If you’re a jazz fan, now’s the time to start thinking about getting tickets for The National Concert Hall’s annual summer jazz series, which starts on Aug. 26.
Now in its tenth year, the concert hall’s annual “Summer Jazz Party,” always sells out quickly because of its top-name performers. This year’s lineup includes Grammy Award-winning singer Patti Austin and veteran saxophonist Joe Lovano.
Lovano, who kicks off the series on Aug. 26, is a veteran American tenor saxophonist known for his deep knowledge of jazz tradition and history. He trained formally at Berklee College of Music in the 1970s and was signed to Blue Note records in 1991, during a stint with guitarist John Scofield’s quartet. Lovano first appeared in Taiwan in 2004 when the National Concert Hall’s jazz series was just getting started. This time around, the audience can expect to hear a forceful rhythm section, as his quartet, Us Five, is armed with two drummers.
Photo courtesy of the artists
This next show, on Sept. 1, features the National Concert Hall’s specially commissioned “NTCH Summer Jazz Project,” a big band ensemble composed of local musicians and high-profile American guests, including hard bop drummer Albert “Tootie” Heath, trumpeter and trombonist Michael Mossman and saxophonist Antonio Hart.
On Sept 5, the concert hall hosts the Mingus Big Band, an ongoing collective of former backing musicians for the late jazz bassist Charlie Mingus, one of the most important composers in the genre. The Mingus Big Band is one of three ensembles devoted to continuing his legacy by performing his repertoire.
The National Concert Hall’s best-selling show is always the one that features a singer, and this year is no different. There are very few seats left for Patti Austin’s concert on Sept. 8. The 61-year-old vocalist, who has made several pop chart hits during a long-running career that spans jazz and R ‘N’ B, earned a Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal for her 2007 album Avant Gershwin.
Photo courtesy of the artists
Tickets are NT$500 to NT$2,500 and are available at NTCH ticketing and online at www.artsticket.com.tw. For more information, visit event.ntch.edu.tw/2012/2012SummerJazz/index.html
Last week, Viola Zhou published a marvelous deep dive into the culture clash between Taiwanese boss mentality and American labor practices at the Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) plant in Arizona in Rest of World. “The American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company,” while the Taiwanese said American workers aren’t dedicated. The article is a delight, but what it is depicting is the clash between a work culture that offers employee autonomy and at least nods at work-life balance, and one that runs on hierarchical discipline enforced by chickenshit. And it runs on chickenshit because chickenshit is a cultural
My previous column Donovan’s Deep Dives: The powerful political force that vanished from the English press on April 23 began with three paragraphs of what would be to most English-language readers today incomprehensible gibberish, but are very typical descriptions of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) internal politics in the local Chinese-language press. After a quiet period in the early 2010s, the English press stopped writing about the DPP factions, the factions changed and eventually local English-language journalists could not reintroduce the subject without a long explanation on the context that would not fit easily in a typical news article. That previous
April 29 to May 5 One month before the Taipei-Keelung New Road (北基新路) was set to open, the news that US general Douglas MacArthur had died, reached Taiwan. The military leader saw Taiwan as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” that was of huge strategic value to the US. He’d been a proponent of keeping it out of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hands. Coupled with the fact that the US had funded more than 50 percent of the road’s construction costs, the authorities at the last minute renamed it the MacArthur Thruway (麥帥公路) for his “great contributions to the free world and deep
Years ago, I was thrilled when I came across a map online showing a fun weekend excursion: a long motorcycle ride into the mountains of Pingtung County (屏東) going almost up to the border with Taitung County (台東), followed by a short hike up to a mountain lake with the mysterious name of “Small Ghost Lake” (小鬼湖). I shared it with a more experienced hiking friend who then proceeded to laugh. Apparently, this road had been taken out by landslides long before and was never going to be fixed. Reaching the lake this way — or any way that would