Good music is spiritual. Good music is undirected. It’s felt and received. It’s almost natural. Musicians who are on that tip, they make music because they like to connect to the f***ing ether. | | | | Makaya McCraven at the North Sea Jazz Festival in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, July 7, 2017.
(Peter Van Breukelen/Redferns/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “Good music is spiritual. Good music is undirected. It’s felt and received. It’s almost natural. Musicians who are on that tip, they make music because they like to connect to the f***ing ether.”
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| | rantnrave:// "Perils," the late great NEW YORK TIMES music critic ROBERT PALMER wrote 35 years ago, await every new generation of jazz young lions who find themselves "mediating between the jazz tradition and the latest innovations." It's a negotiation they frequently lose, according to Palmer, the "eternal verities of jazz" eventually clamping down on them like a well-placed trap. Palmer had two particular young lion generations in mind, the one featuring WAYNE SHORTER in the 1950s and '60s and the one from which WYNTON MARSALIS emerged in the 1980s. Some things never change—do enough googling and you can find an army of players literally called "young lions" in any decade you choose, this one included. But other things do. While Shorter was receiving his KENNEDY CENTER HONOR Sunday night, I had the great privilege of being a couple hundred miles north, in NEW YORK's (LE) POISSON ROUGE, to witness a once-in-a-lifetime assemblage of 11 players, led by drummer MAKAYA MCCRAVEN, whose astonishing new album, UNIVERSAL BEINGS, they were celebrating. The eternal verities of improvisational jazz very much do inform the playing of McCraven, vibraphonist JOEL ROSS, saxophonists SHABAKA HUTCHINGS and NUBYA GARCIA and all their stagemates, but so do the verities of hip-hop, dance music and other modern songforms. And they're not mediating all that stuff so much as they're living and breathing and bending and reshaping it. They're in command of the conversation—and of a persistent blitzkrieg of grooves. The New York club was sold out and packed wall-to-wall with a young audience for whom I suspect the difference between these particular improvised saxophone, vibes, harp and electric-guitar solos and, say, a good house-music DJ is academic at best. Just a different amazing flavor of groove. The night's sponsor, RED BULL, served them cans of its drinks on the way out. Sonic and cultural differences are ever-collapsing, and McCraven is a young lion in the best, lower-case sense of the term, mediating his own impulses every time he changes the groove, taking his players and his audience exactly where he wants to, and offering them the next move... But here's some mediating between jazz tradition and the latest innovations: The funk-friendly jam band GALACTIC has bought New Orleans institution TIPITINA's... TENCENT will IPO this year after all, reportedly next week... The GRAMMY nomination announcements have been moved from Wednesday—a national day of mourning for PRESIDENT GEORGE H.W. BUSH—to Friday... Movies on the docket: KAMASI WASHINGTON will screen a short film based on album HEAVEN AND EARTH at SUNDANCE in January. The MÖTLEY CRÜE autobiography THE DIRT has been turned into a biopic that will premiere on NETFLIX next spring. UNIVERSAL PICTURES is developing a film based on PRINCE's songs that—I am not making this up—the studio does not want to be another PURPLE RAIN but does want to be another MAMMA MIA. I repeat, I did not make that up... THE CHER SHOW opened on BROADWAY Monday night. The reviews were not good. Someone in the audience was on his cellphone... Malibu's high-power, low-key ONE LOVE benefit... RIP JODY WILLIAMS and CARSTEN OTTERBACH. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | Music Business Worldwide |
| On November 2, 2018, a song commissioned by United Airlines, titled "Rhapsody in Blue (United Airlines Rhapsody Remastered)," appeared in Cherie Hu's Release Radar playlist. She has some thoughts, and concerns, on how lines are becoming blurred over what constitutes an "ad" on Spotify et al. | | |
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| | | | | | With Nubya Garcia, Ashley Henry and Daniel Casimir. From "Universal Beings," out now on International Anthem. |
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