• Read More

    Interview with Matterhorn author Karl Marlantes.

    Intense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Jones’s The Thin Red Line. It is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood.

  • Read More

    Interview with John Coltrane biographer Ben Ratliff.

    What was the essence of John Coltrane’’s achievement that makes him so prized forty years after his death? What was it about his improvising, his bands, his compositions, his place within his era of jazz that left so many musicians and listeners so powerfully drawn to him? What would a John Coltrane look like now — or are we looking for the wrong signs?  The acclaimed jazz writer Ben Ratliff addresses these questions in Coltrane.

  • Read More

    Ed Corrigan’s poetry channels Jack Kerouac…

  • Read More

    Featuring photographs and excerpts from the Paul Desmond biography, “Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond,” by Doug Ramsey

     

     

  • Interview with Matterhorn author Karl Marlantes
  • Interview with John Coltrane biographer Ben Ratliff
  • Poetry by Ed Corrigan
  • Paul Desmond: A Life Told in Pictures, Music and Memories
sonnyrollins Features

Who was your childhood hero?

| No comments

Childhood Heroes — We all had them

Excerpted from exclusive Jerry Jazz Musician interviews, our guests talk of theirs.


Sonny Rollins was a hero of saxophonist Joshua Redman

JJM Who was your hero, Joshua?

JR My musical hero?

JJM Well, that or your boyhood hero…

JR I think my mom was my hero. My mom took great care of me and she was a person I looked up to. I didn’t really have heroes like clear role models, like people or figures that I idolized…I think the first record I ever bought was a Sonny Rollins record, Saxophone Colossus, and from that point on Sonny Rollins became a hero of mine. I was nine or ten or so at the time, and my mom paid for the record… […] Continue reading »

luis Literature

Poetry by Luis Lazaro Tijerina

| No comments

Death is a Trumpet Note Away
(To the Jazz Trumpeter, Lee Morgan)

I hear your trumpet notes splitting the evening skies,
breaking up a piano solo, then a sparse hot guitar
opens the modal line for your slow bursts of almost
cornet sounds… a river flow of “Avotcja One”-
trumpet sounds “into a bed of plaints” and flurries
[…] Continue reading »

corwin Literature

Poetry by Arlene Corwin

| No comments

So Much To Do, So Little Time To Do It In

For Michel Petrucciani

A little man, glass bones disease.
A la Lautrec: two prodigies.
At thirty-six his lungs gave out.
We cried, we would not be consoled.
[…] Continue reading »

desmondmarch29 Art

Paul Desmond:  A Life Told in Pictures, Music and Memories

| No comments

Doug Ramsey’s biography of saxophonist Paul Desmond is a lavish, detailedwork of art, filled with photographs, letters, and memories of a complexand frequently inspiring life. “Paul Desmond: A Life Told in Pictures,Music and Memories,” a Jerry Jazz Musician production published in cooperation with Ramsey and Parkside Publications, features photographs and excerpts from the book, as well as sound samples of Desmond’s music. […] Continue reading »