Sunday Session: November 15, 2020

Herbie Hancock

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

* Lakecia Benjamin: The future of jazz is now (Bay State Banner)
* What’s in a Name? (Jazz Times)
* Forgotten protest icon Odetta Holmes lives on in modern Black Americana (ScalawagMagazine.org)
* Live Nation expects that “shows at scale” will return next summer (NME.com)
* Review of Jazzfest Berlin 2020 (London Jazz News)
* Sun Ra's Cosmic Keys (Reverb.com)
* Tomeka Reid Looks For Challenging Situations (DownBeat)
* Sleeping Giants: The Brief Reign and Brilliant Legacy of Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi Band (WBGO)
* Alone Together: A Q&A with Tabla Master Zakir Hussain (SFJAZZ.org)
* Mayfield and Markham Plead Guilty in a Plea Deal (Offbeat)
* 50 Years Later: The Surprising Memphis Roots of “Led Zeppelin III.” (MemphisMagazine.com)
* Israeli researchers create AI capable of writing personalized jazz solos (Jerusalem Post)
* Alfredo Rodríguez Deploys Abundant Technique (DownBeat)
* 'It's the screams of the damned!' The eerie AI world of deepfake music (The Guardian)
* Shabaka Hutchings - The Future of Afrofuturism (SFJAZZ.org)
* For The Rolling Stones’ 60th Anniversary, Keith Richards Says “The Plans Are to Still Actually All Be Alive” (ConsequenceOfSound.net)
* Guitarist Steve Hunter on His Journey From ‘Berlin’ to ‘Billion Dollar Babies’ (Rolling Stone)
* Emerging Opera Singers Now Pay for Online Auditions. Are Companies Watching Them? (MiddleClassArtist.com)
* Joel Ross Doesn’t ‘Do The Obvious Thing’ (DownBeat)
* Meet the guardians of the world’s earliest musical recordings (Los Angeles Times)
* Volcanic drummer and MacArthur ‘genius grant’ winner Tyshawn Sorey premieres new work with Seattle Symphony (Seattle Times)
* Sonny Rollins on Jazz as a Music of Freedom (LitHub.com)
* A Brief Guide to the Shape of “Jazz Rap” Today (Bandcamp.com)
* Bassist Eric Revis Revels In Curiosity, Versatility (DownBeat)
* The Experimental Edge of the “New Weird South” (Bandcamp.com)
* Christian Sands Relies On Adaptability (DownBeat)
* State of Play: the rise of in-game concerts (DJMag.com)
* Ronnie Scott understood that for some people music is the only outlet – so he opened a club (New Statesman)
* Seated gigs, no moshing and 'brutally exhausting' sets: the strange new world of live music (The Guardian)
* How Ticketmaster Plans to Check Your Vaccine Status for Concerts: Exclusive (Billboard)
* Inside Sun Ra’s 1971 trip to Egypt (TheVinylFactory.com)
* Big Breaks - What’s Behind Orpheus Classical? (Atavist.com)
* Andrew White, Prolific Multi-Instrumentalist, Scholar and Washington, D.C. Legend, Dies at 78 (WBGO)
* Electrophone: the Victorian-era gadget that was a precursor to live-streaming (TheConversation.com)

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: A jazz film mini-festival (shutdown edition), part 2

This week, it's another installment in our mini-festival of jazz films that can be viewed for free online. (You can see last week's post with part one here.)

Today's edition features three films about pianists, starting up top with Music In The Key Of Oscar, a 1995 documentary about Oscar Peterson.

After the jump, you can see the film titled simply Earl "Fatha" Hines, filmed in 1975 to coincide with Hines' 70th birthday.

Next up, it's Mal: A Portrait Of Mal Waldron, a 1997 documentary about the late pianist who played with major jazz figures including Billie Holiday, Eric Dolphy, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and more.

That's followed by Ronnie Scott and All That Jazz, a documentary produced in 1989 to celebrate 30 years of London's long-running jazz club (which continues to operate today) and its founder and namesake.

The next-to-last film, Big Ben: Ben Webster in Denmark offers a look at Webster's life as an expatriate living in Europe in 1971.

The final video is The Breath Courses Through Us, a 2013 film about the free jazz group New York Art Quartet, with John Tchicai (saxophone), Roswell Rudd (trombone), Milford Graves (drums), and Reggie Workman (bass), recounting the group's origins and brief initial run in the mid-Sixties and their reunion 35 years later.

You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump...