you mean this is ‘going to go’?”  He says, “It's going to take off!” And the rest is history.

AB: I wonder if you could just briefly talk about this, because I think it's important: your business model, in that the artists got to keep the lion's share of the profit, right? Why did you do it that way? Cause a lot of folks don't work like that.

CT: There's nobody that works that way! It was really, I guess you could say, a selflessness move. Because it was an 85/15 split. And when I tell people, they say, “You're crazy, you can't have a business that way. How you gonna pay the rent? And you don't have them under contract to make them do two or three more records?! You can never run an operation like that!” I said, well, I only started this for me and Stanley to put our own product out, I'm not worried about it. But people thought we were crazy.

AB: Can we talk a bit about mentorship? Tell me about the significance of having Jackie McLean as a mentor?

CT: I would not be here, in this, without him. He must have heard or saw something in this kid, and he let me in.

AB: Your first recording ends up being with McLean in 1964 on his It’s Time album. You also contributed three original tunes to the album. When did you start composing? What was your instructional framework to even start learning, because you are self-taught, both as a trumpeter and composer? 

CT: I would always go and see if there was a place where musicians would jam, in Brooklyn. I was still in high school. [A musician named] Larry Greenwich would let me come by his house, and he would show me how to line up things on paper. Chords and so on. I [later] put him on my recordings, my big band recordings, you know? You do that for me, I'm gonna do this for you. At Howard University, one day I was going to the Fine Arts building to get at the piano and I heard some sounds coming from there that was super hip. I saw it was this tiny little lady in there playing. And so, I knocked, and I said, “May, could I ask you, what is that you're playing?” And she said, “Oh, those are minor 9ths.” I said, “Can you show me that?” [and she did]. I said, “What's your name?” She said, “My name is Olympia Hicks.” Well, that was John Hicks’ first wife. I didn't even know John yet. I was to meet him when I came back home to New York. And so all of these things are linking. I started writing from what she showed me with those chords. And what Larry had shown me [about] how to line things up. And so, by the time I got back to New York, before meeting Jackie, I had already written those songs.

AB: What drew you to big band? When you said, I want to start a big band, did you have all of these pieces together, or did it come over time?

CT: It came over time. When I would take the band to Europe, I would always look to see where there was a big band and I could bring the few arrangements that we had started to write for each other, and for ourselves, and get them played. And when I heard them, I said, okay, that's not bad. Even as much as I love big band, I'm a small group guy. I grew up Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie’s quintet. You know, Max Roach Quintet. As a teenager, I saw Slide Hampton with his octet at the famous Smalls Paradise. Slide Hampton and Thad Jones. But I never wanted to have a big band. I just wanted to know how to write like that. And slowly, I started doing it, but then I realized, if I'm going to have my own style, I've got to write it in a way that opens it up for the musicians to interpret, like we do with a small group.

AB: Strata-East Rising...This is going to be an epic event. What are you most looking forward to?

CT: Having all those guys and playing songs from the albums... 50 years of that. And I'm going to have a big band there. You know, my sole purpose for being an artist and deciding that this was going to be my station in life... I just wanted to belong. I didn't want to be nothing bigger or less. I just wanted to be one of the guys. I mean, after all, this art form, for me, is just about the greatest art form. I just wanted to belong to it. And, for me, the greatest appreciation is I've been allowed to belong to this thing.

Where The Music Lives Now!

Mapping NYC’s Experimental and Improvised DIY Scene in 2025

By Piotr Orlov

If there’s one constant about New York City, it is change. The nature of sounds and spaces hosting improvised music throughout the city was already beginning to evolve before the pandemic turned our live-music community inside-out. But since 2020’s COVID-19 lockdown and Black Lives Matter protests, there has been a deluge of new cross-genre spaces and events, house shows and DIY venues, restaurant backrooms and experimental clubs, independent galleries and cultural institutions playing host to a mix of DJs and electronic producers, noise bands and “jazz” groups, art-punks and post-classical composers.

After lockdown, marches were full of live musicians, parks and open streets played host to soundsystem parties and concerts that enforced social distancing regulations (yes, some didn’t); and while official indoor venues remained closed, numerous food and drink establishments took advantage of gardens and sidewalk sheds to start hosting shows. The live music culture was led by its improvisers, setting up on stoops, street corners and park clearings, bringing the city back to life.

Since 2021, I have been publishing the weekly “Bklyn Sounds” column in my Dada Strain newsletter, devoted to the city’s “rhythm, improvisation, community” events. It began as a way to document the rich local music exploding in pockets all over the city, and to support independent artists, venues and programs, while giving listeners nightlife choices beyond the established or obvious. More than three years later, it’s become a way to follow (in near realtime) the musical changes unfolding throughout New York, especially its experimental, improvised and DIY wings. With nearly 3,000 subscribers, “Bklyn Sounds” is whole-heartedly non-completist and admittedly biased in its editorial oversight, yet open-hearted in its embrace of local rhythm, improvisation and community events. And always growing, searching.

This is one reason why the folks at Winter Jazzfest asked me to map some of the organizations, clubs, spaces, promoters and series currently pushing the city’s improvised music into new directions. The list that follows does not include longstanding historic establishments which everyone knows, nor many small series and spots which I don’t know of yet. It is a list, not the list—the city moves too fast for any list to be definitive.

CLUBS: If you’re looking for a traditional nightclub jazz set-up featuring contemporary improvisers playing new music six nights a week, two sets a night (minus the two-drink minimum), CloseUp (154 Orchard St., Manhattan) is a good bet, regularly featuring younger New York talent. Same goes for Ornithology (6 Suydam St., Brooklyn), opened by Smalls founder Mitchell Borden on the border of Bushwick and Bed-Stuy. Both embrace the “J” word and cultural approach, whereas others presenting various improvised musics are a little more reticent. For example, Ridgewood’s Cassette (68-38 Forest Ave., Queens, formerly known as Bar Sundown) is a comfortable basement room that spreads its programming across various styles—indie singer-songwriters, post-Julliard instrumentalists, rap and cumbia—whose neighborhood location makes it a prime hang for experimental players who live nearby. A few blocks away from Ornithology, Black-owned Haitian-themed Cafe Erzulie (894 Broadway, Brooklyn) hosts one of the great young, Black Brooklyn crowds, and has its own variant of diverse programming, including a deeply vibey Wednesday jazz night, a stream of excellent underground R&B and rap, and weekends with some of the best young DJs in the city. Over in Sunset Park, Mama Tried (787 3rd Avenue, Brooklyn) opened in 2019 as a shot-and-beer-looking joint with bar food and a backyard situated under the Gowanus expressway; yet during vaccine summer, when Ravi Coltrane did a month-long residency there, it mutated into a haven for live music, heavily indie and improvised, with WFMU as a kind of lodestar. It now hosts shows in a crowded bar area at times too.

Not all the clubs that have picked up the improvised music mantle post-lockdown are new. Williamsburg’s Union Pool (484 Union, Brooklyn) was a leading site for the neighborhood’s early-’00s post-punk boom, yet has now started hosting Creative Music Studio residencies and a variety of great free-jazz shows. (Including, full disclosure, Dada Strain’s WJF showcase.) Since its 2002 opening, Park Slope’s Barbès (376 9th, Brooklyn) has been an epicenter of the city’s pan-global rhythm music scene, but it also plays host to regular appearances by the neighborhood’s numerous great jazz musicians, both younger cats and veterans (including, currently, a weekly residency by saxophonist Oscar Noriega’s Crooked Quartet). Ridgewood’s Trans Pecos (9-15 Wyckoff, Queens) was founded in 2013 by vets of the now-legendary Silent Barn and Brooklyn’s DIY scene; its programming still reflects those roots and the youthful sounds of the neighborhood, heavy on rave and noise, but also excels at experimental improvisation bills.

Longtime New York singer-songwriter Richard Julian’s Bar LunÀtico (486 Halsey, Brooklyn) recently celebrated a decade as a crucial spot for two-sets-a-night gigs by great New York community players and bands who cross forms and cultures, with occasional special appearances by the likes of Marc Ribot and Meshell Ndegeocello. And in the six years that Bar Bayeux (1066 Nostrand, Brooklyn) has operated in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, it’s established itself as a magnet for great jazz gatherings, a place for new groups to work their kinks out–all wiith no cover charge and a single drink minimum, but deep-pocket tips expected.

2024 has seen a couple of club-type spaces join the fray. Ridgewood’s Dada Bar (6047 Myrtle, Queens) is an artist-owned music and art room that hosts a literary salon and DJs, as well as the in-house Dada Orchestra led by guitarist On Ka’a Davis, and bands that engage electronics and jazz-style improvisation. There’s also Umbra (785 Hart, Brooklyn) in Bushwick, a cafe-bar-restaurant still feeling its way through developing a music aesthetic for its Thursday through Sunday gigs, but has also already booked local improvisers and experimentalists.

SPACES: Among my favorite spots is Sisters (900 Fulton, Brooklyn), a Clinton Hill restaurant whose backroom has become a destination for new and experimental sounds and series—foremost, Lester St. Louis and Luke Stewart’s monthly “Assembly,” and Shara Lunon’s electronic experimental-minded quarterly “Heavy Florals”—alongside more traditional but outré jazz, DJs and global music performances. February 2022 saw the South Williamsburg opening of Property Is Theft a.k.a. The P.I.T. (411 S. 5th, Brooklyn), a community bookstore and activist cultural center whose DIY punk aesthetic folds in noise improvisers and downtown skronk. The attraction of the Greenpoint loft Light and Sound Design Studio (RSVP for location, Brooklyn) starts with a beautiful four-point Klipschorn sound system, continues into a private psychedelicized space, and peaks with heavily electronic, improvised programming that gets occasionally dancey but always remains good for deep listening. (Full disclosure: Dada Strain throws events here too.)

Maybe it’s because I live near there, but it seems to me that Brooklyn’s Gowanus and Red Hook neighborhoods are especially great at creating third spaces to host new and experimental music that then become central to the local universe. That’s certainly the case with 360 Record Shop (360 Van Brunt, Brooklyn) which is not only one of the best small record stores in the city, but puts on shows by local DIY players, now often produced by multi-instrumentalist Kevin Murray, with some of Brooklyn's best often playing there. Not sure whether the back area of the great pub Lowlands Bar (543 3rd Ave., Brooklyn) started hosting live music before the pandemic, but it was saxophonist Tim Berne’s near-weekly gigs there during this period that seemed to have initiated sparse but regular sessions. It’s more homey, but heavy on tip-jar and knowing-ears vibes. Gowanus is also home to the long-standing Ibeam Brooklyn (168 7th St., Brooklyn), a “member owned and operated performance and rehearsal space for professional musicians” which hosts no-frills weekly shows that are, at times, the best places to catch new music by the community smarties.

SERIES and HOUSE SHOWS: An experimental-sounds series that mixes art-world visuals with noise, improvisation and electronics, Abasement had been thriving in the Max Fish basement since 2015, until the pandemic closed the legendary bar down for good. In October 2022, Abasement moved to a much bigger room at Artists Space (11 Cortland Alley, Manhattan) where it is now one of the best experimental art+music nights in the city. Pre-pandemic, Black Science Fiction was just a gleam in filmmaker Imani Dennison’s eye; in the aftermath, she began producing events featuring great Black musicians, young and old, in small clubs, churches, DIY spaces, all the way up to National Sawdust (where, in 2023, she brought Los Angeles’s Pan Afrikan People’s Arkestra for a rare NYC gig).

The flurry of folks putting on small, potent DIY home shows includes the Julia Anrather and Matteo Liberatore-curated Please Y.S., a series of living room shows started in Manhattan’s Chinatown (where I once saw Wendy Eisenberg and David Grubbs shred the voodoo down) but that now takes place in Crown Heights, as great jazz, rock and new music improvisers pop up next to experimental rappers and electronic producers. There’s also numerous private Brooklyn homes hosting series that do consistently great work. I can personally vouch for  drummer Andrew Drury’s art-and-food experience Soup & Sound in Prospect Lefferts, and saxophonist Jonathan Moritz’s Prospect Series in Park Slope.

Striped Light is a monthly curated by longtime DIY improv show organizers Ian Douglas-Moore and David Watson, started in Fall 2023 and featuring “innovative music” events at an industrial space in Long Island City. The irregular “Fire Over Heaven” series at Ridgewood’s Outpost Artist Resources studio regularly switches up its artist curators—hence, maybe, its irregularity—but the consistent quality of the great young(ish) DIY experimentalists they put on is extraordinary. And a word for the wonderful, Brackish multi-disciplinary arts series started by saxophonist/composer Angela Morris (and introduced to me by the late jaimie branch, who remains its guardian angel), moving between various Red Hook and Gowanus outposts, and regularly bringing insightful young improvisers to the fore.

This is also a good time to shout out two tireless workers in the DIY show community: Amani Fela and his currently on-sabbatical Still/Moving series which, during its multi-year run at Ki Smith Gallery on the Lower East Side made direct connections between New York’s art, beats and improvisation tribes; and John Pugh, whose Center for Psychic Technology has long had a hand in improvised and noise sounds outbursts across the city (and who’s imminently opening a space in Ridgewood, which I greatly look forward to).

INSTITUTIONS: It’s not just individuals but new institutions that are expanding the purview of what NYC improvised music events look like now. Spring 2022 saw Satya Pemmaraju and Vyjayanthi Rao establish FourOneOne, a nonprofit organization supporting performance and community work. It initially opened as a small live space in South Williamsburg (now under renovation), and has more recently pivoted towards unique multi-venue residencies by the likes of Graham Haynes and Bahaudin Dagar, while curating thematic multi-night programs such as Transatlantik, which brought together a slew of improvisers with Caribbean roots. Fridman Gallery’s multi-disciplinary sound-arts New Ear Festival predates the pandemic, but in the last couple of years it has coalesced into New Ear, an artist-support organization which is expanding its programming purview, and thinking about how sound interacts with the gallery’s media arts curation.

Two venerable, artist-run DIY music institutions remain crucial to the current conversation: Roulette may have moved to Downtown Brooklyn over a decade ago, but its mission to support the community’s improvisers and experimentalists continues, and in its seasonal residencies, you can regularly spot the next great projects and players. Arts For Art is probably still best-regarded for its annual Vision Festival of free and creative music, but its seasonal live programs, in the East Village’s community gardens and the city’s small independently owned clubs, are NYC music highlights. 

There are also the younger music-and-art institutions who continue adding to the city’s evolving sonic conversation. Folks like Blank Forms, committed to the art and history of improvised and experimental music; Issue Project Room, which is moving further and further into newly commissioned, multimedia and electronics-enhanced work; and Red Hook’s recently reopened Pioneer Works, which puts in increasingly more mainstream shows next to big outsider-music gatherings, but whose music-residency program has been responsible for an enormous amount of great recordings the past five years. 

BROADCASTING: As new sounds and movements require novel broadcasting voices, there are numerous sites besides Dada Strain disseminating information about all of the above. NYC-Noise is an essential daily calendar about what’s going on in the city’s DIY spaces, from noise improv to digital hardcore to lefty cultural activism. Extended Techniques is a monthly calendar focused on new classical and composed sounds, but also heavily invested in creative music. Veteran Times critic Steve Smith’s great Night After Night newsletter overlaps in coverage of that concert-music world  And, old friend of both NYCWJF and Dada Strain, the jazz critic Jim Macnie, continues to publish his New York events-plus blog, Lament For a Straight Line which is brighter about the city’s jazz goings-on than pretty much any other available outlet. Support these independent voices! 

To stay in touch with the ongoing developments in the city’s “Rhythm Improvisation Community” sounds, subscribe to Dada Strain. 

An Interview with Makaya McCraven

By Matt Merewitz

Fully Altered Media’s Matt Merewitz spoke with 2025 Artist-in-Residence Makaya McCraven about 10 years of his album In the Moment, the importance of grassroots community building for artists, and what he’s most proud of in his career.

Matt Merewitz: When did you first play Winter Jazzfest?

Makaya McCraven: I mean, I first played Winter Jazzfest for Meghan Stabile's Revive da Live showcase at Zinc Bar. That was years before In the Moment. I had just moved to Chicago. So it must be like 2009, 2008 or so. Alecia Chakour and I did stuff there. I met Meghan through Alecia and Igmar [Thomas] back then, and every time I was coming to New York, she really helped plug me into a lot of different things.  And that was one of the places we could work together whenever the festival was happening. She was trying to get her foot in the door with the Revive stuff. 

MM: In the Moment feels like it happened a long time ago. But the record sounds equally fresh now as it did then. It’s what all the new music sounds like now. How do you feel towards it? Does it feel like ten years ago? Does it feel longer? 

MMc: I mean, 10 years feels about right. It does feel like a long time. But I definitely have a strong recollection of it. And I feel that sentiment, that music has shifted a little bit in the last 10 years. That is an interesting feeling to see how things are different because making that record was like having to do your own thing and have the confidence to do something that maybe people are going to say X, Y, or Z about. But a lot of that was happening at the time. A lot of different records were coming out that were kind of challenging that particular moment.

MM: How long had you been sitting on that record before you linked with Scottie  [McNiece] and put it out? 

MMc: I met Scottie when he was putting on shows and in town, and there was no label, the label didn't exist. Scottie came to me and said he wanted to do a weekly event. And so this is actually good fodder for what we're doing [this year] at Winter Jazzfest. He started putting on concerts in Chicago at bars and stuff. He was doing stuff at a place called Gilt Bar, which is kind of a loungy spot downstairs. He found this other spot called The Bedford, and we had just met and he said he really liked what I was doing because I was flipping different kind of styles and doing improv music. He said, Let's do a weekly series. We called it Spontaneous Composition. We did an improvised series in a bank vault at The Bedford every week. When we first had that initial meeting about doing that weekly, he was like, “I'm thinking of starting a record label. I'm already going to record something with Rob Mazurek. If you want to record, I'd love to record you every week; maybe you'll put out these improvisations. Maybe you could use this to write a new record or whatever. But let's just document it.” And so we were documenting that and eventually I was taking the recordings home. I was a gigging seven nights a week. But when I went home, I would just be making beats on my computer for myself because I didn't have a professional outlet. But then I started messing with these tracks and In the Moment was the second record that International Anthem ever put out. And in that way, even if I work with other labels, I feel very connected with them in terms of like building that label from the ground up. Also me and Scottie have been homies and we're in each other's ear regardless if we go separate ways. And so for Winter Jazzfest [we’re] celebrating the beginning of the label is ten years old and this record is ten years old. That started our connection. I've kind of themed my residency around that.

Most of the time when I play, I play with my band and we play arranged music, which might be written in this process of improvisation, but then I've arranged it for the band. When I do the improvised shows, generally speaking, I like to do them in small rooms, more acoustic spaces. I get these gigs now [where] I'm playing for like 500-2,000 standing. I don't want to just do an improvised show for that crowd. When it's acoustic and intimate and people are sitting on the ground, that's the vibe for me, for the improvising. For Winter Jazzfest, we're going to be doing the thing at Public Records where I'm going to be doing an improvised, recorded set, kind of in the spirit of the In the Moment sessions.  

Then at Nublu, it's going to be a set with Theon [Cross] and Ben Lamar Gay, who we've improvised now twice before, once on-air at Worldwide FM with Gilles [Peterson], and then once at this International Anthem showcase in Berlin earlier this year, which was also recorded. This is going to be recorded, and is starting to be a potential project. 

On the Friday Marathon night, we're going to be playing music from In the Moment, and maybe play some pieces that have never been actually arranged for the band yet. 

MM: Kassa [Overall] has talked about you as a like-minded spirit. Is part of your live show that you're always triggering samples in real-time? Is that something that you're constantly doing? 

MMc: No, I haven't triggered live samples in my set for years. I just generally play the drums. It's more like I sample as a mechanism to compose and put out recordings. Then the next night in Brooklyn, I'll be using a similar band, which is generally my working outfit, maybe a couple of special guests. But we're just going to be improvising; something I generally don't do, shows with my larger band improvising in larger rooms. 

MM: Different people have different thoughts on International Anthem. It feels very connected to a Blue Note Records, or an Impulse! Records, or a Prestige Records where there's this kind of overlap of musicians on different recordings. Obviously there's different strains coming in from London or L.A. or Chicago. Does it feel to you like it has achieved that status, everything coming from a scene [or] a certain kind of vibe. Do you feel that? 

MMc: Well, it's funny you say that. I've heard a lot of people say similar things about International Anthem being like a Blue Note or Impulse! or something. I don't think they really looked at that as any sort of model. I think that might just be some sort of coincidence. But I do think the scene aspect of it is pragmatic and we're talking about a company kind of borne off of the ground, and exists because of the members of the scene that have been there for them to coalesce around. And so I think it's just kind of been part of what the whole thing is. There's a Chicago element to that, you know? Me, Rob Mazurek. And then after me and Rob, Nick Mazzarella did the [label’s] third record and I think Ben Lamar Gay, maybe was four and then jaimie branch.

MM: Were you kind of giving notes to Scottie along the way? Like, “You should check out this guy.”

MMc: Absolutely. It definitely was like, we should make a Junius [Paul] record, right? Then when Jeff [Parker] gave me a call, I think at one point because we pulled him in for one of the Bedford Sessions, and then the record came out and it did well. Jeff called me and was like, “Man, what's up with this? Is it cool? Are they cool?” And I was like, “Yeah, you know, they're cool.” So he became part of the mix and a lot of it was just really organic.  

It's just a funny sentiment because I get young musicians or people who want to talk about IARC and say, Hey, how did you get signed to International Anthem? And I'll always be like, I didn't. We created it together. We found young, excited, hungry, eager partners. We worked together and the right things came together. Our luck and our skills and all the things hit for us. I sometimes encourage younger people not to go looking for an International Anthem, but look for the people to grow with and partner with, and see where that can take you. 

And then as soon as we had a little bit of scene with International Anthem, you got people like Blue Note knocking on your door, being like, How'd you guys outsell us? And then you can have all sorts of new opportunities in the marketplace. But I'm really proud of, and I believe in the grassroots effort that I've made even before I met International Anthem. And when I met Scottie, seeing the things he was doing, I think we connected that we both had this mindset to do it.  

MM: Can you see your career having gone a totally different direction had Scottie not asked you to do this specific thing?

MMc: I think this specific thing influenced my career in a different way. I always liked to do improvised gigs, and improvise using all the different genres that I'm in to. But to have a weekly gig and record every time and listen back, and it be at a time when I was really into beatmaking, that was a unique moment. Before that moment, I always thought I had my notes. I had my band idea, what I wanted my band to be, and then I wanted to make my producer career. And maybe I would need a pseudonym to be a beatmaker. And then on the other side, this is my sideman career. When I stopped trying to compartmentalize all the different ideas of my art and found a place where I could put it all together and have that platform…because I had somebody like Scottie who was just like, Yeah, man, do what you do, what you want to do with this? And then when I played him some music and he's like, Bro, that's really dope; you're on to something. And I'm like, Really? I don't trust you necessarily. Lemme play it for Junius. And then Junius is like, Bro, that's really dope man. And then I'm like, Well, maybe Scottie did hear something. And then like, are you really gonna put this out? You really want to start a label? Let's go.  

MM: No, I mean, it's amazing. It's just the organic-ness of it. You're clearly on this [path], and it's like groove music, or whatever you want to call it. But do you feel like there are paths that you haven't explored that you're really excited to explore that don't sound anything like this?

MMc: Absolutely. A lot of the stuff on In These Times that we play, even though it's still heavily vamp music…I get notes or a write-up and it's like, “blending jazz and hip hop,” I go back and I listen to my last couple of records and I'm like, I don't even sound like jazz and hip hop. I maybe have elements of that in my playing and my aesthetic and all of that, but it's maybe a little reductive.  

So to that point is like an emphatic yes, right? It's emphatically yes. There's so much music and things I'd like to explore and be able to find and learn, and challenge myself to find new ways of writing music or developing my skills of writing, both in creative ways, using electronics, but also just in my writing and harmonic sensibilities and my dexterity to be able to write more than what I can hear at this very moment. 

MM: It feels like there's been maybe three or four watershed moments in your career that I can put a signpost on. I may just be missing the full picture, but there's In This Moment, Universal Beings, In These Times and then there's Deciphering the Message on Blue Note. And also obviously there's the London/Chicago crossover sessions. Are there periods that you feel people have not checked out sufficiently that you're really proud of?

MMc: I had the Gil Scott-Heron record. That was the first time I worked with a label like that, XL. I had this opportunity to do this thing with a legacy artist such as Gil Scott-Heron. And it was a really big moment for me with Universal Beings. You know what was more important to me than the record as a watershed moment? The Red Bull concerts were a huge moment for me in my career. Not only because we had the means to pull off those things and bring all those people together. But that really spurred me in the direction of In These Times with the large ensemble. As soon as I did that, that's when I started working large ensembles and working a lot more with Brandee [Younger] and flirting with ideas like bringing a string quartet on stage, and just having these 12-13 piece ensembles, which now has become something I do. I did 10 or 12 of those kind of concerts in 2024 and 2023. We sold out the Barbican playing In These Times with a small 18-piece orchestra. Gilles Peterson named [In the Moment] his favorite record of the week the week before it came out. And immediately, I had people I was a fan of hitting me up, like, Bro, I checked out your records.

When you ask what I'm really proud of: I am really proud of my hustle. I'm really proud of all the sideman and working gigs and grassroots stuff I did from being in a band that I co-led from high school [in Northampton] through college, called Cold Duck Complex. 

I had a whole career before I moved to Chicago that I'm proud of. We hustled and we opened for a lot of serious artists. We had a lot of people coming to our shows, and we did that grassroots style. So when I met Scottie and he was talking about grassroots building—nobody did grassroots in jazz. Everybody goes to school and they're looking for some label to sign them. It's a much smaller percentage of people that are taking a grassroots approach, and I connected with him on that. 

Having my friends join this family, and being able to help my community. And my community has helped me, whether that's Junius or Joel [Ross]. Look at Joel. I'm so proud of him and in awe of his talent. I've known him since he was a freshman in high school.

MM: Were you involved in the Jazz Links program that mentored him?

MMc: Yes. I worked a lot with the Jazz Institute. I was in the Jazz Links house band for many years. I met Alexis Lombre when she was in seventh grade, and she came in and played the blues. That's some real community. Knowing them kids, it's really great to see Isaiah [Collier] and everything he's doing. He’s making a real name for himself out here. 

We did a lot of stuff in the jam band world, but we were a live hip hop band, a jazzy trio with a rapper, which then was a novelty. The Roots weren't a household name by any means.

So I always push back on that—like. Miles was doing hip hop in the late 80s, and Buckshot LeFonque, Guru in the 90s, Greg Osby—all these people. So when people are like, Oh, it's so modern and hip, how can you be mixing jazz and hip hop? I'm like, you are 30 years late on the controversy.

But that being said, there weren't a lot of live hip hop bands and this is at the root of me trying to find ways to blend these different styles that I'm in to. All that stuff to me, everything I've done in my career has always been working towards the same goal.

MM:  You've raised up this group of people around you, including Marquis Hill and Joel Ross and Brandee Younger and Junius Paul and Josh Johnson, all these people who remain part of your community. You're offering people a part of their living. It's really profound. 

MMc: It's just an expansion of the family. I’m always looking to expand, bring new people in, while keeping the same folks around and hoping that everybody is building up.

One thing I'm proud of with my band is if I show up and I do a gig in New York or wherever and I haven't called nobody for the gig yet; the ads are already out and Brandee's like, “Hey, I'm in town. I'd love to play with you guys.” And Joel is like, “Hey, I'm in town, too. Can I play?” And I'm like, the stage is kind of small. They might get mad at me if I start bringing all these big-ass instruments. But then it's like, you know what? Fuck it, everybody, let's play. I'm really honored and humbled that such talented and brilliant musicians want to play with me.

Terri Lyne Carrington: Reflecting the Times

By Kyla Marshell

As Max Roach’s centennial year comes to a close, drummer, composer, producer and educator Terri Lyne Carrington offers up her own interpretation of Roach’s landmark album We Insist! The Freedom Now Suite, featuring Candid Records labelmates Morgan Guerin, Simon Moullier, Milena Casado, Christie Dashiell, and others (all of whom were signed to Candid Records by Carrrington). Here, she talks about this new project and how she balances artistic expression with political responsibility.

Kyla Marshell: What we can expect from We Insist—both the concert at Nublu and the new album?

Terri Lyne Carrington: It’s a reimagining of Max Roach’s We Insist! The Freedom Now Suite. I didn’t change any of the original text written by Oscar Brown, Jr. But I added some poetry and additional music that address some of the issues we’re facing today. The original was written in 1962, mostly dealing with freedom from the perspective of the Civil Rights Movement, which was also a heavily Black male perspective. So I added some things that made it feel more related to what’s happening now. As a woman, there’s so many things that we’re facing now. So it’s a poetic tribute to Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach. And I used mostly musicians who are signed to Candid Records. Candid is the label that the original album came out on, and this new album is also being released by Candid.

What to expect is a different take on that music, with a few other additions. It’s not acoustic straight-ahead jazz like the first one was. I drew from other areas of Black music, like gospel and the church, Afro-Cuban music. They had Babatunde Olatunji on the original. I have Weedie Braimah playing percussion [on the record] and he’s kind of the perfect person for this record because of his heritage from the [African] continent as well as from New Orleans. I’m approaching it with a wider lens of Black music and jazz and all the influences that we’ve had over the years.

KM: There have been a lot of Max Roach tributes over the course of his centennial. What is it about We Insist! that inspires so many new interpretations?

TLC: I think it’s really one of the premiere protest albums of our time, in jazz. It was really, really bold for the times—even the cover alone. I’m glad that Candid put it out like that. It was really defying what was happening in the country. We’ve come to be more bold as the years go on, but at that time, it was a really big statement. And I think that statement rings true. It’s the combination of the text and music. Like on “Driva Man,” the first song on the album, it’s really deep. It still resonates with people because all that history is still real, and it also makes us look at how far we’ve come, or not come, from those times. So much of what was being talked about then is still relevant now, unfortunately. When you look at Max Roach, you have to look at that album as being seminal to his career and to his overall protest spirit as an artist. He was somebody who set an example for us, to make your art have meaning with what’s going on in your community.

KM: You’re also moderating a panel at this year’s Jazz Talks, the title of which is the Nina Simone quote, “An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times.” How do you balance the responsibility of reflecting the times with just being a person in the world?

TLC: When I listen to the original [We Insist!] album, I feel a heaviness. I feel like these men are really dealing with this thing from a very deep place, but also I can feel the anger. I feel that sense of darkness around the theme. For our cover of We Insist, there’s a lot of joy in it as well. We’re still dealing with the themes, but from where I stand, there’s a place in music for me that is celebratory, joyous. I want to make people feel good. I want to make myself feel good. Because I like to have a good time, you know? That’s a big part of my personality. I’m dealing with a lot of heavy issues, but it doesn’t take away my light. 

I think we can only be authentic to who we are. I can only do this kind of work from the place that I stand. Of course, with empathy and open eyes to the places that other people stand. We have common ground with all of humanity, not just our own struggle. That’s the place I operate from. 

I would like for people to come away thinking about some of these themes, thinking more deeply about solutions, about their own interaction with the themes, about the purpose and mission of your life. Being inspired to respond in a way that connects to the humanity in others. That’s what I’m trying to do—connect to the humanity in others. I want the way that I present music to inspire other people to do the same. I feel like that kind of ripple effect is what will actually make change. What good is having a platform at all if you’re not contributing good to the world? I just do that in the best way I know how.

A LOVE SUPREME: SIXTY YEARS ON

By Ashley Kahn

A Love Supreme was born in the spotlight, released in the last days of January 1965, at the midpoint of a decade that was about to catch fire. Global shifts in politics, culture, and spirituality—society in general—were right around the corner. It was the right sound and idea for the time.  

The world took to A Love Supreme with universal applause. Its release helped push Coltrane’s popularity to its highest point during his lifetime and proved a bestseller by popular music standards. It earned a Gold record distinction for 50,000 units sold, and two GRAMMY Award nods. DownBeat saw the album as a marker to what it called “The Year Of Coltrane”, placing the saxophonist on its cover the month it published its annual readers’ poll, heralding his top position in three categories—Tenor Saxophone, Jazzman Of The Year, and Record Of The Year—and his induction into DownBeat’s Hall of Fame.

The general embrace of A Love Supreme was as unlikely as it was immediate. When the needle first hit the record, it was a sound for which most were unprepared, a blast from the outer reaches of modern jazz, the edge—though not the extreme—of the avant-garde. If this was an introduction to Coltrane for some, it required patience and undistracted focus. Even longtime fans and musicians were challenged. There were moments in the music that swung with a familiar rhythmic feel and structure—identifiable themes and solos. But other sections were strange and unnerving and exhilarating, led more by raw emotion and effusive vigor than established harmonic pathways, following a form of its own logic.

To many whose ears were attuned to a wide range of styles, A Love Supreme sounded like church, a Black American church service. Obviously this was jazz—tenor saxophone, a rhythm section, plus a gong and some timpani at times—but it tracked with the rise-and-fall of a Black gospel service: a warm call to worship (“Acknowledgement”) that balanced a familiar hymn-like chant with gospel-like intensity; congregational orders of business followed with moments of group and individual statement, interspersed with preacher-like messages; and finally a sermon (“Resolution”, “Pursuance”) closing with a hushed, personal testimonial (“Psalm) and a benediction to all. On closer listen, it was even more ecumenical: blues flavors abounded, as did Latin rhythms and hints of Eastern folk sources, always circling back to the feel of religious ritual.

One did not even have to pull the vinyl from the sleeve to know that this was music of deep, spiritual intent. A Love Supreme spelled out its spiritual directive plainly and proudly on the album cover, in a letter addressed to the listener, penned by Coltrane himself, and a poem, also written by him, filled with divine praise that seemed to draw from Western, Eastern, traditional and mystical spiritual sources. The words all spoke of God and music and earthly troubles and spiritual salvation—a disarmingly personal testament that amounted to a bold and surprising step away from the cool, understated vibe that was the way of the jazz world.

Today, in sound and message, A Love Supreme continues to cast its shadow of influence wide, across lines of generation and genre. Hip-hop producers and emcees quote from it. Rolling Stone and other pop/rock list-keepers consistently place it among the Top 50 (or 25 or 10) albums of all time—one of the very, very few jazz recordings to enjoy, and maintain, that ranking. In the jazz world, its stature is unquestioned, serving as a touchstone by which any project weaving together musical and spiritual intention is measured. 

By accepting NYC Winter Jazzfest’s invitation to celebrate the 60th anniversary of his father’s signature recording at Brooklyn’s Roulette, Ravi Coltrane acknowledges his own role in continuing his family’s legacy. He will perform the suite as first recorded—as a quartet with familiar support (David Virelles, Dezron Douglas, Johnathan Blake)—and then other musicians of different stripes (Angelica Sanchez, Melissa Aldana, Tomoki Sanders, Kalia Vandever, others) will explore the sound and spirit of A Love Supreme in a round-robin fashion. This concert, IMPRESSIONS: Improvisatory Interpretations on A Love Supreme underscores the idea that this music, despite the extreme reverence it now commands, was never intended as liturgy. It is open to re-imagining and updating, as jazz has grown and evolved since 1965.  

In fact, A Love Supreme itself was the result of change and updating, a path of spiritual evolution that began in childhood. Consider this story, told by his cousin Mary Alexander (of “Cousin Mary” fame):

“I remember one Sunday [in High Point, NC], after everything was over, they opened the doors of the church. In the Methodist church they call it ‘opening the doors of the church.’ That’s when people come up from their seats to join the church after the pastor has preached. They still do that. John was about eight years old, his feet barely reaching the floor. Out of the clear blue sky, he got off the bench by himself and went up to join the church. I didn’t even know what he was doing, he was so little…”

A Love Supreme represents Coltrane’s second leap from the pew, when he dedicated himself to not one church, but to all churches. The God he meant to praise was not a high-seated deity belonging to one religious path, but a divine force shared by all people and carried within. “All paths lead to God,” he wrote in the poem on the album’s inner sleeve, and added: “No road is an easy one, but they all go back to God.”

A Love Supreme is Coltrane’s universal testament, his non-denominational sermon of devotion, his Namaste. Sixty years since its arrival, voices that speak of divine connection and supreme love are once again having trouble being heard. The lines that would divide one people from another seem unbending and to run deep. In a world at odds with itself, the music and the message of John Coltrane remain more relevant than ever.

2024 Program Guide Editorial

Let the Night Take You: 20 Years of winter jazzfest

By Adam Schatz

It’s later than you think and you’re halfway through a pizza slice as you speed-walk from one block to the next, the music you just experienced still rattling your bones, a rattle that won’t fully settle before the next impact begins. And maybe the slice isn’t quite as good as others you’ve had, but that hardly matters, because for this rarest of nights the pizza’s not the point. You bump into someone you know, and maybe they’re with someone who you haven’t seen in a year. You realize you’re headed to the same spot and pick up the pace, hopping the curb to walk in the street, avoiding some slowpokes who stopped in front of the CVS in the middle of the sidewalk to check their phones, poor souls who have no idea what they’re missing out on tonight. But never mind them, they’re ancient history, as is the ghost of the pizza you just gobbled, and before you know it you’re indoors again, pressed against a wall, swept away by novel sonics and improvisatory explorations, surrounded by faces new and old, all participating in the annual practice of giving in and letting loose.

That account has happened to someone every single night of the twenty years of NYC Winter Jazzfest, with slight variations of course. Sometimes you step in a puddle or slip on the ice. Sometimes you realize you’ve dropped a glove two sets back, and you’ll be damned if you can remember where that was or who you even were before the music bulldozed your body and mind.

The beauty and menace of New York City lies in its inherent uncertainty. It can prop you up and let you down within the same 5-second window, and so it’s all the more impressive that Winter Jazzfest has existed as long as it has. I believe part of the secret to the festival’s survival has been flexibility, a quality that is absolutely essential to make existence palatable in a city such as this one. Often it feels like you’re playing a game of whack-a-mole with the insatiable real estate demons as venues previously considered available to adventurous music become vaporized and turned into...well, vape shops. But like the music itself, the festival is a living and breathing organism, and it would be a hollow shell without the people who work tirelessly to make it happen each year as well as the loyal attendees who come back for more every January. That tandem attack on the logic of doing anything in New York in the dead of winter is what makes the whole thing so electric. It’s why it doesn’t stop, even though Brice needs a nap.

There’s just...something about it. The sheer magnitude of forces at play all at once. In order to hit them all you can meticulously plan your path for the evening or you can let chance drag you from show to show, and often that’s the best way to get your senses shifted by an underdog, a surprise offender, a magic bean, or a new contender. Whatever expectations one has approaching Winter Jazzfest, one also knows it’s best to forget them in your other pants and just see where the night takes you. Because nothing is more New York than letting the night take you.

The uncertainty of the city begets a raw fault line that draws the best of the best to its coordinates, and that’s truly what makes Winter Jazzfest so special year after year: the players. It’s a marvel and a privilege to witness so many fiercely independent voices who also can serve each other’s visions. Intentions overlap, melodies build and dissolve in feats of marvelous cacophony and generous silences. People play together for the first time and old friends reconnect, and it all channels into the amplified frequencies. Sure, any night in New York is a good one to hear sound be sounded, but this festival, this collection of sledgehammers...it’s just the best, and you can’t wait to be tossed around by it every January.

Because you’re back. And you belong here. It’s not the biggest club, but you can catch anyone’s eye in the place and know that they too are a card carrying member. If you’ve been in the family for ages, welcome back. If you’re just joining us, buckle up. It’s different every time, and that’s the way it’s always going to be.

Happy twenty years. Here’s to twenty more.

Sax, Shakuhachi and Sharing the Journey: A Conversation with Shabaka

By Nicole Mitchell

Flutist, composer, bandleader, author  and 2018 NYC Winter Jazzfest Artist-in-Residence Nicole Mitchell speaks with Shabaka, the 2024 Winter Jazzfest Artist-in-Residence about his roots, his recent transition from saxophone to the flute, and the need for searching meditative music today.

Nicole Mitchell: I see you as someone who takes music as a spiritual path and shares your journey with us. Through sound you channel messages to celebrate Black culture and decolonize our minds. I see you as an imagination practitioner and imagination is the most powerful resource humanity has.

Shabaka: I’m really happy that you acknowledged that, because I really feel passionately that the journey is to be shared. One of the interesting aspects of being from the Caribbean–moving to it when I was young and then moving away from it–it really ruptured the idea of where is home. England was home until I was six, and then for more or less 10 years I was in Barbados. And then, just at that point, I moved back to England. It makes you think, actually–home is home. Going back to the imagination, I go along thinking that what I can imagine is a representation of what Barbados left and instilled in me.

NM: I am curious about your experience playing all these flutes from materials of the earth. Their origins are timeless and you breathing your life into them brings new sound to your life, and also for us to hear.

S: I bought my first flute in 2019 in Japan, but I only started to learn it from 2020 in the lockdown. I got the shakuhachi and literally was thinking, How do you do this? I’ve undertaken learning it without a teacher. At its base level, it’s a meditational device; you’ve got to be relaxed when you’re playing it.

NM: Beautiful. About your flute album African Culture, my friend, Dr. JoVia Armstrong calls it Black Contemplative Music. I feel maybe people are paying more attention to healing music now. Music that is introspective and vulnerable. That’s really powerful right now because we really need it.

S: Yeah, I think the flute just brings a sound that people need now. So, you hear something, and it restores an element of you.

NM: Yes! Getting to Winter Jazzfest, you have like six different projects you’re doing, right? One is with Saul Williams. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

S: I think I first met Saul when he came to see one of my gigs in the Netherlands and then we kept in contact. I’m such a Williams fan, ever since Slam came out. He’s been a really big influence in terms of having a longform artistic statement that’s nuanced and is only really revealed if you see the big span of his work, you know?

NM: I’m really inspired to see how this is going to manifest. Another project you’re doing is with Joe Lovano.

S: I met him about a year ago in Finland. We talked a lot about the flutes, you know. Percussion instruments, gongs and flutes. We will explore these instruments without the saxophone at the front. When you’re dealing with lots of instruments, it becomes about how do you creatively use all the forces at your disposal? I think the act of questioning, and the act of finding answers, whether they’re uncomfortable or easy, you know, that’s what makes you grow, and this is what I see the whole program for Jazzfest as being a step [toward that] growth. So I’ve not curated these concerts based on them being things that I know are going to be triumphant successes. They’re just very logical steps in the journey and we’ll see how they turn out.

NM: I’ve heard you talk about living within the legacy, like in quantum physics, that energy never dies. So those before us that have done this work, there’s a sense of embodiment that you’ve talked about, say, with Coltrane, with Charlie Parker–this idea of a continuum.

S: Yeah. It’s energy and feelings. For me, what’s more important than the harmonic progression of Coltrane is the feeling of him. If I’m really concentrated on how I’m feeling while listening to him and how I imagine he’s feeling, then I can go on stage and try to embody the feelings that I associate with these masters. That, for me, is the legacy. I’m really honored that throughout my career I’ve connected to the big legacy of musicians, even though I’m not from America. And this is why the whole journey of bamboo as opposed to classical flutes is important because it’s a way of then turning the circle around and seeing what happens when I take the lessons and then employ them to mediums of expression that aren’t from the West. And then it’s about being honest with yourself. That’s the thing that causes you to learn.

The Value of Mentorship: A Conversation with Caroline Davis and Milena Casado

By Kyla Marshell

Saxophonist Caroline Davis and flugelhorn player Milena Casado, who have both been participants in mentorship programs geared toward women and gender expansive musicians, share how mentorship has affected their growth as artists, and how they find ways to mentor other musicians, regardless of age or career status.

Kyla Marshell: You’ve both participated in mentorship programs—Mutual Mentorship for Musicians (M3) and Next Jazz Legacy, among others—in which you had women mentors. How has being mentored by another woman shaped your development?

Caroline Davis: I participated in a program where Geri Allen was my mentor. She gave me a lot of confidence about my playing and encouraged me to explore different ways of rhythmic expression. She really helped me to become the improviser that I am today. There was a time when we played a concert at Dizzy’s, and we played a couple of my songs. I had just started writing music. And she was very encouraging. She was like, I was sitting in the audience, and I noticed that everybody was loving your composition in these ways. And that just really helped me feel more confident in myself.

MC: I feel it’s so important to have people that can support and motivate and show you different things not only about music, but about life. And just the fact of sharing, I feel is so important, especially my case, from women. For me, Terri Lyne Carrington, Kris Davis or even Meshell Ndegeocello through the Next Jazz Legacy program—they have been super supportive and encouraging, and I feel all of us, we've gone through similar things sometimes. So it's good to have their perspectives on how to deal with certain things.

I remember when I was young and seeing Terri Lyne with esperanza [spalding] and Geri Allen and playing and I was amazed by them. I was like, Whoa, I want to be like them one day. And now being mentored by Terri, it's just amazing.

KM: Do you all consider yourselves to be mentors—whether peer mentors or to younger artists?

CD: I think younger people can mentor older people. I think that’s one useful thing about M3, giving opportunities to people of all ages. The music industry in general, there’s a problem of ageism. And I see it with the older women, especially in jazz, who I know who have explained to me how they feel. I’m excited about the other directions of inclusivity and equity in this music, and not discounting [people like] Monette Sudler, Sumi Tonooka, Michele Rosewoman, Toshiko Akiyoshi. Our elder people.

KM: What are some ways that you try to mentor other women or marginalized musicians when you encounter them?

MC: I try to be as vulnerable as I can and just really share what I’ve learned, be there for other people and be truthful to myself. Accept myself so that I can share that with other people and encourage them. So I don’t usually think about the practice like mentoring, but just really being real and sharing everything I know or everything that my mentors had told me.

CD: I recently ran a jam session at Nublu for jaimie branch’s family. And in that situation I specifically reached out to a couple women who I knew would be interested in coming, but were maybe nervous to come in that situation. I invited them up on stage, and I just tried to just make them feel welcome. Those situations in particular can feel overwhelming for people who don't go often.

KM: What do you still want to see change in the jazz landscape for women or other gender-expansive musicians?

CD: One, a sense of showing up for people. Being present in spaces that maybe people don’t usually go to, or going to a show where you don’t know anyone in the band. And that requires a little bit of discomfort on the part of the person going. And the second thing is this focus on hierarchy and fame. I think it’s detrimental overall to the community at-large.

MC: I wish we could all coexist in the same environment. Like race, gender, doesn’t matter. That we could all just be there together, supporting each other, encouraging each other, and sharing. Mentorship is so important because at the end of the day, every musician has gone a little bit through the same stages. It’s about just receiving and giving to the next cycle. It’s a beautiful circle, somehow. It’s like what someone told me, I’m now able to share with someone else and it never stops and just continues.

A Tribute to Curtis Fowlkes

By Roy Nathanson

Curtis Fowlkes, who recently departed this life, was a helluva trombone player. The best, really. Walk onstage at any of these venues. Ask any musician who’s heard or played with him. They’ll tell you. Soulful, articulate, hilarious. Crazy in tune in every sense of the word. And that sound! Primed to leap up and grab you or caress those parts of your heart you weren’t sure you had. And oh yeah, could he sing! Purr is more like it. That voice just flowed so effortlessly. Like out of his horn. It was all one voice really. Completely in control of what it wanted to say without ever being fussy or full of itself. The kind of impossible alchemy that is reportedly channeled only through the heart.

His depth of commitment to sound, Curt’s harmonic knowledge, his instinctive connection to the blues—those were his building blocks and Curt was some architect. He could build a melodic idea out of one note, from a choice rhythmic idea, from one blues lick, one perfect mistake. And of course, Curt was also a consummate listener. He’d listen to what was being played, then just make it sound better. Or he’d listen to what you said and he’d make it funnier. Trust me, there’s a reason why anyone who met or played with curt always felt listened to or cared about in a very particular way.

And yeah, Curt was Brooklyn. Brooklyn for sure. He was born in Bed-Stuy in 1950. I was born in Flatbush a year later, 1951. Turns out, we’d played together in the 1964 All Brooklyn Junior High School Band at Lefferts Junior High School, but we didn’t actually meet. That is, not until I finally actually sat next to him, above the elephants, in the Big Apple Circus band in 1981 where he saved my ass from getting fired. You see, unlike me, Curt was such a fantastic music reader. So he played my parts for me, quietly in rehearsal, so I could hear what the hell they sounded like before I had to play ’em!

Curt had made his way to the Big Apple Circus via Tilden High School, reggae and calypso bands, jazz studies at the Brooklyn Muse, the Jazzmobile program, and a stint in the late ’70s CETA band (a rare 70s government program created to support brilliant, underemployed jazz musicians of our city). Curt came out of the rich, early 70s central Brooklyn world of talented, hungry, curious young musicians like Alex Blake, Sam Furnace, Jimmy Cozier, Vernon Reid and Charles Dougherty. And by the time Curt got to the Circus, he’d played the music of practically every ethnic sub-culture in this city. But the ground floor of his education was always jazz.

Anyway, I got so crazy close to Curt in the circus that in 1984, when I joined John Lurie’s Lounge Lizards, I dragged him in with me. A few years later, Curt and I decided to start The Jazz Passengers. We figured that since we loved the same dumb jokes, the same serious jazz, the same R&B, and the same glorious Brooklyn, that that was enough of a reason to start our own band. Originally the Passengers was comprised of Curt, me, Bill Ware, Brad Jones, E.J. Rodriguez, Marc Ribot and Jim Nolet. In time, Marc and Jim left and we added Sam Bardfeld. Over the years we’ve toured and recorded with special guests like Debbie Harry, Elvis Costello, Jimmy Scott and Mavis Staples.

In the meantime, everyone wanted Curtis’ remarkable sound and musicality so from the mid 80s on Curt also recorded and toured with an incredible list of musicians: Henry Threadgill, Bill Frisell, Glen Hansard, Charlie Haden, Steven Bernstein, Charlie Hunter, Marc Ribot, Don Byron, Louis Bellson and many others. So you have plenty of recorded opportunities to immerse yourself in Curtis’ magical sound.

Like most great Jazz musicians, Curt also loved playing standards. His favorite was “When I Fall in Love.” He always sang the melody first before he played it, whispering the lyric, then turning it on its head with that sly smile of his—knowing full well we were the ones falling for him. 

Curtis is survived by his wonderful son Saadiah and remarkable daughter Elisheba and her beautiful kids Waris, Yasheera, Bilal. 

Oh, and I suggest you make it your extra special mission to search out Curt’s one solo record, Reflect, that he made with his band, Catfish Corner. You’ll be seriously happy you did.  

2023 Program Guide Editorial

Memories of Winter Jazz Breezy

By Piotr Orlov

After the late trumpeter jaimie branch moved to New York in 2015, she was a regular at pretty much all Winter Jazzfests that followed. Breezy loved that, over the course of its hectic week, she could get a few different gigs in, at least one that would inevitably feature her own proj- ects — whether the jaimie branch quartet that was soon renamed Fly Or Die, or her electronic improvisation duo Anteloper — but also because it gave her the opportunity to play with others, finding new contexts and adventures, some that would lead to lasting collaborations, some never to be heard from again.

Of the numerous times I saw branch perform at WJF, the after-hours jam session at Nublu in 2019 is the one that stands out most vividly. Not because it was any version of “the best” or “most unique” that she offered — those might have been at a 2018 Fly Or Die gig where the vi- braphonist Joel Ross was added to the group, or her participation in the one-time-only reading of Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz” that paired the electric power-trio Harriet Tubman with James Brandon Lewis’ Unruly band, which branch’s trumpet helped make even rowdier. The reason that late-Friday night at Nublu has long loomed in my mind is that it gave me the greatest sense of jaimie branch as an organizer, as a charismatic magnet for other musicians, as someone who understood the creative moment, had the artistic power to both control it and let it flow, and who had the smarts and the will to make it happen. Prior, I’d already known and loved jaimie branch as a fearless player; that night I fell for her as a potential elder and a community bed- rock.

The occasion was the first of a two-night bill called “Chicago Overground,” shows that I co-pro- duced with International Anthem’s Scottie McNiece and which featured some members of the Windy City’s “new” generation of players, many of whom were jaimie’s old friends, compatriots, collaborators. So of course she wanted to be involved—except that she was booked to play elsewhere in the festival, and we were looking to feature folks who had no other gigs, and
were coming in from Chi. That said, Scottie and I had already discussed having open late-night sessions as each evening’s closing programs, and wanted Chicago affiliates to lead: Breezy grabbed the chance, with bassist Luke Stewart and drummer Warren Trae Crudup III (the exper- imental thrashers in Blacks’ Myths who were also the rhythm section for Unruly) as her wing- men. And off they went, starting at around 1 a.m.

It was the tail-end of a loooong WJF marathon night. Nublu on Loisaida Ave is a bit of a haul from the clustered congregation of Village jazz clubs, and the temperature was well below freezing, with East River gusts reaching deep below the layers and into the bones. The cynic in me wasn’t sure just how well-attended the jam was going to be–which made the steady stream of musicians who walked through the door with their various axes (horns, reeds, guitars–a keytar!) that much more surprising. As jaimie, Luke and Trae initiated a joyful noise, the would- be participants began lining Nublu’s stage-left staircase, beneath the painting of Miles, waiting for the cue that would signal their turn at glory. And there was Breezy, her tone a full-force gale, the witching hour driving the sorcery, turning towards the initiates and welcoming them onto the stage. With her eyes and a gesture of her horn, she conducted, coached, and paced them, first feeding them a musical worm, then making way for them to leave the nest. Or, if they were sloppy or unprepared, brutally cutting them off, as she did one drunken saxophonist, uncer- emoniously booting him from the stage. You did not cross her—she meant business. But this business was in the name of a greater truth. The music would take wide turns: originating in the melody-heavy changes of standards, with the central trio always moments away from galloping happily off a cliff. Before going on, the initiates’ faces held expressions somewhere between fear, adulation and eagerness. Afterward, most had the dead-eyed stare of someone disem- barking a rollercoaster a little more thrilling than expected: “Do I go again?” “Will she let me?”

Of course she would let them. As Luke wrote in a wonderful poem after jaimie’s tragic passing on August 22, “Breezy is Love.” And one reason I believe that to be 100% true is that love means a belief in the future, a belief in the people helping create it, which, in jaimie’s case has always meant the community of musicians dreaming up that sonic about-to-be, together in real time. This, then, is what the “Flock Up and Fly” gathering is all about, taking place on that same stage where I saw jaimie branch participate in above-the-line community-building. Her old friends

will be there, her recent ones as well, maybe even some of the initiates, the assholes and the clowns. Breezy will be there too, the angel and the devil on everyone’s shoulder. It’s at Winter Jazzfest, no way she’d miss it. 

Remembering Meghan Stabile: An Interview with Igmar Thomas

By Kyla Marshell

Before there was Revive Music Group, its Blue Note Records imprint, or a dedicated stage at Winter Jazzfest, Revive Da Live, the presenter and promoter of progressive jazz artists and events, was Meghan Stabile’s senior project at Berklee. The way she saw it, she couldn’t believe that this wealth of music existed without more fanfare from her own generation. In shows that combined the foundations of jazz with more contemporary elements of hip-hop, Meghan created a new pathway for artists who have since become household names—Robert Glasper, Kamasi Washington, and Thundercat are a few—to make authentic music unbound by genre. Besides her business acumen, she was also a sweet, kind, caring and funny person. I used to sit across from her in makeshift offices—cafes, bars, and her living room—learning about the busi- ness side of music as a young, new-to-New York person trying to figure things out.

Underneath the day-to-day of this figuring, Meghan was changing my life, in ways both mundane and profound. And this, I’ve learned over these last months of mourning and memorializing her, is a common story. She called herself the Supreme Uniter, and for a reason: she brought togeth- er an untold number of musicians who in turn created something that will live on long beyond her lifetime.

Igmar Thomas, trumpet player and director of the Revive Big Band, bore witness to Meghan’s vision from the very beginning, from their freshman year at Berklee, to now, as he carries on Meghan’s legacy.

What was unique about Meghan’s approach to working with artists?

Her passion and her determination. She was a woman that was getting it done. She was a closer. A lot of people have great ideas, but she took her ideas and many of them came true. And it wasn’t easy. I was with her, and she really put all her time into it. She was doing that more than school. She really hustled and was able to close on notable artists, and get a big enough bud- get to make it happen. A lot of people don’t go that far, and she kept doing that and every time it was bigger and bigger.

What do you think her influence has been on the music and jazz communities?

What I was told was it shaped people’s soundtrack of New York. They’d hear the music, see the videos and want to move there. They’d come to our shows. Revive allowed people to be themselves in the 21st century. Because of the conservatism at that point—there were a lot of people that were afraid, whether you say they’re playing hip-hop, or soul, anything but swing, from a jazz perspective. Meg, with her production, made [this style of music] more normalized and widely accepted, and exposed it to the people who were not in touch. People could be themselves as opposed to getting boxed into the “jazz education system.”

Can you talk about her commitment to wellness? How can the music community incorporate this element of Meghan’s mission into their work and lives?

Music is therapy. We all realize it. She used it for herself and others and that’s what she wanted to continue to do and that’s what she was doing. There’s many different approaches. Hers was more of a world music, East Asian approach. Whether you’re listening to drones or you’re lis- tening to a Faith Evans song, everybody has a certain subjective itch that music can scratch. She was finding another avenue for musicians to easily come in and find awareness, understanding, healing, or just give. She was very fierce about that.

What musicians can do from a creative aspect is highlight [wellness], understand it, be aware
of it as opposed to writing something cool or convenient for the radio. Look at it from a film scoring perspective, almost. What emotions exactly are you trying to emote? And be moral. Be responsible. Sometimes take a song or two and heal somebody. I think that’s what the goal and the mission was.

What do you want people to remember about Meghan?

The determination, the work ethic, the vigor. Even when things weren’t working out. She turned a nickel into a dime and dime into a dollar.

How can we honor her legacy?

Live music. Live live music. Support it in all its forms. Whether it’s attending a show, or the instru- ments are live on the record. Supporting musicians’ creativity. Supporting the analog and the live musician, and their rights. That’s what Revive started for. 

A Conversation with Terri Lyne Carrington

By Naomi Extra

On a chilly January afternoon in 2018, WJF hosted the “Jazz and Gender: Challenging Inequality and Forging a New Legacy” panel to a room jam-packed and buzzing with energy. Angela Davis, Lara Pellegrinelli, Arnetta Johnson, Vijay Iyer, and Esperanza Spalding spoke, with Terri Lyne Carrington as moderator. Since 2018, a great deal has happened in the world of “jazz and gender.” I caught up with Carrington to talk about the new book that she edited, New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets by Women Composers and the New Standards Live perfor- mance at WJF this year. Here, Carrington shares insights on where we are in the jazz and gen- der conversation in 2023, and why not just equality, but justice is crucial to this movement.

Would you mind sharing a little bit of the backstory of the book?

I had some students that had trouble finding compositions by women artists. And it’s not just the students. Over the years, people have mentioned that it’s hard to find songs written by women in the jazz canon. I hadn’t really thought about it a whole lot because we’re all just out here playing. And those of us that are performers mostly play original music.

For those who might not know, what are jazz standards and why do they matter?

Part of what makes them a standard is the form in some ways, but also that people have made it their business to learn these songs and play them over the years. And so we had the old standards from the Tin Pan Alley days. Then, we had newer standards-–Miles Davis, Art Blakey, McCoy Tyner and John Coltrane. [But] who made these decisions? Women have been left out of that canon, for the most part. So I thought, let’s put together a collection of songs.
I wanted [the book] to span a long period of time. It’s about 99 years, starting with Lil Hardin Armstrong to some recent Berklee grads.

What are some of your goals for the book?

I want everyone to be invested in the future of the music and take ownership in something that doesn’t necessarily reflect their exact [identity] group. I want for my male colleagues to not just support the book because they know me. I want them to support it because they re- ally feel it’s important, that the voices that have been left out need to be acknowledged, and [because] they think there’s some music in there that would resonate with them.

Tell me about the New Standards Live performance that will be happening at WJF.
What can people expect?
It’s to highlight the music from the book. We have four sets with four different combinations of players. It’ll feature people who are composers in the book and will be rounded off by some other New York musicians. There will also be a set of the Next Jazz Legacy Emerging Artists from the apprenticeship and mentorship program that we’ve done in collaboration with New Music USA.

I remember seeing you moderate the Jazz and Gender panel at WJF back in 2018. Can you share some of your reflections on that moment and where you are with your thinking now? 2018 is the year that our [Jazz and Gender] Institute [at Berklee College of Music] started.
It was all kind of new to me. I wasn’t sure what to even name the Institute. I was thinking “gender equity.” It was pointed out to me by my friends Angela Davis and Gina Dent that I needed to use the word “justice” because you can have equity without having justice, without changing the conditions that created the inequity in the first place. I started to understand more about the importance of words.

Have things progressed, in terms of the widespread call for gender justice and equity in jazz?
I think things have changed since then [and] are in the process of changing. I go back and forth because I’d like to think that eventually one day we’ll be able to check off a box and say, “Okay, we did that in jazz. Now there’s equity, now there’s justice.” But I don’t think it works quite like that. I would be very happy to see jazz and gender get to a place where everybody can pursue their dreams and not have quite as many burdens to deal with. I do see some change and that’s really exciting and inspiring because it makes you want to keep doing the work when you see a groundswell of momentum.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. 

Saluting Pharoah Sanders

By Willard Jenkins

NEA Jazz Master and spiritual beacon, saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, who joined the ancestors last September 24, was an honored Winter Jazzfest presence. He headlined a 2017 WJF bill opened by one of his acolytes, Afro-Brit quest-agent Shabaka Hutchings and one of his several assemblages, The Ancestors. Two years later, Pharoah returned to reprise his burning presence on the 50th anniversary performance of Gary Bartz’s classic recording Another Earth.

On this WJF occasion, guitarist, guitar synthesist, and aural architect Nate Mercereau will focus on Sanders’ 1974 Impulse! Records date, Elevation. Mercereau, a committed devotee of free improvisation and spontaneous composition, addresses his core instrument with a sense of twisted adventure that brings to mind the man Rolling Stone once labeled the “Avant-Gui- tar Godfather,” the ancestor Sonny Sharrock. The godfather of improvised guitar skronk, Sharrock made several sessions with the great saxophonist, including on Sanders’ pivotal 1966 Impulse! session Tauhid.

Born Ferrell Lee Sanders on October 13, 1940 in Little Rock, AR, the man who became Pharoah Sanders, he of the extended, multiphonic tenor saxophone technique, was initially introduced to the broader public as a member of John Coltrane’s mid-60s extended, incen- diary spiritual quest unit. In the new book Ain’t But a Few of Us: Black Music Writers Tell Their Story, (Duke University Press, 2022; edited by this writer), the Anthology section reprints a 1965 DownBeat Magazine review by A.B. Spellman headed, “Trane + 7 = a Wild Night at the Gate,” where Spellman recalls the visceral contributions of Pharoah to Coltrane’s extended assemblage:

“Sanders followed [Carlos] Ward, and he is the damndest tenor player in the English lan- guage,” Spellman enthused. “He went on for minute after minute in a register that I didn’t know the tenor had. Those special effects that most tenor men use only in moments of high orgiastic excitement are the basic premises of his presentation. His use of overtones, includ- ing a cultivated squeak that parallels his line, is constantly startling. He plays way above the upper register; long slurred lines and squeaky monosyllabic staccatos, and then closes with some kind of Bushman’s nursery rhyme. Pharoah is ready, and you’ll be hearing from him soon.” And indeed we did, starting most broadly with Sanders’ brilliant, and by turns prayerful and incendiary Impulse! recordings Tauhid (1966) and Karma (1969), which introduced Leon Thomas’ vocal hypnosis through the deeply impactful anthem “The Creator Has a Master Plan.”

The ensuing 57 years have hardly dampened author Spellman’s enthusiasm for Pharoah. “When I wrote that Pharoah Sanders is the damndest tenor saxophonist in the English lan- guage,” Spellman expressed recently, “I was thinking of the whole man with his country boy gait and his silent, introspective demeanor. But mostly, I was mentally replaying some sounds that he had made on his horn that wouldn’t leave me. Sounds that were exclusively his, sounds that seemed thrown out of the bell with a jet force and a shrapnel edge. If you were open to this music, these sounds could reorder your sensibilities. He always had new ones or new ways of placing them within the progressions of the band. Like Coltrane, his leader, and Albert Ayler, his peer, he was sui generis.”

Such is the sensibility Mercereau and friends will strive mightily to bring to Winter Jazzfest. Theirs will be a quest for the often ecstatic truth and intrepid furiosity Pharoah Sanders delivered on his 1973 Impulse! date Elevation. That record included the contributions of Joe Bonner on piano, harmonium, wood flute and percussion; bassist Calvin Hill, who also con- tributed tambura; drummer-percussionists Michael Carvin, Lawrence Killian, John Blue, and Kenneth Nash; and vocalist Sedatrius Brown. Doubtless Elevation’s extended explorations, in- cluding the opening title track, which clocks in at 18:02, and the rapturous piece “The Gather- ing” (13:52 on record) with Sanders emoting at Herculean levels, will be points of Mercereau’s performance given the leader’s spontaneous composition sense of sound architecture.

The influence of Pharoah Sanders remains indelible, whether on key observers like A.B. Spellman and the legion of writers who encountered the saxophonist-conceptualist beyond his Coltrane entry point, or on subsequent generations of musicians, like Mercereau and his cohorts. Such is certainly the case with newly minted NEA Jazz Master, alto saxophonist Kenny Garrett. Pharoah joined Kenny on the bandstand at The Iridium for the altoist’s 2008 Mack Avenue record Sketches of MD. A mentor of sorts for Garrett, Kenny today says, “The lasting impact of Pharoah Sanders was his quest for the truth, speaking his truth through his saxo- phone, and allowing the listener to take part in his journey. The lasting impact of Pharoah was the sermons he spoke every time he breathed air into his saxophone. His courage to allow the listener to share his everyday ups and downs of life. His quest for the truth at whatever the cost.” 

Honoring Marshall Allen

By Gilles Peterson 

As a broadcaster, DJ and record collector, Sun Ra’s LPs have always been enticing, rare, pre-discogs–limited edition works of art. I can definitely recall the buzz we experienced when Ra, complete with wolfskin fur hat, arrived at Jazz FM in the early 90s to be interviewed by Jez Nelson. We were young and Ra was out there—mysterious, like no one else we’d ever met.

Jumping across time to 2015, it was the arrival of the Arkestra, under the direction of Marshall Allen, for a residency at Cafe Oto in Dalston that set the scene for a creative connection with the new jazz generation in London. Shabaka Hutchings was invited to join the Ark- estra. He went on tour with them. He loved that they all had tasks. Marshall was in control of the sheet music. They were wild. You had the beautiful Danny Thomson on baritone, “Flying Knoel” Scott singing and dancing-–and you had Marshall. Nobody in this universe plays alto like Marshall Allen.

Over time I’ve been lucky to present the Arkes- tra live at my festivals—Worldwide in Sete and We Out Here in the UK this summer coming– and just to complete this vignette, I have to recall a recent conversation with Ahmet Ulug of Omni Sound. We were chatting about the new LP and he dropped a little bomb saying, “You know what, the best track isn’t even on the album!” It turns out there’s a track with that deep Lanquidity vibe—so I’m definitely hyped. I need to hear it. Basically, Marshall felt there was something not quite right about it so it’s still in the can and, for me, that’s Marshall. He’s 98 and he still gives a fuck! He’s amazing.

Honoring Marshall Allen

By Ahmet Ulug 

“Marshall Allen is a giant. There is no alto saxophonist I know today, or generally, hipper than Marshall. That this is not common knowledge is depressing.” Proclaimed in the early 90s by Amiri Baraka, these words still ring true in 2023, and Marshall deserves all the recognition he can get, especially during his lifetime. 

Marshall Allen is a living cultural heritage icon. At 98 years old, 75 years with Sun Ra Arkestra, and the last 28 years as the director, he still lives in the now-historic Sun Ra house in Philadelphia, recording and performing. Considering Sun Ra’s beginnings with Fletcher Henderson, it is fair to claim that Marshall’s reach goes back through the last 100 years of jazz history.

I am one of those people whose life has been altered by Sun Ra, and it became my karmic duty to show my gratitude by recording the Arkestra under Marshall Allen’s leadership. First, let’s take a look back. Marshall joined the proto-Black Power movement of Sun Ra in 1958, and lived, rehearsed, recorded, and toured with Sun Ra almost exclusively.

After Sun Ra’s retreat from planet earth in 1993, Marshall became the musical director of the Arkestra. By writing new arrangements of Sun Ra’s music and composing new music, Marshall has launched the Arkestra into a dimension beyond that of a mere “ghost” band while preserving the aesthetic and distinct sound of Sun Ra.

Today, the Arkestra continues to spread Sun Ra’s philosophy of utilizing music to influence and enlighten. It is electrifying to witness the increasing popularity of the Arkestra among young generations of fans, artists, and schol- ars.

In 2020, at the height of Covid, I realized the urgency of needing to record the Arkestra, and make it as much about Marshall as it was about Sun Ra. I proceeded to contact Elson, the manager of the band, with the idea for an instrumental album.

With Covid restrictions easing in June 2021, the chance to record the album became
more tangible, and we set the date. The day before the session, I wrote a letter to Marshall. Knowing the capacity of the Arkestra, I defined our commission with some keywords: healing, accessible, spiritual, and hypnotic. With no further discussions and no questions asked, Marshall decided on the music to record.

On June 15, 2021, the day started with a prayer. There were 20 musicians in the studio along with the spirit of Sun Ra. Marshall led the Arkestra with endless enthusiasm and energy. All musicians were in total synergy as if certain motifs were intrinsically formatted in them. At the end of the day, Marshall was happy, and everyone felt enlightened one more time.

This recording became the album Living Sky. It is an homage to the legacy of Marshall Allen as well as the living heritage of Sun Ra.

2022 Program Guide Editorial

The Pandemic: Moving Forward with Common Purpose

By Natalie Weiner

During jazz’s century, the music has seen so much peril as to be perceived as perpetually on life support. That perception is most frequently associated with aesthetic and commercial threats: the imagined harm wrought by shocking innovation, the dilution that comes with popularity, the struggle that comes without it. 

But the genre, vast as it is, has survived massive external challenges as well. Wars dragged talented musicians away from their art and into the service, and limited the availability of recording materials. Natural disasters have often threatened its commonly accepted birthplace, New Orleans, and the people and places there that are both so intrinsic to it even today. And yes, pandemics have come and gone. 

The 1918 influenza pandemic, the “most severe in recent history” according to the CDC, arrived a year after one of the first “jass” recordings was made in 1917. It posed an enormous threat to the burgeoning musical revolution for the same reasons we’re now familiar with: being in close proximity to others, as one would have been in an intimate New Orleans club, became dangerous. Louis Armstrong was 17 years old when the pandemic hit, and according to his autobiography, never got sick — but club closures around the city did “force [him] to take any odd jobs [he] could get,” as he wrote later. 

Given the hurdles musicians have already overcome to make this music, it’s no surprise that many in the jazz world have greeted the coronavirus pandemic with some defiance. “How has the pandemic changed jazz? The short answer is, it hasn’t,” says Rio Sakairi, artistic director at New York’s Jazz Gallery. “What’s really at the core of who we are is not going to change over something like this.”

Yet there have been obvious challenges posed by the pandemic that included every aspect of music-making. Clubs could not safely open. Musicians could not gather to record, or travel to perform or collaborate, or teach their students. Festivals like Winter Jazzfest were not tenable, and even the 2022 edition had to be postponed. Organizations that support jazz artists and programming suddenly faced unprecedented demand for their services.

“[The need for assistance] was all consistent with the mission of the foundation, but when COVID-19 started, we were facing it on this heretofore unimagined scale,” says Joseph Petruccelli, executive director of the Jazz Foundation of America, a non-profit dedicated to supporting musicians since 1989.

What is surprising about the response to these massive problems isn’t all the ways people in the jazz community found to address them. Instead, it was the collaboration — the fact that jazzers of all stripes came together to find solutions — that was shocking. “I only like to use the word unprecedented now when it’s describing good things,” says Petruccelli, “and there was an unprecedented sense of cooperation throughout the [jazz] ecosystem.” He was able to form a consortium of label heads to brainstorm ways to help musicians, and eventually that group facilitated a JFA benefit album, Relief, released on Mack Avenue but featuring artists from six different labels.

One important collective action came with the formation of the Jazz Coalition, which Brice Rosenbloom (founder of Winter Jazzfest), Gail Boyd and Danny Melnick formed soon after the pandemic began. The Coalition includes dozens of musicians, each of whom donated personal funds in order to commission new work from their colleagues during the period when in-person performance was impossible. “We realize the need to selflessly pivot and unite the jazz community in an immediate effort to commission musicians and nurture their creativity,” Rosenbloom said at the time. Community and unity — two ideas that were rarely priorities in the jazz world prior to the beginning of the pandemic.

Of course, live-streaming and outdoor performance initiatives were crucial. The Jazz Gallery started almost immediately hosting informal online meetings with musicians, as well as online shows featuring musicians’ videotaped performances from their homes. Live-streaming from the venue itself began in June, and fans from around the world tuned in to watch artists like Vijay Iyer, Joel Ross, Ravi Coltrane and Becca Stevens. Though she cautions against thinking about silver linings of such a vast tragedy, Sakairi says, “the restrictions and the hurdles sort of gave us a direction.”

Individual artists like Cécile McLorin-Salvant and Brandee Younger devised their own modes of streaming performances from home, some paid, some free, some benefiting COVID-19 relief funds. Orrin Evans streamed a series of shows from his front yard in Philadelphia, performed in front of an intimate audience, on Facebook; stoop shows and park jams became ubiquitous in New York during the summer months.

Thanks to the vaccine, we enjoyed a period when venues slowly reopened and artists returned to the road. But the postponement of WJF 2022 and the rude emergence of Omicron as yet another unexpected roadblock to recovery have heightened the pandemic’s emotional and spiritual toll even more. Still, the jazz community found in physical isolation something that it often had been easy to feel alienated from: solidarity.

Afro-Town Topics: A Conversation with Angel Bat Dawid

By Shannon J. Effinger

For Angel Bat Dawid, fearlessness comes naturally. She survived a brain tumor diagnosis while in college. Last year, she was hospitalized for several weeks battling COVID-19. And just hours after her own COVID diagnosis, Dawid’s younger sister, who suffered from chronic asthma, died from complications due to COVID-19. What keeps her going? Her faith and a promise she made to her sister to keep going.

“My sister was my biggest cheerleader. She was so proud of me and all the music,” says Dawid during our recent phone conversation. “She wouldn't want me to be sad right now; she wants me to keep doing music and not stop because she knows it makes me happy.”

None of this has seemed to slow Dawid down. As Artist-In-Residence of this year’s Winter Jazzfest, she says that this opportunity lends her the support needed to stretch herself creatively and compose new music. The following are excerpts from our conversation, in which we discuss her career to date, the larger discourse around racism in America and some of what she has in store for this year’s installment, featuring Marshall Allen, the longtime leader of the Sun Ra Arkestra.

SJE: It's hard to fathom that nearly eight years ago, you decided to leave your job behind in pursuit of your true calling and passion for music. Has this unprecedented time allowed you any moments for reflection?

ABD: Absolutely! I slowed down my life tremendously since the pandemic. It’s just safer to quarantine as much as possible. I take care of myself a lot more. I’ll opt to sit and watch a movie with my parents instead of answering an email. Alphabetizing my record collection and listening to my extensive music collection is just as important as practicing. And I feel so much stronger and at peace with this kind of life. It just keeps getting better and better. I also decided I was not ever gonna stress about anything anymore. Stress is a bad habit, and I don’t allow it to enter into anything I do. I don’t meet DEADlines anymore, only LIFElines. I turn my phone off at night and read books in the morning and the evening, do [my] The Five Tibetan Rites [exercises], and do my work with ease — I love what I do. It’s fun. And I stay in a grateful mood. Three words keep me going: “RIGHT MENTAL ATTITUDE.” That is how one will always be rich and wealthy. I learned that from a great book, Think and Grow Rich: A Black Choice by Dennis Kimbro.

“Afrofuturism,” a term first coined by writer Mark Dery, attempts to encapsulate the total breadth of the Black experience —past, present & future. Arguably, Chicago has been a haven for Afrofuturist artists, thinkers, and storytellers. If you can express it in words, how have ChiTown and the tenets of Afrofuturism shaped you and your artistic expression?

I have the same reservations about “Afrofuturism” that I have with the word “jazz.” Afrofuturism is what they are calling this surge of Black expressionism. With that being said, if a term is going to be used to describe what I do, I want to be the person in charge of defining it and not some white person’s twisted idea of what Blackness is, especially in regard to the arts.

This time has finally allowed honest conversations on racial injustice in this country and worldwide. I feel, in many ways, your LIVE album — and the ordeal you experienced in Berlin — has helped significantly to move us forward in actually discussing race/racism. More needs to be done. What does “change” in this regard look like for you?

Change means that this whole system must be destroyed, not understood or accepted anymore, but completely eradicated. Racism is like a beautiful, delicious, gorgeous chocolate cake that someone made for you, but they put a molecule or more of shit in it. I don’t care how tasty and delicious that cake is; it’s still a shit cake. And that’s what we live in. Racism is in everything. During the pandemic, I did this virtual performance video explaining how racism is in everything. It’s based on the work and research of Neely Fuller Jr., who said, “If you don't understand white supremacy/racism, everything that you do understand will only confuse you.”

Marshall Allen is one of the most underrated living giants of this music. It feels very much like he’s passing the baton along to you. Describe what it has been like to record, perform and collaborate with Allen in the last few years.

Dreams come true! All I can say is that I’m humbled and utterly grateful and have wept tears of joy to not only meet my sonic heroes but to actually perform with them. Marshall Allen has contributed to my next album coming out this fall, Cry of Jazz. I mixed the whole project, so when I was sent the Marshall Allen stems, I was in my home studio just amazed to have these recordings of him, hearing his breath and the chills of his powerful tone in my headphones. I just couldn’t believe that this was happening and still happening. I’m just amazed, humbled, and hope to continue the legacy of preserving this Black music so well like Sun Ra and all the other spiritual musicians who left us with such important works!

“AFRO-TOWN TOPICS: A MYTHOLOGICAL AFROFUTURIST REVUE” — can you break down what this will entail? Will it combine performance and discussion?

So here’s the scoop on “Afro-Town.” A few months ago, I was in my studio, and “Sunny Side of The Street” popped into my head. I was humming it all day. I went to look it up, and this is what I found: “On the Sunny Side of the Street” is a 1930 song composed by Jimmy McHugh with lyrics by Dorothy Fields. Some authors say that Fats Waller was the composer, but he sold the rights to the song.

Red fucking flag—white people are stealing [Black] peoples’ things and claiming it as their own AGAIN. This led me down a road researching Tin Pan Alley and its racist ways. Fast forward into this millennium, there’s still this messed up music industry doing the same thing. 

I started researching more about these great composers (Fats Waller, Andy Razaf, and James P. Johnson). They were highly accomplished composers, lyricists, poets with operas and symphonies, etc., but never taken seriously, and where their work was mostly stolen or sold.

People sold their music because they got families and mouths to feed. I had to know more, so I ordered this piano roll LP of Fats Waller's music, and mysteriously, a few paragraphs were circled in red on the back of the record.

One was addressed to Johnson (being Fats Waller's mentor). I looked up the address on Airbnb and found that there was a space in the same building. I also saw that Johnson’s scores were under lock and key at Rutgers. So I began making plans to go to New York to stay at JPS, study his work, and compose something from the research.

I emailed Rutgers and said I was vaxxed and would wear 100 masks and social distance, and could I come through and look at the scores. I got a response of denial because they were only open to students due to COVID, etc. Now I didn’t want to shoot the messenger. Still, I was outraged because here I am, a Black composer wanting to study the works of the Black composers. This institution that is so proud of having his collections is denying a young Black composer access to something that I should have access to.

I told the librarian that it was unacceptable and even emailed the president about how frustrating this was and to make an exception. A few days later, the librarian hit me up, and he just so happened to be Black. He said his hands were tied, but he completely understood and agreed with me.

He even went so far as to send me copies from the over $200 rare book about Johnson, written of course by a white male. It was a nice gesture, and I was very appreciative, but I'm still furious with these white-led institutions and schools. Are they accommodating, or are they doing the right thing?

Anyway, this squashed my hopeful journey, but a few days later, Winter Jazzfest hit me up about being Artist-in-Residence this year. And then I knew… ahhhh, that's why I felt the need to go to NYC.

So I did more research about Fats Waller and his wonderful handsome cohort from Madagascar, Andy Razaf. This duo was responsible for “Ain't Misbehavin’,” “Honeysuckle Rose,” etc. These songs came from a big hit musical revue called Connie’s Hot Chocolates.

So for the residency, I decided I was gonna write a musical revue like my heroes. Connie’s Hot Chocolates was originally called Tan Town Topics, Tan being white folks they thought that title would get them on Broadway. So I decided to do Afro-Town Topics. And the rest has been a magical journey. 

Afro-Town Topics is a musical news broadcast. The news reports come from Ebonys, Jets, books in my library and are broken up into the important topics of Afro-Town. I adore Sun Ra because he called himself a Myth Scientist, and mythology has stories that point to important truths. Fables and parables hold rich and beautiful information that can never be stolen or sold.

“Sing me your folks songs, and I’ll tell you about the character customs and history of your people,” a quote from the great Paul Robeson, so Afro-Town is a mythological space with a lot of truths and mystery. Musical revues mix music and dance, skits, and comedy, and I knew I wanted to work on something like this for my residency.

Now that WJF has been postponed once again due to COVID-19, what else can we expect from you in this largely virtual format of the program?

Well, the slice of delicious pie is because I am in Chicago, my home, so I can actually do more because the expenses of traveling and putting folks up in hotels took up most of my budget. Being here in Chicago made it so I could actually have more musicians and pay them all more money. And everyone in this ensemble has the best Chicago has to offer, all Black and all my good friends I love dearly. And with Afro-Town being a news show, having it done virtually makes sense. I still have all the plans of doing Afro-Town live in front of an audience. I can’t wait for that day!

The Tally: Jazz Carries On in the Midst of Terrible Losses

By Michael J. West

The spirit of the late Ralph Peterson — drummer, composer, bandleader, educator, all-around bad motherfucker and steadfast friend of Winter Jazzfest — might best be exemplified by his last words to a colleague. “If the Grim Reaper is coming for me,” he said, “he better bring a friend.”

Nobody could doubt it: When Ralph died of cancer on March 1, 2021, he’d given everything he had. But then, he’d done that all his life. He was a force of nature. His boundless energy and devotion to the music touched countless colleagues, protégés and students. Before its postponement on account of Omicron, Winter Jazzfest planned to bring together a healthy cross-section of all of these — saxophonists Bill Pierce, Craig Handy, and Tia Fuller; trumpeter Brian Lynch; bassist Essiet Essiet; and drummer Tyshawn Sorey — at Dizzy’s on January 18. Yet if it was Peterson’s name and memory on the marquee, it tacitly stood in for the scores of tragic losses the jazz community has endured since the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic began.

The piano titan McCoy Tyner passed away on March 6, 2020, a year (almost to the day) before Peterson. At the time, it was a tragic, heartbreaking occasion—but not an unexpected one. Tyner had been in ill health for quite some time; two years prior, at a gig at Washington DC’s Blues Alley, he had only been able to participate in half his own set. It was hard at that time to see Tyner’s death as the harbinger of a jazz-casualty avalanche.

The same day Tyner died, 21 passengers on a California cruise ship tested positive for COVID. A week later a national emergency and a worldwide pandemic had been declared, and it had claimed the life of saxophonist Marcelo Peralta in Spain. Then saxophonist Manu Dibango in Cameroon. A few days later it reached New York jazz via pianist Mike Longo. Then, in the space of two days, Wallace Roney, Ellis Marsalis and Bucky Pizzarelli. At that point it became clear that a catastrophe was unfolding.

I know this chronology well: I am the de facto obituarist for JazzTimes magazine. By the end of 2020, I had written 40 obits. As of this writing I have written 35 more. There are nearly 20 more jazz obituaries that I did not write these past two years. Jazz has likely never had such a sustained period of major losses.

Coronavirus isn’t the sole culprit. Tyner’s death was not COVID-related; neither were the deaths of Tony Allen, Jimmy Cobb, Freddy Cole, Chick Corea, Stanley Cowell, Jimmy Heath, Frank Kimbrough, Jymie Merritt, George Mraz or Ralph Peterson. But it’s hard not to see a sort of collateral damage. What the virus couldn’t kill by direct infection, it sapped by way of the lockdowns that shut performances all over the world. More than a few jazz musicians have described playing live as their “lifeblood”; figurative or not, when that lifeblood is cut off, what’s left?

It wasn’t only musicians that we lost. Broadcasters (Thurston Briscoe, Eulis Cathey, and Bob Porter), journalists (Stanley Crouch, Pamela Espeland, W. Royal Stokes, and Greg Tate), recording engineers (Al Schmitt), club owners (Gino Moratti, Joe Segal), festival producers (Bill Royston, George Wein), and even record store owners (Bob Koester) are all important members of the jazz community. Their losses are keenly felt by their peers and those who knew, loved, or were in any way affected by them.

If you’re reading this, that surely includes you. Any one of us can name great musicians whose work changed our life, whether a headliner like Corea or a sideman like Eugene Wright (who wasn’t seduced by his drum solo on Brubeck’s “Take Five”?). Yet you might also have had your first hearing of a favorite tune on Eulis Cathey’s shows at WBGO or SiriusXM. You might have gotten angry at “Putting the White Man in Charge,” or another one of Stanley Crouch’s provocative columns. You might have bought an old Coltrane or Elmore James album at the Jazz Record Mart in Chicago or had a wild time at New Orleans JazzFest one year, no matter what kind of music you were listening to. In any of those instances, your thanks go to someone who passed away these last two years.

Of course, if this time is mainly defined in our minds by the pandemic, it’s also a question of time itself. Jazz is now over a century old: 105 years just in recordings. Now, more than ever, the spectrum of elders in the jazz community (regardless of occupation) crosses multiple generations. Some of them had already spent multiple generations under stressful conditions: touring, hustling and stretching to make ends meet, at the very least. There are, of course, other and more unsavory aspects. The jazz life has never been easy. There’s no shortage of songs or stories over the last century or so to remind us of that.

Of course, even the elders can seem like superheroes, with a lifetime of staring down and overcoming adversities that would break the backs of us mere mortals. Henry Grimes and Giuseppi Logan come to mind, living lives (and dying deaths) of uncanny parallels. Both were born in 1935 in Philadelphia; both came to New York and staked out niches in the then-burgeoning free jazz movement; both struggled with mental illness that removed them from the scene and sometimes pushed them into homelessness. In the 21st century, both re-emerged and made astonishing, much-fêted comebacks (Grimes in 2003, Logan in 2009), restoring themselves in the jazz firmament. Both, after those turns of events, looked somehow invincible… which somehow increased the tragedy of their final parallel: Grimes and Logan both died in New York, both 84 years old, both from COVID, three days apart.

Or there’s Lee Konitz, whose career spanned an astonishing 75 years: He’d played for so long, and with so many, that when he passed on April 15, 2020 (incidentally the same day as Grimes), the very idea of a jazz world without him was inconceivable. A massive stroke in 2011, followed by another decade of health issues, had barely even slowed him down. How could we lose this indomitable spirit, a mere whippersnapper of 92?

Then there’s Ralph Peterson. He’d fought a long battle with cocaine addiction and lived to tell the tale. (Which he often did, with dignity and fortitude; if you attended WJF in 2020, you may remember him co-hosting a talk on the subject.) In the years that followed, he endured diabetes, morbid obesity, Bell’s palsy, and two bouts of cancer. It is no exaggeration to say that with each affliction, he emerged stronger than ever. When cancer came knocking a third time, it seemed all but certain that he’d notch yet another victory. “Even if the treatment knocks me down to 70 percent, I’m confident that 70 percent of Ralph Peterson is equivalent to 150 percent of most people,” he told me in 2018. 

“But I’m not worrying about that,” he added. “The music is my path to immortality.”

If Ralph is a representative of all the jazz world’s recent casualties, let this stand as the epitaph for all of them as well. The music — whether they performed it, enabled it, presented it, marketed it, broadcast it or inspired debate about it — is each of their paths to immortality. No matter how many friends he brings, the Grim Reaper can’t take that.

This Is A Movement

By Sarah Elizabeth Charles, Caroline Davis and Aja Burrell Wood

What’s it like to be a woman in jazz?

This age-old question is often asked of musicians who happen to be female. But is it the right question? What about other questions that point to non-dominant groups of musicians experiencing unequal representation and opportunity in this industry? What about others who are marginalized as a result of race, class, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability and/or age? 

The inequities that exist in this music are broad-ranging and we believe can be remedied by zooming out and considering the culture of the music as a whole. More helpful questions therefore might be:

Who has been left out of or behind in the dominant narrative of this music and why?

What does a transformation of culture that includes everyone, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, class, race, etc., look like? 

Melba Liston once said in an interview, “First you are a jazz musician, then you are black, then you are a female. I mean, it goes down the line like that. We’re like the bottom of the heap.” Melba’s words represent the common sentiments of many women in her generation and still ring true today. From sexism on the bandstand to being shuffled to the side of bookings and networking opportunities, women, non-binary, gender-nonconforming and other marginalized musicians in this industry face similar mistreatments, placing them also at the bottom of the heap. 

To confront this reality, we have come together to present This Is A Movement: Towards Liberation, a Jazz & Gender convening.

This Is A Movement did not appear out of thin air. It arose from a feeling of necessity to offer space for listening, learning and exploration via panel discussions, questions, research presentations and smaller group exchanges and deep dives. Those of us responsible for initiating this gathering do not claim to own any initiatives or ideas, nor do we mean for it to be hierarchical in nature. Rather, this initiative has grown out of the work of numerous individuals’ ideas and labor, intellectual and otherwise.

We believe it is important to recognize that this is just as much about acknowledging the tireless work that has been done, as it is about continuing to challenge ourselves to live up to the legacy and labor of those who came before us. We’re standing on the shoulders of Black feminist thought leaders such as Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith and bell hooks; intersectional scholars such as Anna Julia Cooper and Kimberlé Crenshaw; activists and community organizers such as Sojourner Truth, Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer; and a great many under-celebrated and under-represented musicians. 

Our initiative aims to create a space in which individuals, institutions and organizations interested in doing equity work can come together and start to build a more effective model for what this industry can be. Within our ever-expanding network the goal is to come together to exchange, imagine and create. Conversation and dialogue are both essential to making This Is A Movement long-lasting and impactful. 

However, musicians cannot be solely responsible for this effort. The industry and current power structures include many more than the musicians. Curators, writers, editors, educational institutions, venues, festivals and others desiring equity have a stake in this endeavor as well. Our This Is A Movement gathering will therefore include and invite all of these individuals into one conversation space in an effort to level the playing field and have meaningful discussion.

We encourage our collective community to join us in co-creating what has the potential to be a fully realized, equitable present and future in service of this rich art form; a future in which the music can thrive and progress more than we ever thought was possible for generations to come.