Notes from the Net: Reviews of the Bad Plus, Dewey Jackson; funding jazz; and more

Despite the tradional mid-summer lull in breaking news, StLJN's tireless cyborg infotraps nevertheless have scooped up a few items of interest over the past week:

* AllAboutJazz.com ran a review of Live at the Barrel, yesteryear St. Louis trumpeter Dewey Jackson's session from 1954 recently issued for the first time by Delmark Records, the Chicago label owned by former St. Louisan Bob Koester.

* From the "Coming attractions" file, the Journal News, a suburban paper outside NYC, had a feature story on drummer Roy Haynes, who's playing Jazz at the Bistro in September.

* Also, the Bad Plus, who will return to the Bistro the first week of January 2008, recently played London, where one reviewer called them "a subversive US group whose jazz stylings seemed calculated to send up the entire genre...Fragmented, hyperactive and theatrical, The Bad Plus stretch the piano-trio format inside-out".

* An interesting piece in the Chicago Tribune last week examined a collective of businesses and foundations that is helping to fund jazz performances throughout the city:

"Two years ago, several of Chicago's most famous corporations and foundations dared to invent a new model for funding the arts.

In a dramatic move, they joined forces to create an informal philanthropic consortium dedicated to supporting music. This meant, in effect, that each of these big-league organizations risked losing some of the high visibility -- or the "branding" power, in marketers' terms -- that accrues with being the sole or lead underwriter of an arts event.

More radical still, they decided to pour their resources not into safe and conventional musical outfits, such as symphony orchestras and opera companies, but into a less formally organized music that long has been an orphan when it comes to funding: jazz.

Since then, the aptly named Chicago Jazz Partnership has funneled approximately $1.5 million in cash (and nearly as much in in-kind contributions, such as production costs and musician airfares) into a music that's internationally identified with this city.

Granted, that may not seem like a lot of money when compared with the funding of institutions such as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which has an operating budget of $57.6 million and an endowment of $202 million. But it's huge in jazz, a music that somehow has flourished for most of a century on nightclub cover charges and bar tabs, but with scant institutional support (multimillion dollar organizations such as Jazz at Lincoln Center, in New York, and SFJAZZ, in San Francisco, remain the exceptions in the low-budget world of jazz).

So when the stage lights go up Thursday night for Millennium Park's third annual "Made in Chicago" jazz series, a brilliantly programmed lineup underwritten by the Chicago Jazz Partnership, audiences once again can witness how this novel funding approach has altered the musical landscape of this city."

Read the whole thing here.

* And finally, The Onion recently ran a humor piece called "No one sets out to be a smooth jazz musician" that's good for a few chuckles, even (or maybe especially) for those who particularly enjoy that genre of music.