Jazz in the New Millennium:
Live and Well
Revised Edition 2024
By Rick Mitchell
Dharma Moon Press in partnership with Da Camera of Houston $29.95 Print
Longtime Portland music critic and radio programmer Rick Mitchell will read from his latest book, Jazz in the New Millennium Revised Edition, on Saturday, October 19 at 3 p.m. at Music Millennium, 3158 E. Burnside Street in Portland, Oregon.
The book contains interview/profiles of 84 prominent jazz musicians active in the 21st Century, including such living masters as Charles Lloyd and Pat Metheny, prime time players Jason Moran and Christian McBride and rising stars Esperanza Spalding and Cecile McLorin Salvant. The first edition was published in 2014 by Dharma Moon Press and DaCamera of Houston.
The revised edition includes 40 new chapters. As Mitchell says in the revised introduction, “I am shaping the narrative with the questions I ask, and my analysis of the music is never too far from the surface. But as an interviewer, my primary objective is to let the musicians speak for themselves.”
Mitchell launched his journalism career at The Portland Scribe in 1974, the same year he began serving as a volunteer programmer at KBOO-FM. He worked his way up the print media food chain to Willamette Week, The Oregon Journal, The Oregonian and back to Willamette Week, before leaving Portland in 1987 and accepting a job as the music critic at The Houston Chronicle in 1989.
While in Houston, he continued his freelance work for numerous national and regional publications. His previous books include Garth Brooks: One of a Kind, Workin’ on a Full House (Simon and Schuster, 1993) and Whiskey River (Take My Mind): The True Story of Texas Honky Tonk (University of Texas Press, 2007).
Mitchell finally made it home to Portland in 2017, and was back on KBOO within a matter of weeks. He currently holds down monthly slots on jazz, blues and Americana roots music.
He also produces a weekly one-hour program called Jazz in the New Millennium, syndicated nationally by the African American Public Radio Consortium and heard locally Sunday mornings on XRAY-FM.
Portland music fans of a certain age may remember Mitchell as the leader/percussionist with LeBon, an avant-garde jazz/funk/rock band that disrupted the dance floors in Portland nightclubs from 1983-1987.
In Jazz in the New Millennium Revised Edition, Mitchell argues that the greatest music of the first 25 years of the 21st Century holds its own with any previous era of jazz.
“Will young listeners 50 years from now discover the recordings of Cecile McLorin Salvant and Joshua Redman and approach them with the same reverence we now have for Billie Holiday and Lester Young?” he asks in the introduction. “I don’t know,” he answers, “but I am here to make the case that they should…”
Praise for the First Edition
“From Randy Weston, Roy Haynes and Wayne Shorter to Jason Moran, Robert Glasper and Esperanza Spalding, Jazz in the New Millennium profiles nearly 60 leading jazz artists who are keeping the tradition alive and well in the 21st Century. Sincere thanks to Rick Mitchell and Da Camera of Houston for this invaluable addition to the jazz scholarly canon.”
Dr. Robert Morgan Director of Jazz Studies Emeritus High School for the Performing and Visual Arts
Rick Mitchell In the News
Houston Chronicle, Houston 8/8/2014
Writer Profiles 21st-Century Jazz Greats in New Book
Willamette Week, Portland, OR, 7/30/2014
Hotseat: Rick Mitchell, A Former Portland Musician and Writer on the State of Jazz Right Now
Houston Press, Houston, 7/29/2014
Houston Author Rick Mitchell on Modern Jazz: “There’s too Much Good Music Out There”
Houston Chronicle, Houston, 8/1/2014
Jazz in the New Millennium: Live and Well, An Excerpt from Rick Mitchell’s New Book
To read an excerpt from the Introduction, click here.