The Singing Epidemic
All of a sudden everybody wants to be a jazz singer—and a few are actually good at it… More »
"If I go to a concert and I'm supposed to be reviewing it, and I'm taking
notes, I sometimes wind up jotting down as much about the audience as I do
about the performers," Francis Davis recently told The Atlantic in an
online interview. "I'm interested in what music means to people: what does it
signify to them?" A contributing editor to The Atlantic since 1992, Davis's interest in the
social and intellectual significance of jazz, musical theater, pop, and blues
has brought a unique depth to his career as a music critic and historian.
Davis's writing career began to take form in the scripts he wrote for a Philadelphia public-radio show (which he also produced and hosted) that specialized in playing out-of-print jazz. When his scripts evolved into more sophisticated jazz criticism, he started submitting them for publication and became a staff writer at a small New Jersey newspaper. Since his first article for The Atlantic, "The Loss of Count Basie" (August 1984), he has authored seven books: In the Moment (1986), Outcats (1990), The History of the Blues: The Roots, the Music, the People From Charley Patton to Robert Cray (1995), Bebop and Nothingness: Jazz and Pop at the End of the Century (1996), Like Young (2001), Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael (2002), and Jazz and Its Discontents: A Francis Davis Reader (2004)
Davis writes for a variety of publications, including The Village Voice, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Stereo Review. A 1994 Pew Fellow in the Arts, he teaches a course in jazz, blues, and folklore at the University of Pennsylvania and is currently working on a biography of John Coltrane and a history of jazz.
All of a sudden everybody wants to be a jazz singer—and a few are actually good at it… More »
The pianist Matthew Shipp is the star of the latter-day free-jazz scene—the only scene in jazz right now with younger faces in the audience… More »
Even though the saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter never went away, his two recent albums are being hailed as a major comeback… More »
Johnny Cash was a Christian who didn't cast stones, a patriot who wasn't a bully… More »
Directors of today's war movies, with their insistence on graphic bloodletting and happy endings, should look at the original World War II movies, which were subtly subversive… More »
Bill Frisell draws from a wide spectrum of music identified with the American experience&mdashand country music is a persistent echo.… More »
Despite seeing on television news what used to be confined to action movies, audiences have been flocking to them, perhaps eager for the illusion of control they offer… More »
The indefatigable Dizzy Gillespie symbolizes jazz to audiences and musicians alike… More »
A jazzman breaks all the boundaries.… More »
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