Over at The Record, NPR arts editor Tom Cole has an interesting thought about the new self-empowered music economy and jazz artists. You know, the climate which has people like Dave Holland and Sonny Rollins building comprehensive websites, Dave Douglas and Greg Osby running their own labels and pretty much everyone scrambling to brand their own identities in the wake of the mainstream music industry imploding. A lot of folks do this willingly, one ought to mention: it's as much about electing for autonomy as it is about responding to financial straitening. But Cole's point is simpler:

But it can't help, it seems to me, but take time away from the creative process of making music. I guess that's really my point — not that creating an online space and identity is a good or bad thing — just that the work that goes into it takes time.

Cole also tells us about Nathen Page, a new-to-me guitarist who played with the greats, and ran his own pre-Internet mail-order label out of his Florida home. Worth pondering. Also worth pondering: The Record is the recently-launched news blog of NPR Music, helmed by the eminently capable Jacob Ganz and Frannie Kelley. You should read it, regularly. [The Record: DIY Or Bust For Jazz Musicians, Too]

Related At NPR Music: Tom Cole on seeing Mingus for $5. Dave Douglas on adapting to the digital age.

In a July 16, 2010 interview on A Blog Supreme, Ms. Cicily Janus singled me out as one of the artist managers she perceived to be unhelpful during the course of her writing The New Face of Jazz. Wrote Ms. Janus:

There are a lot of names blatantly missing from this book because I was denied interviews over and over again. Dianne Reeves lives in my town! I contacted her manager over and over again and he criticized my website and said he would schedule her but then ultimately turned me down. I emailed certain names over and over again over a period of 12 months in an attempt to get an interview and was either denied or just plain not answered.

An e-mail trail, which has been sent to A Blog Supreme, portrays a very different story than the one Ms. Janus provided:

Enlarge Hulton Archive/Getty Images

A pensive Miles Davis.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

A pensive Miles Davis.

My boss readily admits that she doesn't know a whole lot about jazz. But she lets me write all this nonsense on the Internet, so I'm not complaining. And at least she's willing to learn. So every so often, she and I get together to listen to and Instant Message about a different great jazz song.

The Boss Lady is currently on her way to the Newport Folk Festival, and to the Newport Jazz Festival the following week, where NPR Music is recording and live webcasting both weekends. So before she left, I thought I'd spring on her one of the classic jazz recordings from Newport: Miles Davis' 1955 version of "Round Midnight," with composer Thelonious Monk on piano.

"Round Midnight," from Miles Davis, 'Round About Midnight (Legacy Edition)[Columbia/Legacy]. Miles Davis, trumpet; Thelonious Monk, piano, Percy Heath, bass; Connie Kay, drums. Newport, R.I.: July 17, 1955.

Purchase: Amazon.com CD / Amazon MP3 / iTunes

Boss Lady: So much atmosphere. So smokey and languid. And it feels so free.

me: Yup, you got it. Ok, we're done here. Bye.

Do you recognize the tune?

What would the late Dutch saxophonist and bandleader Willem Breuker have thought of the vuvuzela? Kevin Whitehead, Fresh Air's jazz critic, literally wrote the book on modern Dutch jazz. And knowing Breuker's freewheeling humor and love for street music, Whitehead wishes we could have been around for that vuvuzela concerto. For those of us not completely familiar with the Dutch saxophonist, Whitehead paints a brief profile of a fascinating musician. [Fresh Air: Remembering Dutch Jazz Musician Willem Breuker]

Lars Gotrich/NPR

Trio Caveat brought its quiet, subtle improvisation the New Atlantis Festival.

Washington, D.C. is a weird place to hold a free jazz festival. Our jazz history skews mainstream, and the current local "out" scene is cozily small. Even stranger yet was the neighborhood — The Fridge is in the back alley of Barracks Row, Capitol Hill's version of Main Street, where every other storefront is a "bar & grill." In any case, I'll greedily take it. And so did the mostly solid crowds.

I previewed five artists from the New Atlantis Festival last week and to my surprise, only a few of them really shook my ears. Charles Gayle was a no-show (Sabir Mateen was a more-than-comparable last minute replacement), power drummer Weasel Walter won over a largely older audience and saxophonist Jimmy Ghaphery was Saturday afternoon's secret weapon.

Hey, Joe Tangari and your editors, I'm quite glad you like jazz enough to occasionally write about it at Pitchfork Media. We "jazz people" wouldn't mind significantly more, of course, but anything we can do to get the cool kids to pay attention to even some of this stuff is OK by me. But here's a question: why do you and the team never give Best New Music nominations to jazz records? I mean, your reviews are usually so positive. It's almost as if y'all want to tell people that "Hey guys, some jazz is actually still good! It belongs in the conversation with other good music!" But when it comes time to actually appointing the next big thing in music, it's like, "How could jazz possibly wear our kingmaking crown? What would that say about our brand? I'm not so sure about this."

The critics' consensus favorite jazz record of 2009, Vijay Iyer's Historicity, was given a rave review — and a 7.8 out of 10. Is some of the best jazz really only 7.8 compared to the, uh, brilliance of the recently BNM-ed Wavves or Best Coast? You write in your latest, rather positive 7.9 review today of Dual Identity, the self-titled new album of the band co-led by Rudresh Mahanthappa and Steve Lehman, that "the era of jazz stars known outside the jazz world is mostly over." But you're in a position to help change that in a serious way if you want to, and you appear to like this record about as much as I do. (Let me just make an aside to say: I Endorse This Album.) I mean, I'll take it, but dude(s), just say what you really feel sometime? [Pitchfork: Album Review: Dual Identity, Dual Identity]

First, read Marc Myers of JazzWax on why twenty-somethings, for whom iTunes libraries serve as sonic wallpaper, may prove fundamentally incompatible with jazz, a "listening music" that requires significantly more concentration:

Can jazz survive Generation F? The "F" here stands for "flighty," and anyone who has watched people in their 20s listen to music today knows what I'm talking about. Songs in iTunes libraries and on iPods serve mostly as white noise for this demographic group. Music is what you put on while working, organizing photos on your computer, i-Chatting or texting.

Then read Phil Freeman's intelligent, historically perceptive and thorough takedown here. The arguments lead up to this:

It's a good thing Myers' complaining is mostly directed at people his own age or older. If people in their twenties read his whiny b——— and reductive generalizations of their generation, they might wind up turned off to jazz, rather than mostly unaware of it, as they are now. (Here's a hint, Marc: most Americans, regardless of age, are pretty much unaware of jazz. Try making a positive contribution to the discussion next time, rather than griping pointlessly about "these kids today.")

I greatly admire Myers' work elsewhere, but I cast my lot with Freeman on this one: the challenge with this generation of listeners is so much more "wait, what's jazz?" than Attention Deficit Disorder. Though in saying so, I'd like to point out that in many faulty arguments, there's a kernel of truth embedded in the premise; it's just extrapolated incorrectly. And I think that's the case with what Myers is saying here.

Enlarge Eileen Barroso

JCOI mentor composers Jane Ira Bloom (left) and Derek Bermel with a participant.

Eileen Barroso

JCOI mentor composers Jane Ira Bloom (left) and Derek Bermel with a participant.

A stupid word like 'jazz' is not going to hold me back from doing what I want to do with a set of instruments, or with a set of people, or with an environment, or with discourse.
—George Lewis, from the stage of Miller Theatre

Looking back at jazz history, it's not hard to identify the important musical training grounds, places that sparked a kind of extended creative combustion through long lists of influential teachers and alumni. The Lenox School of Jazz, a summer program in the late '50s attended by Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry and Ran Blake, could be considered one such place. The studio of the late composer and pianist Lennie Tristano, where young players sometimes found themselves rubbing elbows with Art Pepper or Lee Konitz, was another.

Hindsight may be 20/20, but the recently-completed Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute appears to be history in the making — or at least a strong indicator of seismic shifts along the fault lines between jazz and classical or so-called new music. Last week, Columbia University hosted the inaugural JCOI workshop, the first of its kind and a collaborative effort between its Center for Jazz Studies and the American Composers Orchestra. The idea was to give jazz composers access and exposure to the latest compositional techniques for orchestra.

Directed by trombonist and composer George Lewis, JCOI's prestigious faculty included those well-versed in jazz and other improvising traditions — composers Derek Bermel, Fabien Levy, Anthony Davis, Tania Leon, Jane Ira Bloom and Alvin Singleton — along with Boston Modern Orchestra Project conductor Gil Rose and members of the Wet Ink ensemble. Organized by topic, seminars focused on the history of orchestral music since 1945, the particulars of contemporary orchestration, improvisation and the orchestra and working with conductors, copyists, and music publishers. [Specifics will be covered in-depth in a future post and on-air story. —Ed.]

The group of participants was as engaging as the seminar leaders: around 30 men and women from across the US and Canada ranging in age from 17 to 66. Some were students in various kinds of educational programs, but others –- like guitarist Joel Harrison and bassist Rufus Reid -– were professionals with decades of experience under their belts, blurring the lines between teachers and students. (Interviews with both teachers and participants are available through the American Composers Orchestra's YouTube channel.)

At the heart of A Blog Supreme, we're interested in your perspectives on music. Heretofore, we've meant this metaphorically: what you like and what you think. But now we want to invite you to literally share your views: that is, your photographs.

For those of us who love the sounds of jazz, seeing its sights can be a powerful companion. And we know some of you love to capture those jazz images yourselves, whether on stage or off. So we'd like to invite you to share those shots via the NPR Jazz Photography Pool on Flickr, a free service which allows you to post digital photos online. Please: feel free to join the group, add your favorite original images, and tell us about them. Every so often, we may even feature some of our favorites here on A Blog Supreme.

We know the allure of music photography ourselves. So we've created the A Blog Supreme Flickr photostream for our own original images. Here's a taste:

Those images are some I've taken throughout the course of the last few months — basically, since I purchased my own camera in mid-March — which haven't yet appeared on NPR.org. (It's a used Nikon D40 with a 35mm f/1.8 lens, if you're wondering.) There are more, though, and more coming. Check out Lars Gotrich's shots from this last weekend's New Atlantis Festival in Washington, D.C., for which a full report is on its way.

To recap:

1. Join our NPR Jazz Photography Flickr pool! You could have your own jazz photographs posted in this space.
2. You may also want to check out our own A Blog Supreme Flickr photostream.

P.S. This idea was blatantly borrowed from The Picture Show, NPR's photography blog.

Links we haven't yet revealed:

• On Jimmy Heath and his new autobiography.
• Gangsterism on CNN. (It's a Jason Moran feature — get it?)
• There are some delightful new additions to the Newport Jazz Festival recording archive at Wolfgang's Vault, including sets led by Max Roach, Oscar Peterson, J.J. Johnson and Dave Brubeck.
• Maria Schneider as prog-rock, now that prog is supposedly back. (Though to be fair, I think there's also prog in Ben Allison, Darcy James Argue, Steve Coleman, Pete Robbins, Marco Benevento, Andrew Hill, anyone who takes a long solo on "Blue Rondo a la Turk" ...)
• Artist Stephen Byram, responsible for the cover design behind many a JMT/Winter and Winter, Screwgun and Dave Douglas release, is profiled.
• In Chicago, Chopin without pianos, with accordion, harmonica, guitar, oud, trombone choir and jazz vocals. Neil Tesser, Howard Reich.
• Christian Scott and Trombone Shorty, considered together.
• Ahem: "smooth cruise."
• The Latin Jazz Corner interviews Chris Washburne.
• JazzWax features cartoon tunes.
• The Jazz Session talks to Bryan Murray and Charnett Moffett.
• The Checkout this week features Geri Allen, Nels Cline and Barry Harris.
• RIP: saxophonist Willem Breuker, trumpeter Harry Beckett and DJ Dick Buckley.

Links we've recycled:

Enlarge iStockPhoto

No, not that kind of jelly roll.

iStockPhoto

No, not that kind of jelly roll.

First there was The Daily Beast's revelation that "[p]eople with a strong preference for jazz are 30 percent more sexually active than the average American":

"Liking other types of music, such as rock or rap, was unrelated to sexual activity," write the authors of the psychology textbook from which this statistic is drawn. They hasten to add that liking jazz doesn't automatically make us into sex magnets: "Remember, a correlation between two factors does not necessarily indicate causality." Then again, sometimes it does.

And the response from Jezebel — the Gawker Media website aimed at women — which counter-claimed that "Poets, Jazz Fans Are Likely Bragging About Their Sex Lives":

According to the Daily Beast, the folks having the most sex are exactly the ones you'd expect: jazz lovers, poets, and drunk people. Or maybe they're simply the ones who are pretending to get the most action?

Ouch. So which is it, jazz fans? Are we doing a lot of One O'Clock Jumping? Or is it more like that composition's original title? RHETORICAL QUESTION DON'T ANSWER THAT AAAH. [The Daily Beast: Who's Having the Most Sex? / Jezebel: Poets, Jazz Fans Are Likely Bragging About Their Sex Lives]

We're proud to announce that once again, NPR Music and our public radio partners WGBH Boston and WBGO Newark will be traveling to the CareFusion Newport Jazz Festival for two days of live on-air and online broadcasting, plus archival recording. We'll be covering all three stages of the festival Aug. 7-8, 2010 and hoping to record acts like Wynton Marsalis with Dave Brubeck, Ahmad Jamal and the Chick Corea Freedom Band with Roy Haynes.

You can hear a stream of festival concerts through free audio webcasts at NPR Music, and also through the radio signal of WBGO at 88.3 FM in the New York City region. NPR Music's coverage will be available at npr.org/newportjazz, where we'll be hosting artist interviews, photo streams and a live chat. Afterward, we'll post the recordings, including select downloadable podcasts, for free listening at our Newport Jazz hub. Already, you can explore the archive from 2009 and 2008.

We'll be streaming live from around midday-7:30 p.m. on both Saturday and Sunday, Aug. 7-8. WBGO's Josh Jackson, host of The Checkout and the Live At The Village Vanguard collaboration with NPR Music, will anchor the coverage live from the mother of all jazz festivals. The previous weekend, NPR Music will also be broadcasting from the Newport Folk Festival.

Here are some of the concerts we are hoping to feature. For a full list, see the official Newport Jazz website.

_mattxb via Flickr

Sonny Simmons headlines Friday night at the New Atlantis Festival in Washington, D.C., which runs July 23-24.

The summer music festival season may be drawing to a close, but at least a few more weekends of unbearable heat, gauged prices on bottled water and sunburned music lovers remain. Here in Washington, D.C., we don't get much in the way of Bonnaroos or Newports. But thanks to the grassroots efforts of locals Ed Ricart and Peter Staas, we do get the first New Atlantis Festival, with 100 percent of proceeds going to the artists.

It's a well-curated weekend, bringing original free jazz vets like Sonny Simmons (!) and young, raw talent under one umbrella — or rather, a D.C. warehouse loading dock turned art gallery called The Fridge. That's not to say the multi-neighborhood crawl of this past summer's DC Jazz Festival wasn't great. It just didn't feature much in the way of the jazz that I regularly enjoy — i.e., paint-peeling improvisation.

Enlarge Yann Peucat

These days, Barry Harris gives a lot of pointers to students.

Yann Peucat

These days, Barry Harris gives a lot of pointers to students.

"One thing — we've got to develop a young audience, because everything being against us, the average youngster knows nothing about jazz, and doesn't care to know anything about it, and is quite prejudiced against it without ever hearing it, or anything like that. ... They don't like us, and they haven't heard us. And that's really a drag."
—Barry Harris, 1985

That epigraph was recorded for a film 25 years ago, and its message is awfully familiar to jazz lovers today. That makes it even more important that Barry Harris is still around. As a musician, he became fascinated with bebop when it arrived, and never stopped playing it. As a teacher, he's become fascinated with passing on those lessons, teaching and mentoring thousands of students.

This Wednesday night at 9 p.m. ET, NPR Music and WBGO are live broadcasting/webcasting the first set of the Barry Harris trio from the Village Vanguard. Josh Jackson of WBGO and I will be in the chat room during the show; we'll also have a recording and photos the next day if you miss the live experience. (UPDATE: Josh Jackson interviews him here.)

In preparing for that, I've become fascinated by a few video clips about and featuring Harris. The quotation above, for instance, was captured in a 1985 film, and excerpted in the following profile made by Jazz Legacy Films. A lot of his peers weigh in with stories, and there's even video from his appearance on The Joe Franklin Show.