jazz and blogs #15

While Darcy's on hiatus, you'll need some new reading:

Tie a Bow Not a Knot
Guitarist Drummer Harris Eisenstadt. Really interesting reports and videos from his trip to West Africa. [via SoundSlope]

Occasional Jazz Conjectures
The very poetic drummer/writer Tim DuRoche. Cf. his Whitney Balliett rememberance and "The Real Birth Of The Cool", a story set in 1927.

Bloggetta
Guitarist Mike Baggetta

ListenGood
Jazz writer Larry Blumenfeld, currently in New Orleans, which prompts him to say:

New York's thriving jazz scene and the jazz-CD marketplace exist as entertainment industry and aesthetic construct. The only true jazz culture -- where the music evolves while maintaining its social function -- is in New Orleans. Ideas that we love to invest in as abstractions -- the commingling of joy and pain embodied by blues, the spirit of improvisation as applied life's challenges, the relationship between jazz-band organization and images of democracy -- are being lived out in real time through hard times.

Also, good things on Thomas Chapin.

See! Hear!
Ex-longtime Cadence writer Richard Kamins's blog for the Hartford Courant. Lots of local coverage, but see also review of Taylor Ho Bynum's True Events.

USF Jazz
Happenings at the University of South Florida Jazz Department

100 Greatest Jazz Albums