“Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny,” Frank Zappa announced during the performance of his dizzying, bop-infused composition “Be-Bop Tango (of the Old Jazzmen’s Church)” on the 1974 live album Roxy & Elsewhere. Hopefully, his satirical words about the genre’s decay aren’t proving prophetic nearly a half-century later. The COVID-19 pandemic altered the second half of … [Read more...]
Arts Preview 2017-18: The season in jazz
A pleasant sense of unpredictability has crept into the 2017-2018 South Florida jazz season, as younger, rising singers and players (Gregory Porter, Jon Batiste) and gifted female vocalists and instrumentalists (Tierney Sutton, Anat Cohen) dot the landscape, especially south of Palm Beach County. And even some of the more recurrent acts, like the Marsalis brothers — … [Read more...]