YouTube. We’re reasonably certain that celebrated twelve-tone composer Milton Babbitt’s music has never accompanied beautiful dancing girls before.  Babbitt turns 93 in May; we hope he sees this video and likes it...! The track is from our latest album For All I Care .  (This is the ...

I will never give up my turntable.  I'm just back from Greenpoint where the Brooklyn Record Riot was held today:  30,000 LPs from all genres; beer; endless jostling from (mostly) aggressive white males seeking vinyl treasures.  It was a total blast. I got twenty five items.
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More YouTube, sorry. Young Ethan's first education about the surreal via television:   Sesame Street.  Stage two: Doctor Who.  Stage three:  The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  Stage four:  Alive from Off Center. I re-watched an old VHS tape of Alive fr...

(LIFE Magazine photo by Ted Thai.) I’ve devotedly read enormous amounts of crime fiction for as long as I can remember.   My discovery of Donald E. Westlake came rather late, sometime in my mid-twenties.  He’s a bit of an acquired taste;  there are no spectacles, no senti...

Wynton Marsalis has had enough writers grill him endlessly about controversial topics.  I treated this interview as an opportunity to learn about his current music, namely his most recent large-scale work, Congo Square,   an unusually successful combination of conventional big band and t...

I wasn't planning to give Wynton a "blindfold test," but he seemed to want to hear these trumpet solos without me telling him anything in advance.  When, after one phrase, he sang along with almost the whole first solo, I knew I was in the right place. Download 01 Blues By Five_m...

When I called Wynton to set up the interview, he told me his address. His apartment number ends in “J.â€�  I choked back a laugh and asked him, “‘J’ as in ‘jazz?’â€� He replied, very quietly, “No doubt.â€� Towards the end of our interview, he said, “ Jazz – for a name that no...

(Art Blakey hired them as soon as they started appearing.) This Encyclopedia article has the conventional wisdom on the movement spearheaded by Wynton Marsalis.  It’s possible that the phase “Young Lionsâ€� is controversial with the practitioners. I don’t recall ever reading the musician...

I mourned the departure of Jeff "Tain" Watts from the Wynton Marsalis bands because I thought it brought out the very best in both players.  All great jazz has tension in it, and here was a showdown between a trumpet player who related fervently to Louis Armstrong and a drummer who e...

( House in Cotton Field by Romare Bearden.) As implied before, the Young Lion sound lurks in TBP - not much, of course, but it is there like some vestigial root.  (We apply just a hint of Young Lion procedures to “Long Distance Runaroundâ€� on our next album with Wendy Lewis.)  It’s ...