Word: jazzing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Lakers at Jazz...
Strings occupy a special, not particularly exalted place in jazz, their use generally signifying either a descent into pop schlock or an ill-advised stab at European art-music "legitimacy." Or, in the worst cases, a truly appalling amalgamation of the two. Charlie Parker's recordings with strings are probably the genre's acme. With their mostly undistinguished arrangements backing the saxophonist as if he were a B-list crooner, the sessions have long been dismissed by jazzbos as being beneath his talents. But he himself was proud of them, and listeners today, accustomed to the burr-in-your...
Fusion and "smooth" jazz certainly haven't burnished strings' reputation. But with the music's more ambitious players looking for ways to broaden jazz's sonic palette after a decade dominated by neotraditionalism, strings are back (the hipster vogue for lounge music probably hasn't hurt). The boomlet began with last year's McCoy Tyner recording of Burt Bacharach tunes--an appropriate enough context--and continues with new albums by Wynton Marsalis and the 29-year-old Puerto Rican-born tenor saxophonist David Sanchez, both on Columbia. Marsalis' record, The Midnight Blues: Standard Time Vol. 5, is his first standards...
Wild Man Blues follows Woody Allen and his seven-member jazz band along their 1996 springtime tour of Europe. If that synopsis sounds like material for a three-minute "Entertainment Tonight" profile, then kudos go out immediately to Kopple, who knows that Allen's career as a jazzman is not a fluff-level footnote to his more obvious engagement in the cinema. Her feature-length documentary has already been faulted by some viewers at Sundance for downplaying Woody-as-Filmmaker, a criticism that misses Wild Man Blues's whole point: Woody Allen considers himself a developing musician who's lucky...
...nervousness about the presence of Kopple's camera is small potatoes next to his genuine stagefright at the prospect in front of him: weeks of one-night-only stops in Paris, Madrid, Turin, and other Old World cities, playing to audiences who know little about primitivist New Orleans jazz (which the band renders with real zest) but who know a great deal about the man on the marquee...