For my birthday weekend, I gave myself a present and an assignment – review the 2023 Newport Jazz Festival. Here’s the result, at DownBeat Magazine. The nation’s oldest jazz festival was never only about jazz. This year’s edition presented the full gamut of jazz and “jazz-adjacent” music, including big personalities like Samara Joy, Jon Batiste, and Herbie Hancock.
Filed under Bill Charlap, Bob Dorough, Branford Marsalis, Camille Thurman, Charles McPherson, Christian McBride, Derrick Hodge, Diana Krall, George Wein, Herbie Hancock, Jon Batiste, Kenny Washington, Kurt Elling, Larry Goldings, Lionel Loueke, Louis Armstrong, Marquis Hill, Newport Jazz Festival, Quincy Jones, Ray Charles
For Charles Mingus’s centennial, DownBeat asked me to do a deep dive on the composer, bassist and singular American cultural figure. In this package of three pieces, I explore the place Mingus occupies in the popular imagination, by all accounts well-deserved, as a force of nature, an iconoclastic truth-teller, a volatile, emotional man with a violent streak. But his many friends and fellow musicians, people who knew and loved him, remember a different side: the spiritual seeker, poet, esthete and philosopher; the bandleader who took pains to treat his musicians fairly; and, above all, the artist he was right down to his bone marrow. Among the artists and critics I interviewed: Christian McBride, Charles McPherson, biographer Brian Priestley, and Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Vincent Gardner, who served as musical director for JALC’s Mingus centennial tribute. The main article is here. A sidebar on the making of “Epitaph,” Mingus’s magnum opus, is here. Another piece about new Mingus recordings and tributes is here.
Allen Morrison - Music Journalist, Jazz Pianist, Songwriter, Lecturer - Long Island, NY 
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