bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Mood Swings (Tom Harrell)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Tom Harrell’s unevenness as an improviser and composer has generated one of jazz’s most consistent dramas over the past 25 years. When the planets come into alignment in a Harrell solo; when all is focused and driven and he knows where he is headed but takes his time getting there, diverting himself with melodic fragments and oddly accented color notes; when his tone is warm, moist, supple, and sure, despite an attack that can be downright fierce, it is tempting to throw caution to the winds and proclaim him the finest trumpet player of his generation. But then there are those other moments, when he struggles to find the target, when his influences predominate or he succumbs to a drab, almost sentimental lilt, underscored by his affection for samba and other placating Latin beats. Both Harrells are on display on his new album, Paradise (RCA Victor), and they vied for attention last week at the Village Vanguard.
Long Roads (Harry Belafonte)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
You won’t find Harry Belafonte’s name on the cover of the handsome, oversized box that houses The Long Road to Freedom, or on the title page of the 140-page book that accompanies its five CDs. Take that as an example of the modesty and restraint that led him to create this astonishing treasure in the first place. In the late 1950s, when he first proposed documenting a history of African American music from the early days of slavery to the close of the 19th century, only Elvis Presley rivaled Belafonte as RCA’s top seller. The company president, George Marek, a genuinely musical executive (they existed in those days) who later wrote several accomplished biographies, committed the label to the project. Many recording sessions took place, beginning in 1961 and continuing over the next decade. Yet after Marek died, the work died as well, abandoned and apparently forgotten for nearly 30 years. Its belated release now by the RCA/BMG affiliate Buddha Records is a major event, perhaps the most important of several major releases in the fall of 2001, for it will influence the way we hear, understand, and write about African American music.
The Microtonal Man (Joe Maneri)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
One of the infrequent pleasures of ethnic weddings and bar or bat mitzvahs in the era before DJs began contributing to musical unemployment was the chance encounter with jazz players working anonymously in the bands. I can recall coming across sidemen once associated with Fats Navarro, Woody Herman, Thad and Mel, and Cecil Taylor. Musicians call those gigs socials, and often play them for the same reason many critics write liner notes and press releases: It’s a living. As a rule, they bring their jazz expertise to the gig and take little if anything away. Joe Maneri suspended that rule. The saxophonist and clarinetist, who celebrated his 75th birthday with a full house at Tonic on February 9, took to heart the pitch variations in Greek, Israeli, Middle Eastern, and other party musics he mastered in the line of duty, noting their affinity with scalar particularities in the music of West Africa and India as well as jazz, and made his way into the alternate universe of microtonality.
Singing Cool and Hot (Cassandra Wilson / Dee Dee Bridgewater)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Can it be that little more than a decade ago, jazz singing was widely written off as a dead art? No one had come along to take the stages abandoned by Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, and Carmen McRae, though Betty Carter and Abbey Lincoln had survived the wilderness years to reassert their own claims as supreme individualists in an uncrowded field. They in turn influenced many young singers, which was a great relief from that strange period in the ‘70s when all black woman singers tried to sound like Aretha and all white woman singers tried to sound like Annie Ross—a trite landscape of unholy melisma and runaway hipsterism. Yet the most gifted singer of the boomer generation, who might have changed all that, Dee Dee Bridgewater, relocated to Paris after a fleeting try at disco and was rarely heard here while the most promising singer of the next generation, Cassandra Wilson, was mired in M-Base science fiction and seemed to consider it a matter of artistic integrity not to connect with her audience.
Our Chopin (Cecil Taylor)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Some people decry Cecil Taylor as a composer because he rarely revisits pieces and doesn’t provide song-form themes for others to play, just as some people decry Thelonious Monk as a composer because he was constantly revisiting pieces and worked almost exclusively with song-form themes that are played to distraction. Consistency is the hobgoblin of jazzcrit. What can be said with certainty is that Taylor, like Monk, has invented his own compositional method and his own approach to the keyboard and that they are indivisible. In the 45 years since he recorded Jazz Advance, he has shaped an original vocabulary, a thesaurus of leaps, runs, skitters, eruptions, pauses, rhythms, melodies, thrusts, and counterthrusts. In this, he is nothing unique, merely a member in a very exclusive club of self-invented pianist-composers. You want Chopin melodies, there’s only one place to go. Same with Taylor, though melody probably isn’t what you’re seeking from him. I have no interest in whether Taylor’s music will survive the next century as handsomely as Chopin’s did the last, but I do suggest that in the realm of uncontained piano ecstasy, he is the modern analogue— fittingly, one more likely to nuke romance than dwell upon it. Consequently, his every appearance is a gift, especially those rare American forays into concert halls, where the formality virtually guarantees as much attention to solo piano as to whatever unit he is leading. His February 28 performance at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, presented by the World Music Institute and Thomas Buckner, was typical, which is to say stunning. After only a minute or so of off-stage guttural yowls and, I think, maracas, he hastened (black skullcap and pants; white, black, and gold blouse; rainbow socks) to the keyboard and began a characteristic buildup with blocked chords—some consonant, others dissonant, but all richly foursquare and spelled by sly rests. “Measurement of sound is its silences,” he wrote a long time ago.
Postwar Jazz: An Arbitrary Roadmap (1945–2001)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The initial idea was to create an overview of jazz (and jazz-related) records from 1900 to 2001, by choosing one work to represent each year. After several weeks of revelatory listening to music from the dark ages— rags, marches, cakewalks, blues, minstrel and music hall turns—in an attempt to find appropriate tracks for 1900 to 1920, I realized that the project would have to be abbreviated. I had bit off more than I could chew or the Village Voice could accommodate. This particular fit of madness has now passed, and I don’t expect to fill in the missing years any time soon. Even with the narrower scope of 1945 to 2001, I spent nearly five months groping for solutions to the labyrinth I was intent on building; the writing was, relatively, a snap as compared to the process of selecting representative recordings, given my self-imposed rules, about which more anon. I wanted, for my own illumination, to posit a jazz map. By opting for one track (always a track, never an album, though albums on which the tracks are found are noted at the end of each entry) per year, I hoped to offer a purview that would balance achievement and innovation. Given my rules, however, I soon realized that nothing remotely like objectivity studio. Nash, the soul of sideman dependability, presented this memorable quintet in at least one New York concert, but it survives as a recorded feat of genre-defying eclecticism—a bright idea, brightly done. Debussy’s clarinet exercise is augmented by Nash’s resourceful voicing and an instrumentation that cannot help evoking tangents.
Where’s Waldo? (JVC 2002)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
A brief July 9 press release about the flagship event that ran from June 16 to June 29 begins with an announcement from George Wein (“CEO of Festival Productions, Inc.”): “The 2002 JVC Jazz Festival–New York was the most successful JVC festival ever held in New York.” It was also the least jazz-like. JVC, whether good or ill or, per usual, in between, does not always reflect what is actually going on in the jazz world. This year it did—not musically, but culturally and economically as concerns what remains of jazz central in these United States. Fading away, like Uncle Tom in an episode excised from Duke Ellington’s Jump for Joy, Uncle Jazz lies on his deathbed while producers and CEO’s frantically administer adrenalin to keep him alive. It isn’t necessarily his music they hope to preserve, but his name, a valuable brand on seven continents. Never in my experience has JVC presented so little jazz, or so few thematic and imaginative concerts. Even re-creations, with which we are admittedly surfeited, vanished from the bill. There was nothing novel, original, or newsworthy. A cursory look at the events scheduled for The Hague, Montreal, and other international jazz sites reveals the singularity of New York’s drought. Of eight concerts presented at Carnegie Hall, which according to a press release had a 90 percent ticket sale (that’s the source of the “most successful” claim), only half were undeniably jazz. Of the others, Joao Gilberto and Eddie Palmieri remain tangential, though they have now become deservedly admired JVC traditions; make the audience beg and beg and beg for the encores? After one belated bow, DeJohnette walked to the drums only to learn that there had not yet been enough begging and then had to walk off stage; after the next bow, Peacock made the same mistake. OK, it’s a small price. Jarrett and company, at least, know what they’re doing. I’m not sure about JVC. If this year’s financial success breeds another year with as little resourcefulness, as little jazz, there won’t be much point in covering it. We will already have heard almost all of it worth hearing—year round, in the clubs.
At the Summit (Sonny Rollins)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
“Give yourself a gift,” Marcus Aurelius advised, “the present moment.” Aldous Huxley populated his island paradise Pala with parrots that fly around squawking, “Here and now, boys, here and now!” All the wise men agree: The key to a healthy life is alertness—a refusal to smother the brief candle with ruminations or apprehensions, an avowal to wake up and keep waking up. In art, the existential dilemma translates into devotion to the elusive light of inspiration, a challenge enacted nowhere with greater clarity and urgency than in jazz—where the composer composes in the arena, without benefit of eraser, white-out, tape dubs, or retakes—and by nobody with a more exhilarating sense of adventure than jazz’s finest living practitioner, Sonny Rollins. It was a remarkable week: Verizon colluded with the Jazz Standard to present five solo piano recitals; Jazz Alliance International jammed the same room with a dozen or so trumpeters in tribute to Fats Navarro, and Clark Terry proved it’s what you play and not how much that wins the day; Tony Bennett sang his heart out for an hour and a half at Carnegie Hall (also for Verizon); Lincoln Center remembered Art Blakey; and Ted Nash reconvened Odeon. But when Rollins returns to town, after an all too typical two-year absence, time must have a stop; the present moment is suddenly lit in boldface italics, and after hanging on every measure for 95 minutes, one is disinclined to get the clock rolling again, even though it would trigger a dreamy post mortem on the immediate past. Because his records are sometimes rush-jobs proffering material that hasn’t yet been (in his words) road-tested, and because spontaneity is his shield against cliché and ennui, a Rollins concert is a gift, and when he plays as well as he did at B. B. King’s Blues Club and Grill on September 21, a miracle, too.
Purely Piano (Ethan Iverson / Vijay Iyer / Jason Moran)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Mid-September’s 2002 Verizon Music Festival—note the absence of the J-word—offered little to the J-audience beyond McCoy Tyner and Tony Bennett, at least in the big halls. But a week of solo piano recitals at the Jazz Standard filled me with more optimism about the J-future than anything else this year. Though dramatically different from each other, three pianists born in the ‘70s indicated a united front in their unconventional approaches, filtering of influences, and involvement with the music of their time. Each has devised an emphatic solo style—a purely pianistic music, as opposed to trio music without the trio. Several times I wondered whether Ethan Iverson, Vijay Iyer, and Jason Moran were playing jazz at all, but I never really cared. This was no less true of 41-year-old Matthew Shipp, whom I will catch up with when Equilibrium is released in January. I assume it was also true of 47-year-old Fred Hersch (whom I missed), knowing his intermingling of jazz and classical techniques. But I doubt that Hersch accessed one ingredient connecting the other four, especially in their new or imminent albums: hip-hop beats.
Point Counter Point (Dave Holland)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Musical reductions are commonplace, expansions less so. Nineteenthcentury virtuosos displayed their wares in keyboard adaptations of symphonies; Gershwin later created a player-piano version of his rhapsody. Occasionally, a Stokowski would reverse the process and make a chamber work symphonic. But either way the result tended to generate the dubious respect accorded gimmicks. In jazz, reduction and expansion seem more fluid, but only when the composer of the original is responsible. We don’t give a second thought to Ellington taking a piece created for a small group, enlarging it for the big band (or vice versa), and additionally reworking it as a piano solo, piano-bass duet, or any other configuration that came to hand. But we can live without an augmented version of, say, the Miles Davis Nonet; many shuddered at the very notion of orchestrating A Love Supreme. Would Hal Overton’s elaborations of Monk have been as readily countenanced if Monk had not been his pianist? Of course, adaptations of noted jazz solos by bands or vo-before they charge down the hillside. What Goes Around was recorded in January 2001, and a second volume is already in the works. On the evidence of the new music heard at Birdland—including the impressionistic ballad, “A Rio” (impressive Mark Gross), and the contrapuntal fanfares and astonishing Holland display of “Happy Jammy” (the last movement from his “Monterey Suite”)—this looks like the start of something big.
Jazzman of the Year: 2002 (Clark Terry)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Dear CT, It’s that time of year again—holidays, wrap-ups, and your birthday, number 82 on December 14, which undoubtedly seems more incredible to observers like me than to you, living with courage and style, and still playing with a gleaming ingenuity that spits in the eye of mortal ailments. I believe in choosing one’s own savior, and this year, like it or not, I choose you. You inspire me, emboldening me with the desire to embrace and hear music anew. Since your phoenix-like recovery from serial ills—one of the more astonishing and upbeat stories of the year— I’ve found myself thinking a lot about what you have meant and continue to mean to jazz. To be honest, last winter I feared you had finally put the flugelhorn away for good. The daughter of your great friend and mighty trumpet player Jimmy Maxwell had called to say she had heard you were in troubled health and was worried. You may not know that she and I were in college together. In fact, the first time I caught you live was when the Clark Terry–Bob Brookmeyer Quintet, or a version thereof, came to Grinnell, Iowa, during our freshman year. Anne later told me that until that evening (given the excited conversation that anticipated and followed it), she didn’t realize that her father was famous or that you are one of the jazz gods. Of course, your casually infallible technique and comic esprit sometimes suggest that you don’t know it either—but then true modesty is often inherent in true wit. I’ve never forgotten a moment that occurred after the concert, when the musicians were packing up. You and Bob had brought a pickup trio from Chicago, and they did their best. Right before leaving the stage, you walked over to the pianist, shook his hand with a wide smile, and said, “Don’t think it hasn’t been a gas just because it hasn’t.”
Satchuated (Louis Armstrong)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Years ago, watching a clip of bungee jumpers, I thought, It’s just like writing a biography—the long drop into the abyss, then the sudden jerk of salvation. Later I realized that was wishful thinking. There is no jerk, except yourself, plunging into the depthless mire of research, until finally you are obliged to concede, “Hold, enough!” However many bones you unearth, you know there are more, buried a little deeper. And when the boneyard is truly bare, bones already baking in the sun will be endlessly re-excavated. Otherwise there wouldn’t be hundreds of biographies of Alexander, Napoleon, and Lincoln, each presuming to varnish or grind into dust its predecessors. I have never attempted a full-dress biography of Louis Armstrong, but I have written a short life and several essays, enough to feel some confidence in understanding him, his genius, and his times. Yet seconds after curator Michael Cogswell ushered me into the Louis Armstrong House & Archives for a recent visit, I felt I was plunging down the rabbit hole.
Prologue
Authors: Rarick Ethan 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Margret Reed spread out a buffalo robe for her children and then covered them with a shawl. It was snowing—’’great feathery flakes,’’ as one of the youngsters remembered—so every few moments Reed would rouse herself and shake the accumulation from their makeshift bedding, lest she and the children be buried alive in a muffling layer of white.
Vexatiously Slow
Authors: Rarick Ethan 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The pace could drive a man mad. The column creaked along at two miles an hour. Men could walk faster. They might stop by the trail to write a letter or butcher a fresh kill, and then an hour or two later they would rise and pocket their pencils or their hunting knives and, with a bit of brisk walking, catch the ponderously rolling wagons. Progress, one man said, was ‘‘vexatiously slow.’’ ‘‘Covered wagons’’ became the symbol of the journey, but in fact the rigs used by the emigrants were typically small and simple, not the huge Conestoga freight wagons of the movies. The beds were four or five feet wide and perhaps twice as long, a size that allowed them to maneuver through the canyons and forests and mountain passes the emigrants would eventually face. The running gear was simple: wooden axles and wheels, although strips of iron were wrapped around the wheels to serve as tires. There were no brakes. Going downhill, a wheel or two would be locked with a chain to take off some speed, or a felled tree would be dragged behind, the deadweight serving as a kind of land anchor. Typically, there was no seat for the ‘‘driver.’’ Instead, he walked along beside the draft animals, controlling them with nothing but a whip and voice commands.
A Low Situation
Authors: Rarick Ethan 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Four days after the Forlorn Hope walked away from the lake cabins, Milt Elliott appeared out of the snow like a specter from a wintry hell. More than a week had passed since Elliott and Noah James, another teamster, set off for the Alder Creek camp. A blizzard kicked up the day they left and blew for five straight days, so the logical conclusion was that they were dead. ‘‘Thinks they got lost in the snow,’’ Patrick Breen wrote in his diary.
Nature and Culture
Authors: Novak Barbara 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In this richly illustrated volume, featuring more than fifty black-and-white illustrations and a beautiful eight-page color insert, Barbara Novak describes how for fifty extraordinary years, American society drew from the idea of Nature its most cherished ideals. Between 1825 and 1875, all kinds of Americans--artists, writers, scientists, as well as everyday citizens--believed that God in Nature could resolve human contradictions, and that nature itself confirmed the American destiny. Using diaries and letters of the artists as well as quotes from literary texts, journals, and periodicals, Novak illuminates the range of ideas projected onto the American landscape by painters such as Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, Asher B. Durand, Fitz H. Lane, and Martin J. Heade, and writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Frederich Wilhelm von Schelling. Now with a new preface, this spectacular volume captures a vast cultural panorama. It beautifully demonstrates how the idea of nature served, not only as a vehicle for artistic creation, but as its ideal form. “An impressive achievement.” --Barbara Rose, The New York Times Book Review “An admirable blend of ambition, elan, and hard research. Not just an art book, it bears on some of the deepest fantasies of American culture as a whole.” --Robert Hughes, Time Magazine.
Das Rheingold
Authors: Millington Barry 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Vorabend (preliminary evening) of Der Ring des Nibelungen, in four scenes, set to Wagner’s own libretto; first performed in Munich, at the Königliches Hof-und Nationaltheater, on 22 September 1869. The first performance as part of the Ring cycle, was at Bayreuth’s Festspielhaus, on 13 August 1876. The first Wotan was August Kindermann; Fricka was sung by Sophie Stehle. Loge was Heinrich Vogl; Froh, Franz Nachbauer; Mime, Max Schlosser; and Fafner, Kaspar Bausewein. For the 1876 cast, see Der Ring des Nibelungen.
Staging Wagner from 1876 to the Present Day
Authors: Millington Barry 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The history of the staging of Wagner’s operas reflects a contradiction inherent in the works themselves. The aesthetic tradition to which Wagner considered himself the heir was that of Goethe and Schiller, in which art was elevated above the mundane, sordid realities of everyday life. Yet Wagner’s works, with their insistent social critiques and dissolving of regular metrical patterns into freely expressive ‘musical prose ‘, themselves exemplify the new spirit of realism, which came to pervade all branches of the arts in the 19th century. The characteristic deployment by Wagner of myths and symbols is the perfect embodiment of that contradiction: underlying social realities are thereby objectified in the sphere of fantasy. In the Ring, for example, we are presented, at the surface level of plot, with gods, dragons, and sleeping beauties. It does not require exceptional perspicacity to realize that such types are merely the dramaturgical representations of the plutocrats, labourers, and other products of the bourgeois capitalist society so detested by Wagner.