Dahlgren is slightly younger than me but infinitely more gifted. I have his CD "Best Intentions" where the standard drummer is replaced by Japanese drummers. So it sounds like Ornette Coleman's band collided with Kodo in a bloody mess on the freeway. It's great stuff. It's clear he has an affinity for Japanese music. He is a true jazz artist--stretching boundaries.

He plays with some of the same people that Esperanza Spalding does but she's just rehashing her old jazz chops. michaelr mentioned her singing in Portuguese in 2013 at a live show. That was her stuff from 5 to 7 years ago! She hasn't sung a word of Portuguese since 2008 on her recordings. As I said, her first two albums were phenomenal but her last two are disappointing for someone with her chops. I don't know but a CD every other year indicates something isn't right. When you debut, you want your 2nd CD out within a year. You want the fervor over the first one to barely die down when you get that 2nd one out. It was two years before Spalding put out her second and it was another two before she got a third and another two before her fourth. Couple that with the fact that her chops seem to have vanished and something is going on we're not being told about. I do give her kudos for doing her own stuff instead of the old tired classics but she's no longer cutting edge.

But the Grammys are perfectly happy to hold her up to the world as the greatest thing going on in jazz. It simply isn't true. I would give that title to Dahlgren before I gave it to Spalding. To regain my respect, she'll have to earn it and it isn't going to happen by chasing after Grammys who wouldn't know jazz if it bit em in the ass.

Yes, RtS, it's a dire situation. There is new jazz talent coming up every year but they are being raised as if they were classical musicians--groomed to reinterpret the old calcified classics. Endlessly rehashing the old Songbook which is no longer adequate to hold increasingly shorter attention spans. Wynton Marsalis is chiefly responsible for this. He wants jazz to enshrined on the same level as classical music. He wants it to be regarded the same way. He is forever comparing the great jazzmen to the great classical composers as though these are true parallels instead of the loose analogies they really are. He has paid scant attention to the boppers and free jazzers except for those who have become somewhat calcified in jazz (e.g. Monk, Miles). Guys like Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler are simply ignored. Marsalis used to be far more dismissive of the contributions of white jazzmen although he has softened up on that in the last few years. He was far more militant about it back in the nineties when he felt that white musicians or non-black musicians in general (there are some excellent Japanese jazz artists) can never really grasp the essence of jazz because it is a black music borne from black experiences.

The result has been a large-scale rejection of jazz by the young who have no interest in playing the music of old dead black men much less old dead white ones. And, yes, it's hard to find shops that sell anything that isn't just mainstream anymore. I remember when I was a teen, you could find anything in the stores. Want it now? Go to Amazon or CD Universe.