In the Blogosphere, an Evolving Movement Brings Life to a Lost Era of Jazz

“Jazz just kind of died,” said the saxophonist Branford Marsalis. “It just kind of went away for a while.” He was looking back to the 1970s, an uncertain era when some jazz musicians turned to rock or funk, and others pushed deeper into heady abstraction. His assessment, conveyed in the final episode of “Jazz,” the influential Ken Burns film, seemed as definitive as a coffin nail.
But over the last six months, a far-flung contingent of musicians and aficionados has made an effort to upend that prevailing notion, armed with stacks of vinyl, high-speed Internet and a shared conviction that things back then were really far from moribund. Along the way, they touched off the year’s most animated public discourse on jazz, a democratic exchange that culminated last weekend in the debut of behearer.com, an interactive database devoted to the music’s most conflicted period.

.....continue article at nytimes.com

By NATE CHINEN - nytimes.com


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