George Grella

1 week ago | killyridols.substack.com | George Grella

Albums create the idea that musical ideas are finished and complete. This might be true, especially the closer you get to popular commodity, but is often an illusion, no more so than when it comes to music that uses improvisation, and further so for artists who are constantly moving toward a culminating point. The great 20th century example of that was Miles Davis, and the great 21st century one is Henry Threadgill.

2 weeks ago | daily.bandcamp.com | George Grella

LISTS The Music of Kahil El’Zabar, Jazz’s Elder Statesman By George Grella · June 09, 2025 The term “elder statesman” is commonly heard in jazz culture when talking about musicians who have been around for a long while. It makes sense: They are the elders.

2 weeks ago | star-revue.com | George Grella

People frequently (that is, once every few years) stop me on the street and ask me, “George” (no one really knows who I am), “should I be listening to jazz?” My first response is always, “absolutely!” Then, when they ask me why, this is what I tell them (again almost never happens, but it’s good to have a handy quasi-script tucked away in the mind): Because you’re American: Jazz is one of the few genuinely native cultural products of America, one of the best, and one of the most important,...

3 weeks ago | killyridols.substack.com | George Grella

NOTE: I screwed up the settings on the previous version of this post, here’s the exact same one, but better. I read a lot of academic musicology because it’s my thing as a musician and a critic. Musicology is the study of music in both technical (how it works) and historical (how it came to be and what that means) contexts, and that’s of interest to anyone with more than a consumerist interest in music of any kind.

3 weeks ago | newyorkclassicalreview.com | George Grella

The Little Opera Theatre of New York has a curious production titled Zemlinsky’s Zimmer/Zemlinsky’s Room, which opened Thursday night at BAM Fisher and runs through the weekend. It’s an evening of music from Alexander Zemlinsky that’s sort of an opera, and sort of not. Or, it’s an opera inside of a frame that can be viewed from both front and back.