For more than a century, baseball and jazz have been a duet.
Live sports are nonsense. Doing anything on anybody else’s schedule is nonsense, really. We spend our lives following schedules set down by other people, for school, for work, for family. What we do with our precious free time should not be at the whim of what some billionaire baseball owner thinks is the appropriate time…
Jazz is probably the music best matched to baseball, for obvious reasons: both American inventions; both solo players collaborating on a team effort, finding variations and improvisations within rigorous structures, and so on. But who is baseball’s suited composer? It might be Charles Ives (1874-1954), who recognized early that his dissonant, dissident music would never…
Live improvisation is a strange beast.