About Us
JazzWord is devoted to the musical sounds that have developed since the late 1950s and are often described as Free Music, Free Jazz, Energy Music, FreeBop, Avant-Garde and Creative Improvised Music. While not wedded to a hard and fast definition or a particular timeline, every item on this website has some connection with the North American music derived from the African-American Diaspora first called jazz, and disseminated in the main through recorded sound and live concerts.
Jazzword offers thousands of Reviews by veteran music critic Ken Waxman and references over 5,500 individual Artists. His Jazzword reviews include CDs as well as books, live concerts and international Festivals. Susan O’Connor’s performance portraits on the Artists pages provide an exclusive pictorial record of artists in the midst of creation. The Gallery O tab is the place to download a catalogue of her digital images (since roughly 2009). Her catalogue of black and white film images is available upon request. That section of Jazzword includes the ever-changing Photos of the Moment from the Jazzword archive, and has become an extended project to connect visitors to additional photos by O’Connor of people, places and things in a range of locations. All performance portraits on the site are indexed alphabetically in a searchable list in the Artists section.
The original Jazzword site was launched in 2000 (Y2K) by Ken Waxman and IT specialist David T. Groskind, who maintained it for many years. Simplistics of Toronto revamped and refreshed it in 2022. Ken Waxman and Susan O’Connor are now the administrators of the site.
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