Well folks the deed is done. With yesterday’s anticipated announcement from International Association for Jazz Education president Chuck Owen, the doors have been officially closed on IAJE’s offices in Manhattan, KS, the 2009 Seattle conference has been cancelled, and the whole shebang is about to be turned over to receivership. The one hopeful note in [...]
If there are any readers out there who still think The Independent Ear has some manner of axe to grind where it concerns the current critical state of the International Association for Jazz Education (IAJE) with our original editorial rant Woe is IAJE (if you’re not hip to it, scroll down to just below the [...]
…Just got this response to our editorial rant WOE IS IAJE from a veteran jazz artist manager: I began to have a strange feeling about IAJE over the last 10-15 years in discussions with people that I know in the business around the world. IAJE wasn’t about what’s really happening in the music, in [...]
What was once the National Association for Jazz Educators (NAJE) and what morphed into the International Association for Jazz Education (IAJE) has/had become the omnibus organization for the entire jazz community (despite the narrow-minded comment of "A jazz educator" below). And now it appears as though quite sadly and tragically IAJE is crumbling before our [...]
Flute specialists in jazz have been few and far between. And where once the instrument was the double of choice of saxophonists seeking to augment their music with a different instrumental texture, even that aspect has been eclipsed by the soprano saxophone. So it was with great interest that I began to hear about a [...]
The comments that have accompanied my editorial rant of the other day on the sad and sorry state of IAJE include one from an abject COWARD who goes by the inocuous salutation of "A Concerned Jazz Fan." This particular person, characteristic of a certain cowardice that runs far too rampant in these 21st century times, [...]
Several years ago a group of intrepid music lovers in our nation’s capital, armed with expansive tastes that included healthy ears for improvised original music on the edgier side, developed a collective they dubbed Transparent Productions. Two of the principles in the Transparent Productions collective are friends and colleagues from my WPFW radio days in DC: [...]
Regular readers may recall the Independent Ear Blog post overview of the 2008 IAJE conference in Toronto last January. Sadly that may have been the last IAJE conference for the foreseeable future. What so many of us thought was a robust conference produced by what we assumed was the financially stable International Association for Jazz Education [...]