SKNAIL is the pseudonym of visionary Swiss composer-producer Blaise Caillet, known for startlingly original innovations in jazz, including electronic experimentation, found sounds, and stirring, poetic lyrics from engaging lead singer Nya. Their first album, Glitch Jazz, was released in 2013 … Continue reading The SKNAIL Interview
Gregor’s Bed Wanda Waterman The Voice Magazine, Volume 22 Issue 37 2014-09-19 “Wrapped in a battered sheepskin jacket and peering though Coke-bottle-thick eyeglasses, Sartre lectured up and down the East Coast and was the subject of adoring articles in New York newspapers and magazines. ’One is free to act,’ he told reporters, ’but one must act to be free.’ Beboppers like Dizzy Gillespie and pianist Thelonious Monk picked up on him, appropriating the Left Bank café-intellectual style—the black beret, the horn-rimmed glasses, the wee goatee.” – Lewis MacAdams What is the “Avant-garde,” Really? (continued from here) The symbiosis was a … Continue reading The Fruitful Marriage of American Jazz and the Avant-garde, Part II
by Wanda Waterman The Voice Magazine, Volume 22 Issue 35 2014-09-05 “Late one evening, outside the Open Door in Greenwich Village, [Charlie] Parker, shuffling along in a pair of old carpet slippers, bumped into Jackie McLean. . . ’I want you to kick me in the ass, Jackie McLean, for letting me get myself in this position,’ Bird commanded, bending over … A few days later Parker borrowed McLean’s sax to make an out-of-town gig, a sax McLean had himself borrowed from a friend; Parker pawned it.” – from Birth of the Cool: Beat, Bebop, and the American Avant Garde, … Continue reading The Fruitful Marriage of American Jazz and the Avante Garde, Part I
The Mindful Bard 