Sunday Session: September 27, 2020

John McLaughlin

Here's this week's roundup of various music-related items of interest:

* CTI Records: Ten Tasty Albums With No Added Sugar (Almost) (AllAboutJazz.com)
* Alexis Cole: Teaching & Learning (Jazz Times)
* Funk Legend Steve Arrington Celebrates a Long Career with “Down to The Lowest Terms” (Bandcamp.com)
* Albert Murray Talking Modernism, Race, and Jazz (Hyperallergic.com)
* Third of British musicians may quit industry amid pandemic (The Guardian)
* Rediscovering The Enormous Social And Spiritual Legacy Of Black Jazz Records (NPR)
* When Front Page Challenge met Ella Fitzgerald (CBC)
* Regina Carter’s Extraordinary Career Continues to Evolve (San Francisco Classical Voice)
* 12 synths that could have been classics, but weren’t (MusicRadar.com)
* Punch the 'Clockface': Elvis Costello On Making Albums In a Streaming World (Billboard)
* Paul Desmond and the Canadians (JazzHistoryOnline.com)
* Asynchronous Ensembles Come Out Swinging (DownBeat)
* Five Decades On, An Eclectic Church Preaches The Message Of John Coltrane (NPR)
* The Beat of Her Own Drum (TheLAndMag.com)
* John McLaughlin: Where The Muse Leads (AllAboutJazz.com)
* The Band’s Robbie Robertson: “If there was anything wrong with ‘The Last Waltz’ it was that the cocaine wasn’t very good” (NME.com)
* We’ve Got A File On You: Thurston Moore (Stereogum.com)
* Sound Territory: The Genius of Ornette Coleman (Los Angeles Review of Books)
* Congress Is Killing Independent Music Venues (Vice.com)
* Spike Lee Brings David Byrne’s American Utopia to the Big Screen (American Songwriter)
* Rishi Sunak's winter economy plan will silence the UK music scene (The Guardian)
* Documentary Tracks Charters ‘Searching for Secret Heroes’ of Blues Music (UConn.edu)

Interviews with Bird, Bode on this week's Jazz Unlimited

Dennis Owsley, host of KWMU's Jazz Unlimited program on Sunday nights, doesn't just play CDs by jazz musicians, photograph those musicians, and write about them; sometimes he talks to them, too. This Sunday, Owsley's got a couple of interviews - one old and one new - scheduled to occupy a sizeable portion of his program, which airs from 9 p.m. to midnight.

The first hour will feature a vintage conversation between alto saxophonists Charlie "Bird" Parker and Paul Desmond, originally recorded in 1954 for a Boston radio station. "With the music, the interview is 25 minutes long (14 minutes of talking)," says Owsley via email. "(Parker) talks about his practice regimen as a young man, Edgar Varese, Dizzy and a whole lot of other stuff." The segment will also include music from two of the most famous live performances in the annals of bop - the 1945 Town Hall concert and the 1953 Massey Hall concert - and from an AFRS radio broadcast from 1945 featuring Parker as a member of Billy Berg's band.

The program's second hour will be given over to an extended interview between Owsley and singer Erin Bode, who discusses her work, influences and career so far, but does not address her recent appeal for money for a legal defense fund. (The interview was recorded before Bode's announcement of her as-yet-unspecified legal woes.) "The interviews are done "live on tape" in that we start a stopwatch and go for an hour, so there is no editing of any kind, except to take out silences to make it fit the hour exactly," explains Owsley. "I don't do these interviews to promote anything, I want the audience to get to know what makes the artist tick."

You can hear Jazz Unlimited by tuning into KWMU 90.7 FM, or via online stream here.