Word: jazzing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...jazz influenced your writing? Jeremiah Boydstun Mililani, Hawaii I owned a jazz club and was listening to jazz every day from morning to night. I appreciate the sense of rhythm and improvisation. A good musician doesn't know what's going to happen next. It's spur of the moment. When I write a novel or story, I don't know what is going to happen next...
...Although he has performed in Japan in the past, Jarreau is currently touring the region for the first time, calling at six cities including Bangkok and Beijing (where he expects to "pick up some Olympic hangover and pick them up a bit"). He is co-headlining the shows with jazz-guitar great George Benson, and the performances feature solo spots from both artists as well as duets...
...enthusiastic reception in Asia shouldn't surprise him. In the late 1970s, white-collar Asians in the region's booming economies sought out new sounds to grace their suddenly affordable turntables and cassette players. Older listeners, bored with rock, began to trade up to West Coast jazz fusion - a connoisseur's form that mingled jazz, pop, R&B and funk, setting store above all on sheen and virtuosity. Although derided by jazz traditionalists, the genre had an exotic sophistication to middle-class Asian ears - and Jarreau was its house vocalist, his marvel of a voice swooping out of the speakers...
...Rainbow (1977) and its studio follow-up All Fly Home (1978) - reveal them to be masterpieces of risk-taking and exuberance, eluding easy categorization. That's fitting for a man who remains the only performer to win Grammy Awards in three different styles: pop, R&B and jazz. "He works the cracks between all of those genres," says San Francisco Chronicle pop-music critic Joel Selvin. But most critics agree that Jarreau's roots, ultimately, lie in jazz. "What makes him unique is the jazz current - with its inherent sense of swing and improvisational magic - that courses through everything...
...bright, and after high school opted to study psychology, earning a masters degree and landing work in San Francisco as a vocational rehabilitation counselor. One problem: "I was a horrible bureaucrat and organizer," says Jarreau, who quit his job and began eking out a living in the rich jazz scene of late-'60s California instead. It was after a 1974 Los Angeles show, when he opened for the legendary Les McCann, that he scored a record contract, and in 1975 he released his debut album, We Got By, featuring his trademark genre-bending style. An unsuspecting world was also introduced...