By on February 22, 2013 at 9:34 AM
Lately my jazz radius has undergone radical shrinkage. There was a time when I considered it just a weekend lark to drive four, five, six hundred miles or more across the Midwest just to catch a performance by one of my favorite artists. This wasn’t just idle concert hopping. Watching Herbie Hancock or McCoy Tyner pound the keys seemed more like witnessing history.
Of late, I haven’t been doing that very often. That’s probably due in equal parts to advancing years, soaring gasoline prices and easier access to performances on Internet and TV.
But not even in the heyday of my jones for jazz would I have imagined myself driving all the way to Istanbul.
AP FILE PHOTO
I’m transfixed by news of an upcoming concert there. Scheduled for the end of April, it features a who’s who of jazz performers -- Herbie Hancock, Robert Glasper, Wayne Shorter, George Duke, Al Jarreau, John McLaughlin, Jimmy Heath and more. They will perform at a historic church, whose roots go back to the 4th century A.D.
Some of this is the doing of the United Nations. As it happens, pianist Hancock is a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador and Turkey is the host country of the UN-sanctioned second annual International Jazz Day.
But it also reflects the development of a long-standing relationship between Turkey and jazz.
In a way, it was a new take on the classic boy-meets-girl formula of movies of yore. Country meets jazz. Country falls in love with jazz. Country brings jazz home to meet the family. Country and jazz live happily ever after.
Trace this back to the 1930s and ‘40s, when two sons of Turkish Ambassador Mehmet Munir Ertegun would go jazz hunting, scouring the black neighborhoods of Washington, D.C., for so-called “race” records not available anywhere else.
Read more: http://www.mlive.com/opinion/muskegon/index.ssf/2013/02/clayton_hardiman_81.html
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