All posts tagged: jazz

At Cartier’s Met Gala Afterparty, Flowing Champagne, a Roaming Jazz Band, and Celebrities Ready to Let Loose

At Cartier’s Met Gala Afterparty, Flowing Champagne, a Roaming Jazz Band, and Celebrities Ready to Let Loose

Published by Sam Flores

My mother always said that nothing good happens after midnight. With all due respect to her, she should’ve been my date to Cartier’s Met Gala after-party at The Carlyle last night, where, just as the clock struck 12, Jon Batiste sidled up to the piano at Bemelmans Bar and began to play. Like, really play—he rocked his head and pulsed his hands on the keyboard while his band swayed and danced alongside him. On the piano hung the white floor-length puffer jacket the singer wore to the Met Gala. Designed by ERL, it was inspired by Barkley L. Hendricks’s 1976 painting Steve, which currently hangs in the Whitney Museum. Considered a seminal piece of Black portraiture, it depicts a young Black man standing tall in a pair of aviator sunglasses and a luminous white trench coat. Until Batiste took the stage, Cartier’s party had been an elegant yet restrained affair. White-jacket waiters passed deviled eggs and pigs in a blanket. Mini Champagne bottles sat on silver trays and custom matchbooks were arranged on every table. …

Neuroscientists reveal how jazz improvisation shifts brain activity

Neuroscientists reveal how jazz improvisation shifts brain activity

Published by José Betancourt

Recent findings in neuroscience provide new evidence that musical creativity is not a static trait but a dynamic process involving the rapid reconfiguration of brain networks. By monitoring the brain activity of skilled jazz pianists, an international research team discovered that high levels of improvisational freedom rely less on introspection and more on sensory and motor engagement. The study suggests that the brain shifts its processing strategy depending on how much creative liberty a musician exerts. These findings were published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Creativity is a complex human ability often defined as the capacity to produce ideas that are both novel and appropriate for a given context. One scientific view proposes that creativity emerges from a balance between constraints and freedom, or between what is predictable and what is surprising. Musical improvisation offers an ideal setting to study this balance because it requires musicians to generate new material spontaneously while adhering to specific structural rules. Previous neuroimaging studies have identified various brain regions associated with improvisation. These include …

Egor Demin Sets NBA Rookie 3-Point Record as Nets Snap 7-Game Skid With 10-9-99 Win Over Jazz

Egor Demin Sets NBA Rookie 3-Point Record as Nets Snap 7-Game Skid With 10-9-99 Win Over Jazz

Published by Sam Flores

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Egor Demin set an NBA rookie record by making a 3-pointer in his 34th straight game and finished with 25 points and 10 rebounds to help the Brooklyn Nets snap a seven-game losing streak with a 109-99 victory over the Utah Jazz on Friday night. Demin, who was 6 of 12 from 3-point range, set the mark on the first basket for Brooklyn. Cam Thomas added 21 points for the Nets, Day’ron Sharpe had 16 points and nine rebounds, and Danny Wolf added 14 points. Brooklyn outscored the Jazz 20-2 in second-chance points. Keyonte George led Utah with 26 points and seven assists. Brice Sensabaugh had 18 points off the bench for the Jazz, who have lost five straight games and nine of their last 10. Kyle Filipowski had 14 points and 12 rebounds, while Ace Bailey added in 12 points. Brooklyn used an 8-0 run that was capped by Jalen Wilson’s 3-pointer to go up 91-83 early in the fourth quarter. Utah pulled within a basket again on a …

Julie Campiche: Unspoken review – a harpist’s tender, quietly radical hymn to women who endure | Jazz

Julie Campiche: Unspoken review – a harpist’s tender, quietly radical hymn to women who endure | Jazz

Published by Sam Flores

When the London jazz festival ran online only in 2020, an enthralling livestreamed performance by Swiss harpist Julie Campiche’s avant-jazz ensemble was a startling highlight, introducing UK audiences to a virtuoso instrumentalist and composer who was already turning heads in Europe. Campiche plucked guitar, zither and east Asian-style sounds from the harp, mingled with vocal loops, classical music, Nordic ambient jazz and more. You might call her soundscape magical or otherworldly if it didn’t coexist with a campaigner’s political urgency on environmental and social issues. But Campiche is too much of a visionary to overwhelm the eloquence of pure sound with polemic, as her new album, the unaccompanied Unspoken, confirms more than ever. The artwork for Unspoken by Julie Campiche Campiche’s extra-musical agenda here is a celebration of sisterhood, dedicated to women in public and private lives who have inspired her. The opening Anonymous is built around a Virginia Woolf quote – “for most of history, ‘anonymous’ was a woman” – repeated by a chorus of women’s voices in different languages building to a clamour. …

The long, overlooked history of jazz in Los Angeles

The long, overlooked history of jazz in Los Angeles

Published by Sam Flores

From top to bottom: Bobby Hutcherson, Dexter Gordon, Esperanza Spalding, Abbey Lincoln, Herbie Hancock and Charles Mingus. (Getty Images) Backstage at the Blue Note L.A., Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter’s widow, Carolina, have come, along with me and a friend, to see Esperanza Spalding between sets one late summer Sunday. The club is new and the dressing room feels more humane than most, like a hotel banquet room. Esperanza makes an altar on the vanity and prepares the space for chanting, a prayer meeting but more unapologetic, ritualistic and communal. We make an impromptu jazz orchestra in clipped Sanskrit, and my mind wanders to the first time I heard this Lotus Sutra, when Tina Turner performed it on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” explaining that it’s how she got into her transcendent mode when she still lived with Ike in Inglewood — her means of escaping him in spirit before she ran away physically. When she finally left, she hid from Ike at Wayne Shorter’s home. With my mind on Turner, I do transcend; I feel …

The Dude Ranch Above the Sea | Philip Clark

The Dude Ranch Above the Sea | Philip Clark

Published by José Betancourt

As a teenager, growing up in New Jersey during the 1960s, the pianist Donald Fagen routinely took a bus into Manhattan to hear his jazz heroes in the flesh. The ecstatic improvisational rough-and-tumble of Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, and Willie “The Lion” Smith stayed hardwired inside his brain, and soon Fagen landed at Bard College, where one day in 1967 he overheard a fellow student, Walter Becker from Queens, playing the blues on his guitar in a campus coffee shop. Fagen introduced himself and told Becker how impressed he was by his clean-cut technique. The pair struck up an immediate friendship, then five years later founded Steely Dan, a band that would become one of the defining rock groups of the 1970s. In albums like Can’t Buy a Thrill (1972), Pretzel Logic (1974), and Aja (1977), they cultivated a sleek, polished pop that was marinated in jazz, blues, Latin, and rock and roll. Their songs had both a melodic, high-fidelity sheen—a gift to radio airplay—and a level of compositional integrity and instrumental elan …

11 Los Angeles spots to enjoy jazz every week

11 Los Angeles spots to enjoy jazz every week

Published by Sam Flores

If you love jazz, you have to be alert. That’s in part because the music is all about savoring spontaneity, but also because live jazz is rare and getting rarer. In an entertainment capital that very nearly trembles with music of all genres, only about a dozen clubs in Los Angeles offer jazz more than once a week. Their numbers had been dwindling even before the pandemic. But there’s a new generation of players emerging, the scene is evolving and there’s ample cause for hope. That became clear as we searched, listened and pulled together this guide. The clubs listed below are consistent jazz haunts that typically host at least two performances per week. They come in a wide variety of flavors, including the disheveled dedication you see at the Baked Potato, the chatty lounge feel of the Dresden, the affluent trappings of Herb Alpert’s Vibrato Grill or the communal feel of a Monday night jam at the Lighthouse Cafe, where much of the music in “La La Land” was filmed. Bear in mind that …