The Gig (Newsletter)

3 days 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.

3 weeks 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.

4 weeks 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.

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.

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.