Jazz Chronicles

My obit of Jimmy Giuffre is in the current issue of DownBeat (August), but due to space limitations they didn't have room for the origi...

It won't be a jazz-free summer by any means—I'm headed to the Vitoria-Gasteiz Jazz Festival in a couple of weeks—but probably a blog...

Composer and bandleader Maria Schneider dominated yesterday's Jazz Journalists Association Jazz Awards presentation at The Jazz Standard...

Although I'm paid three times a year or so to write reviews about jazz festivals, it's seldom the festival itself I review. Whether ...

Two jazz magazines... two anniversaries... two very different approaches. That's what readers of Coda – the venerable Canadian journal ...

With Return To Forever's vaunted reunion tour now in full swing – it kicked off last week in Texas and winds through the summer until ea...

The U.S. National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has named the recipients of its 2009 Jazz Masters Award. The winners are: guitarist-singer Ge...

Long before I had heard the word "mojo" I knew Ellas McDaniel was working some kind of magic. When I was eight or nine I was fasci...

It was a shock to learn today that Ajay Heble – founder and artistic director of the Guelph Jazz Festival & Colloquium – has suffered a...

If you're like me, you probably have chunks of your vinyl collection that you haven't gotten around to replacing with digital copies...

Time to reveal the full plans for three events at the Ottawa International Jazz Festival that I've been working on in my role as vice-p...

I'm currently pursuing a story about ECM Records, which involves a convoluted interview process with the globe-trotting Manfred Eicher, ...

Sad news that the great Jimmy Giuffre has died, just two days before his 87th birthday. One of the giants on the clarinet, Giuffre's ban...

Recently, I was engaged by a prominent Canadian musician in a spirited email exchange about the pros and cons of jazz festivals. His main po...

For those in the vicinity of Ottawa – my home base – it's easy to overlook the significant jazz content in this year's Bluesfest lin...

The International Association for Jazz Education officially filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, simultaneously announcing the cancellation of it...

What my friend and JJA colleague Willard Jenkins calls "a house of straw" is starting to blow away faster than I predicted. The fi...

Bennie Maupin is back... with a vengeance. Maupin was one of my favourite reed players in the '60s and early '70s – and remains at t...

It may be the low U.S. dollar, the ever-growing hassle of air travel, or just the luck of 2008 – whatever the reason, there is a larger-than...

Well, maybe not quite yet, but the news that Elvis Costello and Elton John will be collaborating on a new television show – Spectacle: Elvis...