Joys and Concerns #6
With DoYeon Kim and Brandon Seabrook; revised posts; great writing on Substack.
This Monday, April 21st, I’m playing at Ibeam in Brooklyn. Joining me is DoYeon Kim on gayageum, a traditional Korean instrument, not so far from our zither or hammered dulcimer, and guitarist Brandon Seabrook. It’s an exciting and unconventional combination— I’m really at the edge of what I know with this group.
Early next month, on Sunday May 4th, I’ll be playing a brief solo set as part of an ambitious, night-long recording and performance centered around multi-instrumentalists Dana Lyn, Matt Glassmeyer, and Brian Drye. Unlike most Ibeam shows, this is a ticketed event. Grab yours right away, as it’s likely to sell out.
Ibeam is a home for the music, a musician-run cooperative where special things happen. We’re very fortunate to have Ibeam.
On the internet, Substack has been a wonderful home for Chronicles. I really enjoy this platform. Each essay is revised and often sweated over, but there’s always room for improvement, so here’s a few improved recent and older posts. No major changes, just better style, clarity, and flow:
It’s my hope that the writing here is engaging and fun, and that Chronicles will be a resource, maybe even a reference work with good, clear info, just like all my favorite music writing. None of it’s possible without your support, for which I am so grateful.
Recently on Substack:
Lee Mergner, a great writer who I followed at JazzTimes, is now on Substack. Welcome Mr. Mergner! Here’s a great essay about his experience booking groups at college in 1974, so engaging and relaxed that when I finished I thought “You know, maybe I should start a jazz festival.” Dangerous ideas.
The great saxophonist, arranger, bandleader, educator, and scholar Loren Schoenberg is newly here on Substack. Here’s a link to his post with (silent) film from the recording session that gave us Dizzy Gillespie’s Sonny Side Up (Verve, recorded December 1957). It’s just 3 minutes, no sound, but a wealth of info and impressions are given from the beautiful moving pictures of Sonny Stitt, Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie, and the rhythm section of drummer Charli Persip, pianist Ray Bryant (who I don’t see in the film; am I missing something?) and bassist Tommy Bryant. We even get the back of producer Norman Granz’s head in a few shots. Gillespie is clearly in charge, and Stitt and Rollins are friendly, collegial, and worthy adversaries. You can’t miss the enormous inner strength and deep dignity of these musicians.
Nate Chinen writes expansively of his friend and colleague Francis Davis, one of our most important jazz writers, on the occasion of his passing. Context is everything: I especially appreciated Chinen’s comments on what he learned from Davis, how he differed from him, and on the critical milieu from which Davis emerged.
Further on music writers: Lewis Porter’s fascinating look at the family tree of jazz writer Dan Morgenstern takes in the rise of the nation state in 18th century Europe, both World Wars, and the NYC in the Fifties. The roots of jazz music are deep and multifarious; the roots of the jazz community is the story of humanity.
Finally, here’s political journalist and fiction author Ross Barkan, with infectious conviction and fervor, with a great piece on what it’s all about:
What is needed is a muscular humanities—a humanities that advocates for itself in an age of turbulence. It needs actual champions, not quislings and aimless technocrats. For several decades, practitioners of the humanities have been on the defensive or attempted, in ham-fisted ways, to remain on the playing field of advanced technology, hoping iPads in the classroom or digital textual analysis can save them. They do not know how to strongly argue for reading and writing. Absent a raison d’être, they can’t even make the utilitarian case for what they do.
There is one to make: the acts of reading and writing themselves, which are still demanded in the humanities, are the antidote to the enshittification of the human being. It’s not just technology that curdles: it’s us. Consider what you are after hours of streaming and scrolling, after you’ve done the work of farming out thinking to the reams of shallow, inexhaustible content. Consider what you are when you’ve stopped reading books, learning languages, or understanding history. The humanities are the last bulwark against the erosion of the inner life. A world where the humanities barely exist and aren’t taken seriously is one of decadence and spiritual exhaustion.
Right on Ross! Let any gathering of musicians and music lovers, of any size, in the world or on the internet, be our muscular response to the chaos of the United States in 2025.