Kurt Rosenwinkel doesn't raise much of a ruckus. In fact, the last ruckus I remember him raising was a Facebook plea with musicians to stop raising ruckuses and get on with their music.Rosenwinkel's forty-two years old. He's been making music for a few years now. He's weathered all the trends and all the fads well, mainly by not getting involved in any of them. Instead, … [Read more...]
Nicholas Payton Is Chillin’ On Our Nutz: How One Musician Misrepresented the Facts And Bullied the Jazz Narrative Off Course
Author's Note: This is my last feature-length piece as a staff writer for Nextbop before taking an extended break from jazz.Payton's Black American Music, or BAM, has been a lot on my mind since hitting the jazz internet headlines last year; I got caught in one of Payton's rhetorical catch-22's and wrote several angry posts about him at my blog. This piece, which I … [Read more...]
Relevant to His Time: An Interview with Robert Glasper
Some conversations bore me. Some don’t. But few are interesting enough that I’ll sit hunched over a cell phone for fifteen minutes, holding a microphone up to the earpiece, and then spend half an hour trying to decipher the grainy voice on the tape for just a few pages of type. This one was.We could have just written a review of Robert Glasper’s new album, Black Radio, … [Read more...]