
The Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition, a flagship initiative of Jazz at Lincoln Center, draws many dozens of aspiring musicians to New York every spring, for an event both inspiring and entertaining. I caught a portion of the competition last year, when the winner was Garfield High, a perennial favorite from Seattle, Wa.
This year’s throwdown is scheduled for May 12 to 14 at Frederick P. Rose Hall. Jazz at Lincoln Center just announced the finalists, and one twist is Garfield’s conspicuous absence, for the first time since 2001. (If this is beginning to sound like college football rankings, you have some idea of the intensity with which these bands and boosters approach their task.) Anyway, here are the 15 bands advancing to the finals:
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Now online: this month’s column, about the NEA Jazz Masters, the Marsalis Family, and what I believe to be a certain lapse in judgment. I should note that I filed my copy to JazzTimes on Aug. 10, a few weeks before the hullabaloo caused by saxophonist Phil Woods, who announced his boycott of all future NEA Jazz Masters events. (Peter Hum covered this well over at Jazzblog.ca.)
When the Woods grievance hit the airwaves, I piped up on Twitter that I disagreed with his actions but had to acknowledge that he had a point. In response, guitarist-composer Anthony Wilson wrote this (I’ll collapse his serial installments into one statement):
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So, that happened. [Update: Ben Ratliff's NYT coverage.] And you can carp all you like about the Marsalis Monopoly on Jazz in High Places, but the fact remains that this worked. In choosing a “jazz studio” to kick off her White House music series, Michelle Obama reinvigorated a cultural assumption of jazz as the quintessential American product. It’s a viewpoint that Wynton, as much as anyone out there, has kept in mainstream circulation.
Much has been said about the idea that jazz mirrors an ideal of democracy. When we talk about jazz as a fundamentally “American” product, those sociopolitical assumptions are always somewhere in play. Marsalis can speak eloquently and impassionedly on this subject, and he often does, to great effect. A few years ago I mulled this over in the context of a larger profile, about his role in Jazz at Lincoln Center:
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