The jazz business has taken some major hits recently, including the fall of the JVC Jazz Festival in New York, and the end of JazzTimes Magazine.

But today, Ben Ratliff at the New York Times reported that George Wein (pictured), the jazz impresario who founded the Newport Jazz Festival, has convinced CareFusion, a medical technology company based in California, to sponsor two major festivals.

The company will sponsor Wein's August, 2009 festival in Newport, Rhode Island, as well as a large New York City jazz festival in June 2010.

Image © Brad Barket / Getty Images

An iconoclast who has earned mainstream recognition in his decades of musical adventurism, Ornette Coleman, in rejecting standard jazz practices, has become one of the most well known figures in jazz history... read more

Image Courtesy of Atlantic Records

Canadian jazz writer Peter Hum's asks drummer Matt Wilson five questions on his Jazzblog for the Ottawa Citizen. Wilson's whimsy is evident in his responses as much as it is in his playing.

Be sure to read my review of Wilson's upcoming release, That's Gonna Leave a Mark.

Photo © Jimmy Katz

That's Gonna Leave a Mark is the upcoming release by drummer Matt Wilson. The Matt Wilson Quartet consists of saxophonists Andrew D'Angelo and Jeff Lederer, and bassist Chris Lightcap, and the group plays with a looseness flexibility that wouldn't have been possible without the advances of the great free jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman.

On the new album, which will be released on July 7th, 2009, the humor and vivacity supplied by each of the members of the Matt Wilson Quartet will impress the avant-gardist, but also draw in the casual listener. read more

Image Courtesy of Palmetto Records

I was very surprised to learn in this June 20th Washington Post article that the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei "favors jazz." This is the same Supreme Leader who consistently opposes the U.S. and the West in general.

Khamenei spurred the closing of music schools across Iran in 1996 with a fatwa that banned music education, claiming that the promotion of music in schools is contrary to the teachings of Islam. A spokesperson in a 2000 interview stated, "It is not permissible to teach beguiling music which is suitable for trifling and immoral gatherings." Immoral gatherings are the reason most people I know got into jazz in the first place!

I wonder if he listens to jazz on an ipod, and who he considers to be less beguiling: Louis Armstrong or Bix Beiderbeck? Maybe he's a fan of late Coltrane.

Image © Majid / Getty Images

On Monday, June 15th, Michelle Obama hosted an afternoon of jazz education at the White House. 150 high school students were invited to take part in demonstrations, clinics, discussions, and to attend a concert featuring trumpeter and jazz pedagogue Wynton Marsalis and clarinetist extraordinaire Paquito D'Rivera.

The event was organized in part by Washington, D.C.'s Duke Ellington Jazz Festival. As Ben Ratliff suggested in his New York Times piece, the afternoon was a symbol of the current administration's dedication to jazz and the arts.

Sean Jones, whose album The Search Within I reviewed here, was another of the clinicians at the White House. The lessons of the afternoon focused on jazz and American history, the blues, swing, and Duke Ellington.

Photo of Wynton Marsalis and Paquito D'Rivera © Alex Wong / Getty Images

The Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band will release I'm BeBoppin' Too (Half Note) on June 30th. The group, which features Roy Hargrove (pictured), James Moody, Jimmy Heath, Slide Hampton, Antonio Hart, and many others, has been at Manhattan's Blue Note all week. I caught the first set of their last night of the engagement.

Although Moody, Hampton, and Hart were taking the night off, Jimmy Heath, 82, and one of the few remaining living jazz legends, played with the vitality of someone decades younger. Cyrus Chestnut tore it up on piano, and Hargrove conjured up the spirit of Dizzy Gillespie. Dressed in a checkered suit and Nikes, Hargrove conducted the band, sang, danced, joked, and played some astounding solos.

Seeing Heath and Hargrove, now a veritable jazz statesman, alongside a band filled with younger musicians, playing fun, exciting, accessible music that's true to its bebop roots filled me with the rare feeling that traditional jazz is alive and well. With the crumbling of Jazztimes, the end of the New York JVC Jazz Festival, and a general sense of confusion about where jazz is headed, it's easy to start worrying about the fate of the music.

Image © Frederick M. Brown / Getty Images

Jazz writer Ben Ratliff profiles Marcus Gilmore, Kendrick Scott, Dan Weiss, Tyshawn Sorey, and Justin Faulkner, five of the top young jazz drummers, in this New York Times article.

Image of Tyshawn Sorey © Helmut Berns

On June 8th, JazzTimes, a monthly jazz magazine with a circulation of 100,000, posted this short message on its website, confirming suspicions that the magazine is in serious financial trouble.

Rumors about JazzTimes' demise began when the magazine began to lay off employees, notified freelance contributors that their pay would be held, and refrained from sending its June '09 issue to printers. What the magazine's website calls a "temporary suspension" of publication looks to observant jazz fans like the collapse of another pillar of the industry's infrastructure. In 2008, the International Association of Jazz Educators (IAJE) crumbled, and in April of this year it became evident that there would be no JVC Jazz Festival in New York this year.

As Darcy James Argue points out in a recent post, two fronts on which the jazz community continues to thrive (at least in New York), are the free jazz scene, and the jazz-meets-indie rock scene. The Vision Festival, in it's 14th year, began on June 9th and continues its experimental music programming through the 15th. The Search and Restore series will present a top-tier lineup of progressive jazz at Brooklyn's indie-rock dominated Northside Music and Arts Festival.

Image © Getty Images

As promised, I've published a brief bio of jazz and stride pianist James P. Johnson.

Related:

• What is Early Jazz?
• Ten Early Jazz Musicians
• Definition of Stride Piano
• What is Ragtime?
• Definition of Rent Party