One Final Note reborn

After being shut down for over a year (if the online archives are up-to-date), jazz and improvised music magazine One Final Note is relaunched today.

I contributed a Jason Moran concert review which is slightly different from the one that ran here. I must say that it looks great surrounded by OFN's spiffy design. Plus, I'm in the company of really good, even famous, writers:

Joe Milazzo's review of the Jimmy Lyons Box Set is a detailled look at the music (which can be supplemented with other listener reactions over here).

In an opinion piece, the noted Howard Mandel asks:

What good is abstract, intellectual jazz if it isn't grounded somehow in blues, and rhythm, and soul? How can you dig Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, John Zorn, and similarly brainy players, if you don't sense the passions of Jelly Roll Morton, early Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Mississippi delta guitar demon Robert Johnson, Chicago's Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, pianists Otis Spann and Professor Longhair—not to mention Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Al Green, James Brown and George Clinton?

That's a good question, if you ask me.