The jazz grind was much the same as it is today when Bandwagon, pianist Jason Moran's trio with bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits, formed in late 1999, spun out of Blue Note Records' Greg Osby–led youth-movement band New Directions. Jazzers had been functioning in a commercially hostile marketplace for decades, so it was no small thing having a major-label deal in 2000, the year the pre-merger Sony/Columbia label, home to essential recordings by, among others, Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, and Miles Davis, ever so quietly folded its once-storied jazz division right out from under label polarities Wynton Marsalis and David S. Ware—a tree felled in a forest with what seemed... More >>>