JazzTimes Magazine September 2021 Retour à l'édition précédente

SAVING JAZZ HOMES
A few places where the legends of 20th-century jazz once lived have had the good fortune to be preserved for posterity by forward-thinking benefactors. Many more haven’t, and others are somewhere in the middle. Morgan Enos examines a sampling of the most noteworthy cases, from Louis Armstrong’s house to Cecil Taylor’s.

COLTRANE'S ASCENSION
On June 28, 1965, John Coltrane and 10 colleagues went to Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Englewood, N.J., and recorded an album that would launch a new musical era—and divide listeners for decades. Colin Fleming looks back at the making of Ascension and the continuing significance of its undimmed power to shock.

THE U.S. VS. BILLIE HOLIDAY
Jazz biopics are notoriously unreliable when it comes to factuality, but Lee Daniels’ recent film on Billie Holiday took that several steps further than normal. As Lewis Porter shows, despite what the movie claims, there was no U.S. government conspiracy to suppress the landmark song “Strange Fruit”—and that’s just the biggest thing they got wrong.