In 1985, before he was a Sony & Atlantic recording artist celebrated as The Next Really Big Thing by the jazz and popular press, James Carter was a monstrously talented high-school kid who toured Europe with Detroit trumpet legend Marcus Belgrave & The Monster. I was in that band, and this true tale illustrates my experiences with James. This article was first posted on the jazz newsgroup rec.music.bluenote and the Jazz Lovers List, and generated a lot of discussion. It later appeared on the Jazz In France web site, on a francophone page devoted to James. Most recently, it was translated into Dutch (!) for the Amsterdam-based e-zine Writers Block: it begins “Lang geleden, voordat hij platencontracten tekende bij Sony en Atlantic en door de schrijvende pers werd aangekondigd als Het Nieuwe Aanstormend Talent, voordat Downbeat hem op de cover zette met een uitdagend bijschrift en Robert Altman hem een rol gaf in Hollywood-film Kansas City...”

 
 
 

In this article and interview, from the Fall 1994 issue of Midwest Jazz, Jamey talks about how he unexpectedly became one of our premier jazz educators, describes a typical play-along recording session, and offers his thoughts on creativity and how jazz education has changed over the years.

 
 
 

Rec.Music.Bluenote, the Usenet newsgroup devoted to jazz discussion, has grown from a refuge for a few dedicated software engineer jazz fans into a vast virtual community. This article, which first appeared in an edited form in Midwest Jazz in the Fall of 1995, looks into some of the growing pains RMB has gone through along the way to becoming a wonderful, if sometimes cacophonous, place to share insights and enthusiasm about jazz.

 
 
 

Decorah, a small agricultural community in northeast Iowa was the land that jazz forgot: due to a geographic fluke, you couldn't even find jazz on the radio. And yet in 1992 Decorah became "a hotbed of jazz activity," with the vast majority of the people there not only hearing the music, but many of them actually taking real jazz musicians into their homes, and some even trying to play it themselves. This is a story of government arts funding getting it right - how a real community benefited in surprising ways from an opportunity it otherwise would never have had. Decorah may never be the same again....