Jazz

Australia's most popular jazz festival will again transform this sleepy hollow for a weekend of great music, laughter and people catching up with old friends. Organisers are hoping the weather will be kind and everyone will have a great time. The festival will not be cancelled on Code Red Day (s) unless there is a fire that is likely to pose a threat to the town.  

It's Monday, which for the record, is my least favorite day of the week for obvious reasons. Anyways, I'm going to step a bit further outside the conventional "box" on this blog and post another amazing track, titled " Burned Sugar ", from an artist I just can't seem to get enough of lately, and that's Sabu Martinez . The sixteen-plus minute funky Latin jazz cut is the title track to Martinez's three song album Burned Sugar: The Swedish Radio Recordings 1973 , released in 2008 by the Swedish label Mellotronen .  

A colourful piece of Auckland's social history will soon be privately owned, as the heart of Auckland's early jazz and big-band scene is sold for the first time. The Orange Hall, or the "Orange", on Newton Rd, established itself as a popular dance hall before television and other forms of entertainment captured Aucklanders' attention. It was immortalised in the 1958 Peter Cape song Down the Hall on Saturday Night in the line, "We're as slick as the Orange in Auckland".  

There will be many tributes to Sir John Dankworth over the next few days and weeks and although such things shouldn't be judged competitively, it's hard to imagine a homage more movingly expressed than the one Julian Arguelles played here. The saxophonist is close to the Dankworth family, as a member of Alec Dankworth's trio and Spanish Accents group, and his reading of Dedicated To You conveyed a depth of feeling that was clearly personal. It was beautifully done, with Arguelles creating a poignant, ...  

The English band Empirical's new album, Out 'n' In, is dedicated to the late jazz artist Eric Dolphy, a patron saint of the 1960s avant-garde. Like his colleagues Charles Mingus and John Coltrane, Dolphy could blur the lines between traditional and exploratory jazz. In hipster parlance, he played both 'inside' and 'outside.'  

The "To Haiti With Hope" benefit concert will take place at 8 p.m. this Friday at St. Peter's Episcopal Church, 137 N. Division St. Read press release below: A diverse group of Peekskill residents are leveraging the city's reputation as the cultural and dining hub of the region to provide much needed relief to the people of Haiti – devastated by one of the worst natural disasters to ever hit the western hemisphere. To Haiti with Hope is a collaborative effort of local artists, community leaders, ...  

Eugene Marlow, who recently covered the Bobby Sanabria Kenya concert for jazz.com, offers his account below of Dave Douglas's Friday night performance at New York's Jazz Standard. Here our estimable critic uncovers answers to new questions. Such as . . .  

Stuart Nicholson reports below on a festival that breaks all of the rules. It presents Jason Moran and John Zorn, yet carefully avoids the word "jazz" in its name. It promotes its music on its own radio station, publishes a newspaper, and draws on an audience of campers who flock to a circus-type venue.  

Fifty years ago this month, TV viewers were introduced to Peter Gunn in "The Kill," the first of 114 half-hour episodes of a jazz-drenched weekly crime drama that would run for two seasons on NBC and a third on ABC. When he wasn't battling crime, Mr. Gunn was digging some very cool sounds. In fact, wherever he went, jazzy music seemed to follow.