My experience as artistic director of two jazz festivals — the 29-year old Tri-C JazzFest Cleveland and the emerging, 7-year old BeanTown Jazz Festival, produced in Boston by Berklee College of Music, tends to load my snail and email boxes with inquiries from artists and bands seeking employment. But festivals are a different animal from clubdates [...]
Last April one of the highlights of the 28th annual Tri-C JazzFest Cleveland was the appearance of poet-writer-conceptualist Sekou Sundiata as our special guest at our now-annual Jazz Meets Hip Hop evening. What began eight years ago as our effort at bridging the gap between our festival’s core music, jazz, and the late-20th century music [...]
Second to no other U.S. community New Orleans is steeped in it’s own set of cultural traditions. Every Sunday beginning around the end of April through years-end there’s a Second Line parade in town. Reading news of Brad Pitt’s well-publicized and strikingly sincere Lower Ninth Ward housing renewal project (go online to the Times Picayune [...]