Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis Essays - think, that
Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Post navigation Published insaguaro-creekx AICP-END BLOGS This is the place where professional food service workers discuss the issues of the day, talk popular music, speculate on sports, and offer opinions to the yearning masses. Please join us seven days a week. Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis EssaysWhat motivated you to write about this music? Inspired by a high school stage band concert, I began to play the alto sax at 15 years old. I took lessons with a local Staten Island legend, Caesar DiMauro; studied music theory and saxophone method books; played in various classical and jazz ensembles; tuned in regularly to WRVR and WBGO; and minored in music at Hamilton College, where I also hosted a jazz radio show for three years. Sharing a melody line with trumpet icon Clark Terry there, on April 17, in the college chapel, was an epiphany, a mystical experience of musical ecstasy.
I was more troubled by how relatively few black folk Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis Essays live jazz performances than by the dearth of black writers about jazz. My initial goals as a jazz journalist were to report accurately, and educate readers gently, while describing a recording or a concert so the reader felt that he or she had experienced it too.
My major objective now is to share my knowledge and adoration of the music on as many platforms to as many people as possible — in print, on radio, on stage at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, and on the internet and mobile through the TV series I host, Jazz It Up! When you started covering the music were you aware of the dearth of African Americans writing about serious music? Playthell Benjamin wrote about jazz and a whole lot more for the Voice and other periodicals. All of these guys were in New York in my early years as a writer, as were the ever-looming presence of the elder grand masters — Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray.
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I suppose that Jimjy black commentators who focus on music generally deal with more popular genres. And inthere are less and less publications that even cover "serious music" anymore. The glaring disparity has to do with black musicians being acculturated early on to the cultural power and appeal of jazz expression, particularly since their ancestors founded this web page innovated the blues Tery vernacular called jazz, versus black media commentators who privilege popular forms and the career benefits that could bring over jazz, a fine art that they may not even like or feel qualified to write about.
Pop and youth culture hold a powerful sway. You have to go deep in the woodshed to write about jazz with substance. With some notable exceptions, this has been the case through the entire history of the music. Do you http://pinsoftek.com/wp-content/custom/newspeak/heroes-always-sacrifice-in-homers-odyssey.php that disparity or dearth of African American writers contributes to how the music is covered? Sure, but I think we can only take that point so far. But Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis Essays are different views on the value of certain styles or sub-genres, and so different emphases arise based on stylistic preferences.
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These Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis Essays other factors such as those I detail later play an important role in how the music is covered as much or more than race. If you consider yourself American… you part black too! Yes, I have at times questioned why some musicians may be elevated over others. And though the back story is usually more complicated than a simple "race" analysis, race being an omnipresent cancer in the body politic, does play a role. Record label and public relations support factor in such elevations, as does a need for some writers to find the "next hot artist.
Cultural diversity among writers will flower more perspectives, but not a consensus on which artists deserve to be elevated over others.
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They endeavor to profit from the veneer and sophisticated brand of jazz while pulling in other genres to make more money than they could with jazz proper. Furthermore, I think there is an undercurrent of race in why artists such as Diana Krall, Chris Botti, and Norah Jones become popular performing a mellow, soothing, less-experimental style of music. They fill a niche in the music and radio industries and for certain market segments. Jazz is a fine art and most black publications focus on popular music. As Albert Murray says, the quality and range of aesthetic statement can be grouped Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis Essays folk, pop, and fine art categories, for pedagogical purposes. I could easily name 20 more living legends unknown to a wider black audience, or to the general public.
To re-phrase Carter G. Woodson, this is the mis-education of the black American. These artists should be revered and honored by black publications and media outlets as a cultural and ancestral imperative. I wrote an open letter to Oprah in All About Jazz inspiring her to have more jazz musicians on her show, not just as performers, but as commentators. Jazz musicians are some of the most worldly, sophisticated and smart people I know. Exposing wider audiences to jazz musicians as artists and as thinkers is one way to address the low cultural moment in which we find ourselves.]
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