*Columbia University's Center for Jazz Studies has put up a Jazz Studies Online site, which I'm adding to the Night Lights blogroll page. Looks like a cool site-for starters, they've put up the entire first issue of the legendary but short-lived late-1950s journal Jazz Review.
*Speaking of cultural studies of a sort, check out this 1964 Playboy symposium on jazz, posted by Detroit Free Press music critic (and Bloomington native) Mark Stryker over at Organissimo. Participants included Cannonball Adderley, Dave Brubeck, Ralph Gleason, Charles Mingus, Stan Kenton, Dizzy Gillespie, and Gunther Schuller. As Mark notes, "Fascinating on many levels, including the realization that jazz was still considered relevant and interesting enough to the wider cultural dialogue that a general circulation magazine like Playboy would devote so much space to such a rarified discussion. Such a thing would never happen today."
*Two must-reads (as usual) from Jazzwax's Marc Myers: his take on the new Benny Goodman Mosaic set, and an interview with set essayist, jazz scholar, and former Goodman cohort Loren Schoenberg.
*Bill Kirchner is devoting his turn on WBGO's Jazz From the Archives program this weekend to the compositions of hardbop grandpop Horace Silver. The show airs Sunday at 11 p.m. EST. Bill weighed in not long ago on Silver's tunes at Jazz.com, and don't forget our Silver-anniversary songbook tribute from this past September.
*Get 'em while you can: upcoming deletions from the Blue Note catalogue.
*Out of the gate with year-end top 10 lists: Howard Mandel and NPR.
*As noted by Howard and reported elsewhere, trumpeter Freddie Hubbard has had some life-threatening health problems in the past few days; at least one account today suggests that his condition may be improving somewhat. Thoughts and prayers for Mr. Hubbard from this quarter and many others in the jazz world, I'm sure.
*Last but not least, the 2009 Grammy jazz nominations have been announced. Last year they feted Ornette Coleman; howzabout, for encore's sake, a tour-de-force lecture and performance this year from Anthony Braxton... A gent can dream, can't he?
