Jazz Chronicles

Check this John McLaughlin performance on The Tonight Show out before it gets taken down. Amazing playing!

No, my ears weren't deceiving me; in fact, Wynton Marsalis' From The Plantation To The Penitentiary is even worse than I thought. I...

Whoo, boy! I just got a taste of the forthcoming Wynton Marsalis recording, From The Plantation To The Penitentiary , and if my ears aren...

How bizarre to spend the day in windowless rooms with the world's leading jazz journalists without any of them being aware of two of the...

As usual, at this point in IAJE—or any other trade show/conference—what you have to show from the experience is a stack of business cards, a...

My focus at the IAJE conference is threefold: an article for DownBeat about a joint education program betweeen The Manhattan School of Musi...

Landed in Manhattan just in time to check in, sign in to the IAJE conference, grab some latkes at the Carnegie Deli (the recipe I picked up ...

I'm heading this week to the annual International Association of Jazz Education conference in New York, and was mildly surprised to see ...

With the year, and the holidays, winding down I try to find some time to catch up on recordings that I've missed. This year, I'm spe...

It tells you all you need to know about life in a very white Canadian city in the early '60s to discover that I first heard about James ...

For one reason or another, I probably saw fewer concerts in 2006 than in any year in the past 25. Even so, a few register among the best I...

Time was when I felt I had purchasing tickets from Ticketmaster and similar services wired. If you began dialing into their phone system abo...

Although the concept of creating "instant" copies of live concerts is not new—The Allman Brothers Band, for one, has been doing it...

The death of bassist Walter Booker last Friday puts me in mind of my dear departed friend Eric Nisenson. Best known for his books Blue: The ...

I have to admit it, I love when my DownBeat colleagues John Corbett and John McDonough stake out territory at extreme opposite ends of opin...

I caught fellow Ottawan and DownBeat contributor D.D. Jackson last night at a taping for the radio program Fuse , which runs nationally on...

Somewhat related to my post on Maria Schneider—since he's often a mainstay in her orchestra—are some comments on Gary Versace , who I he...

No matter how jaded you become about "the state of jazz" it's always reassuring to encounter Maria Schneider, in one form or a...

The task of selecting a top 10 CD list continues to get more difficult as new technologies enable musicians to record and distribute their w...

One of the joys of the Internet is the ability to access media from around the world, and for me here in Canada that includes National Publi...