Thursday, April 22, 2010

Don't forget: a jazz concert in Spooner tomorrow (Friday) at 7 p.m.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Chicano Jazz



George Lipsitz talks about this song in terms of Chicano culture in the 1960s. This is a cover of "jazz artist Gerald Wilson's tribute to a famous Mexican bullfighter...The song and the band soon became emblematic objects of pride for the Chicano movement in Southern California."

This song is clearly a cross-cultural hybrid. This hybridity is made only more clear when viewed through the group's later work, banda music very located in a different cultural tradition.



This group illustrates the ability jazz has to cross cultural boundaries and reaffirms the music's tradition of subversion and location as an alternative to tradition Anglo-American culture.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Sunday, April 18, 2010

KC Film Fest - Jazz Inspired Films

The Kansas City Film Festival featured several films inspired by jazz this year in their Cinema Jazz Division. Check some of them out at the facebook event:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=114142741945253

Saturday, April 10, 2010

Jazz & Visual Art/Alain Kirili

Here's a Basquiat jazz thing:



On another jazz/visual culture note: one of my dad's good friends, Alain Kirili, is a sculptor, and he does a lot of his work with jazz musicians. Here is a link the Music/Sculpture section of his website: http://www.kirili.com/pagesE/Music.htm

He says that "Jazz and Sculpture are created urgently. Extreme risk is the minimum condition of this creation, the absolute measure of the musician and sculptor... Revival of verticality in my sculpture is linked to statuary, music and dance."

He has musicians over to his studio and they play while he sculpts.







Here's an installation of his in Paris called "Hommage to Charlie Parker"



Here is a video that another artist made of him, and the French at the end is him reading "Charlie Parker's Blues," from Kerouac's Mexico City Blues!

http://www.c-egal.com/openwindow/film/quickkirili.htm

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

A Circle With a Hole in the Middle



This is an image Ornette painted for his album "The Art of the Improvisers."
The performance slated for this Wed has been cancelled.