The Gig (Newsletter)

Articles

Breaking Point

2 weeks ago | thegig.substack.com | Nate Chinen

As I type this, from a hotel room in San Francisco, I’m seeing reports that Iran has sent dozens of missiles into Israel, in retaliation for a deadly wave of Israeli airstrikes. The situation in Gaza remains unimaginably dire.
Parsing The Roots Picnic

3 weeks ago | thegig.substack.com | Nate Chinen

Pusha T voiced this dedication (growled it, gutter-triumphal) on Sunday afternoon in Fairmount Park, Day 2 of The Roots Picnic. It’s a lyric from “The Games We Play,” off his excellent 2018 album Daytona. Of all the countless bars I heard over the weekend, it was the one that best articulated this festival’s defining tension. The Roots Picnic has been an annual early-summer staple in Philadelphia since 2008.
Marcus Gilmore's Journey to the New

1 month ago | thegig.substack.com | Nate Chinen

A drummer of slashing exactitude and sensitive equilibrium, Gilmore has the rare ability to turn any group into a floating island: suspended, self-sufficient, fantastical. He did this for years in the Vijay Iyer Trio, and in Steve Coleman’s Five Elements, and with the late Chick Corea, among many others. He does it on two standout trio albums released this year, by guitarist Gilad Hekselman and pianist Sullivan Fortner.
Song for the New Pope

1 month ago | thegig.substack.com | Nate Chinen

But by now you’ve surely heard that Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost was elected head of the Roman Catholic Church today. Pope Leo XIV, as he will be known, is the 267th pope, and the first to come from the United States of America. As word got out this afternoon, I exchanged texts with my wife, and we both noted how thrilled her father would have been. (He died in 2012, during the papacy of Benedict XVI.)But let’s be specific. Pope Leo XIV isn’t just the first American pope.
Award Tour

1 month ago | thegig.substack.com | Nate Chinen

Today brought a sickening update about the National Endowment for the Arts, where many senior agency officials have submitted their resignations in the face of a slashed budget and a hostile political environment. As I noted in my coverage of the NEA Jazz Masters concert and ceremony one week ago, the precarity has been palpable for a while now.
Being Part of What's Happening Now

1 month ago | thegig.substack.com | Nate Chinen

Jazz Appreciation Month is drawing to a close, and we find ourselves suspended between celebration, contemplation, and lament. I’ll try to keep it all in balance. Andy Bey, who died on Saturday at 85, was the kind of singer who could make you cry. More strikingly, he could make you feel like crying was the answer to a call — the natural response to a welter of feeling in his suble turn of phrase. Today I made my best attempt, under hurried conditions, to honor him with this obituary.
Things Ain't What They Used to Be

2 months ago | thegig.substack.com | Nate Chinen

goes back to 1941. We know it as a band staple for Duke Ellington, who recorded it a handful of times, even played it on film. The fact that “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be” is an Ellington song by proxy — composed by his son Mercer, who wasn’t a member of ASCAP, and thereby exempt from the restrictions of a strike — doesn’t diminish its aura. The song is canon. Maybe it’s now already playing in your head.
Take Five: Carvings, Commandments

2 months ago | thegig.substack.com | Nate Chinen

Hello there! I hope you had a restful weekend. In my household, we just enjoyed spring break — no travel, just a lot of cooking, a few movie nights, fellowship with a visiting family member. So now it’s about catching up and charging ahead. Take Five is my periodic roundup of recommended listening, one track at a time (but usually within the context of a new or forthcoming album).
Francis Davis, RIP

2 months ago | thegig.substack.com | Nate Chinen
Ambrose Akinmusire: Bloomed at Big Ears

2 months ago | thegig.substack.com | Nate Chinen |Jacob Blickenstaff

As part of a suite of coverage from the Big Ears Festival, here’s another special collab between The Gig and , focusing on a single concert. Please enjoy!This is an odd and conflicted predilection for a trumpeter-bandleader situated, however loosely, in the volatile tradition of modern jazz. Akinmusire recognizes the paradox, has struggled in various ways before learning how to lean into it.