Great opinion piece with a couple of pointers to current jazz greats. Good hopes for 2019, 60 years after Kind of Blue/Mingus Ah Um/Time Out…
Read and enjoy!
Thanks for the link - it’s a very nice piece and makes many excellent points. Too put it mildly, I completely agree with just about everything Mr. Chinen says.
I’ve been a jazz fan for well over 40 years, during most of which I’ve also been living in the greater NYC area and attending all kinds of jazz concerts - from Benny Carter playing in Copper Union to David Murray playing the Grateful Dead in Brooklyn. There are always lots of young and very eager fans in the audience (hey I was one those young ones myself years ago) and so to say that now is the golden age does a great disservice to these fans.
At the end of the piece it says that Chinen is the “director of editorial content at WBGO” (a Newark, NJ jazz station) which is disappointing since even a casual listen to WBGO will reveal that more often than not it plays too many dead people - if jazz, as Mr. Chinen writes is alive and well, then why all the focus on dead people?
I think the expression “golden age” is quite anachronistic. Nowadays many people my age (I’m in my late 40s) aren’t particularly fond of (yellow) gold anyway. Too much bling bling is frowned upon by many of us… “All that glisters is not gold. Often have you heard that told.”
Hey! Don’t mock my new speakers… 