Jazz Chronicles

I'm currently listening, filled with emotion, to a 17-hour live radio tribute to drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson on WKCR-FM. I had just a...

Nineteen seventy-two was a great year for live albums by three of the most musical rock bands of the time. The Allman Brothers Band releas...

Tonight, in my city—Ottawa—a local group of improvisers are getting together to play something called 'Whose Solo Is It Anyway.' C...

The great pianist Cedar Walton died today at the age of 79. One of the last remaining members of the generation of musicians who developed t...

A couple of years ago, vibraphonist Peter Appleyard released an album of terrific material he recorded with...

It doesn't get much better than catching two of my favourite young musicians in one of my favourite venues, especially when a cold rain ...

It's akin to the so-called 'fog of war.' When proponents dig in on two sides of a debate, some key facts get lost. It foll...

It is beyond cliché to say that jazz is akin to a conversation, and often not true. In many bands—especially during festival season, when tr...

In Canada, the myth about top-rank musicians has long been that, once they relocate to Toronto, they become part of a homogenous whole, play...

When the TD Ottawa Jazz Festival announced its lineup in late winter I dubbed it the Year of the Voice because of the number of highly disti...

Congratulations are due to pianist Cecil Taylor, recipient of the Kyoto Prize  from the Inamori Foundation for "fully exploring the ...

As summer officially begins, I'll be settling in for 10 days of music at my hometown jazz festival, the TD Ottawa Jazz Festival. This ti...

There are only three musicians I clearly remember hearing for the first time: Charlie Parker, Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. Of these,...

I have a hard time even beginning to think about how important so-called alternative weekly (or alt-weekly) newspapers have been to culture ...

Don't let my silence here at JazzChronicles make you think that nothing is happening in my little world o' jazz. On the contrary, I...

Note: My longtime friend Jacques Emond, former programming director for the Ottawa International Jazz Festival, died Sunday night after suf...

Every year, jazz critic Francis Davis undertakes the mammoth task of polling more than 100 of his peers to determine the past year's bes...

Yes, I know I recently stared into the evil side of year-end top 10 lists, but I get requests. How else are my friends and relations going ...

When an artist remains creative into his or her tenth decade there is a temptation to overstate the person's importance. Longevity has a...

Dave Brubeck was an enormous influence on my early jazz listening, and—along with his sidemen Gerry Mulligan and Paul Desmond—probably the o...