For me it was a couple of weeks ago, during Esperanza Spalding’s exultant concert at Town Hall, in midtown Manhattan. The music we call jazz has been undergoing an explosion of creative possibilities, carried out by musicians with an impressive range of new skills and ideas. I just wrote a book about jazz in the new century, so I might be waving that banner, too. So why do I balk whenever someone declares that jazz has entered another golden age? On some level, too, it’s wariness about any exercise that weighs one era against another, brushing aside the broader context.

Source: New York Times December 26, 2018 00:00 UTC