"Hotplate," SFJazz's monthly concert series at the Amnesia, a hip Mission club, asks local artists and groups like Joe Bagale, Wil Blades and Le Jazz Hot to reinterpret the work of jazz greats, including Sun Ra, Jimmy Smith and Django Reinhardt.
He played compositionally, complementing the work of jazz improvisers who also were master writers; this made his work with Booker Little, Herbie Nichols and Hasaan Ibn Ali special.
I've written about these recordings and about Jackie McLean's career and troubles; Jack Chambers's investigative essay about Brooks's brief career is a superb work of jazz historiography.
Midnight Marauders was the Queens-based Tribe's third album, a work of jazz influences and classic hip-hop beats that combined the braggadocio of the golden age with the delicacy of the daisy age.
One of the late rapper's former neighbours, saxophonist Donald Harrison, claims to have introduced him to the work of jazz giants including Adderley, Charlie Parker and Ella Fitzgerald, teaching the teenage Biggie about diction, phrasing and scat techniques.
The quest to understand, experience and exercise freedom is at the core of the life work of jazz master Wadada Leo Smith.
The entry on T. S. Eliot tells us that though "The Waste Land" "would be forced into the mold of an academic set piece," it is in fact "a work of jazz-like syncopation".
When dissonance and complexity build to a sufficient degree, works of classical, jazz, or rock descent can sound more like one another than like their parent genres.
Twenty-two of these sessions are represented here, and many are sharply turned out, not particularly inspired evidence of the working life of jazz in the 50's.
Eventually the organization may have to bring its agenda more into line with the working life of jazz in all its styles.
