Bobby Hutcherson: Coming to St. Louis this fall?
As regular readers know, it's a tradition here to start off these compendiums of short news items with something about Miles Davis, and this week is no exception. So, for starters, go look at this collection of interviews and blindfold tests featuring Miles, found via Be.Jazz. Then, if you've you've got a broadband connection, take a peek at these videos from the DailyMotion site of a late-career Miles and band performing "Time After Time" and "Mr. Pastorius".
Having satisfied our minimum weekly requirement of Miles-related news, let's turn to some other musicians with a St. Louis connection. John Zorn, who studied at Webster University in the 1970s, has a new CD out, the latest in his Filmworks series, and you can read a review here...Terence Blanchard, who's due in town to play the Sheldon with his Sextet this Saturday night, continues to be in demand as a film composer. His most recent score is for Inside Man, the new film by his frequent collaborator Spike Lee, which stars Denzel Washington, Jodie Foster and Clive Owen and is currently playing in theaters...Organist Joey DeFrancesco, who's been a frequent visitor to St. Louis in recent years, has just charted with his new CD featuring veteran mallet percussionist Bobby Hutcherson. The two are also touring together, and in this article, DeFrancesco says St. Louis will be one of their stops later this year. His Web site shows DeFrancesco's trio featuring Hutcherson as having a St. Louis booking at the Sheldon for November 4, but as the Sheldon has yet to announce its fall schedule, it may be a while before the date is officially confirmed from their end.
For your reading list: John Coltrane was venerated by many as one of the greatest musicians of his time, but some see the late saxophonist as an actual saint, as recounted in this article from the Washington Post about San Francisco's St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church finding a new home in the city's Fillmore district...Meanwhile, no one has nominated Wynton Marsalis for sainthood yet, but there's no denying that the trumpeter has been both influential and sometimes controversial over the course of his career. This article from Billboard's Dan Ouellete looks at the impact Marsalis has had on jazz since he first became famous 25 years ago...Can a mid-sized city support a thriving jazz club scene in today's economic climate? This article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette examines the situation in the Steel City, where a couple of local jazz venues recently closed and another is having financial trouble... And we know things are still tough in New Orleans, but for a couple of recent looks at the situation, check out this article on the city's prospects for economic recovery, and this piece about a online auction of concert tickets happening all this month to help re-equip New Orleans musicians who lost instruments and gear in the hurricane and flooding last fall.
Finally, Ben Ratliff of the New York Times reviews the new PBS series Legends of Jazz here, and seems to think the producers have missed the point: "The ultimate test of jazz on television is whether the music comes across in a hostile medium - how well it suggests the excitement of performance. In all its mainstreaming and common-denominator sense, the show seems to want to deny that jazz is something people care deeply about. But jazz is deep. It is about sound and resonance and great passion. There is a reason people become nearly religious about it. You'd hardly know from watching this," he concludes.
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