Jazz News: Lettuce offers subscriptions and a 20th anniversary re-issue, new book unpacks Soul Jazz

This is Jazz News, a look at what’s news in jazz, music and the arts.

Used to be, if you really loved a jam band, you would load up the van and follow them around all summer – driving, camping, and grooving to the music, as in The Grateful Dead, or Phish. The 21st-century alternative is a paid subscription hub for a huge list of performance videos. That’s what the band Lettuce is doing, in partnership with Nugs.net.

The inaugural list of available shows includes 14 audio recordings from 2024 concerts, like Redmond, WA, and Vail, 8 video concerts from Hartford, Conn., Tipitina’s in New Orleans, and Fort Collins, plus their entire catalog of records. More details. (SOURCE: Lettuce Live)

Psychedelic funk band Lettuce is re-issuing their album Live in Tokyo, in celebration of the album’s 20th anniversary. Yes, on vinyl. Yes, remastered for an enhanced audio experience.

Erick “Jesus” Coomes, Adam Smirnoff,  Adam Deitch, Neal Evans,  Ryan Zoidis, Rashawn Ross, and Sam Kininger were fresh out of Berklee College of Music, in their twenties, and eager to cut loose over a few nights at the Blue Note in Tokyo, and they say this re-mix captures the analog dynamics in a new way.

“Lettuce Live in Tokyo” on vinyl or digital with bonus tracks hits the street on September 13. (SOURCE: Tokyo Lettuce Merch)

A new book recasts jazz in the 1960s and 1970s as the bellwether of black culture, not the highbrow art form you had to be educated to understand. Mike Smith, the author of “In with the In Crowd: Popular Jazz in 1960s Black America,” told the independent music blog Stereogum, artists like Ramsey Lewis, Cannonball Adderley, Horace Silver, Lee Morgan and others had a wider audience than first believed. Nancy Wilson was second in sales only to The Beatles, selling more than Frank Sinatra at times. Mike Smith makes the case that soul jazz is a sub-genre that was extremely popular for black folks, and that’s why it’s been overlooked by the wider society. “In with the In Crowd” is published by the University Press of Mississippi. (SOURCES: Stereogum/Wayne Shorter Lives/Ugly Beauty & UPress Books.In With the In Crowd)

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