You know the rap about symphonic orchestras playing jazz. Can’t swing. There to frame real jazz musicians in pretty strings.  Pops orchestra. Sure, Charlie Parker and Strings was great but strings without Charlie Parker? Are you kidding?

And then there’s the Netherlands Radio’s Metropole Orkest, directed by Connecticut-born Vince Mendoza. Mendoza’s had…

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I thought something was wrong with me as a kid in Newark…I saw the way people of color were treated. Then I thought, Wait a minute.    There’s  nobody in the world that’s better than me. Nobody. And by the same token, I’m not better than anyone else.–James Moody

When James Moody died…

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The same old thing wasn’t going to cut it in the early 1970s. And just about anything recorded before Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, in other words before 1969, was the same old thing. That wasn’t going to grab the ears of the hip new audience Miles had attracted with his…

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I once had a minor tiff with Brad Mehldau, an exchange of words in the pages of the L.A. Weekly that, I hope, ended up serving us both well. It started when I wrote up a plug for a rare Keith Jarrett appearance, saying that Jarrett had influenced a generation of young musicians. For proof one needed to look no further than Mehldau’s recorded rendition of “Blame It on My Youth”

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