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A wealth of excellent poetry has been submitted recently. Poems by Steven Dalachinsky, Michael L. Newell, John Stupp, Ron Kolm, and Freddington are examples…
...January 29th, 2018
An uncredited piece in the January 11, 2018 edition of AL.com titled “The Night Nat Cole was Beaten on a Birmingham Stage” recounts the April 10, 1956 evening in Birmingham, Alabama, in which Nat Cole was attacked on stage by local members of the Ku Klux Klan. It is not only an example of our not-so-distant racist past, but also concerns the complexity concerning Cole’s involvement (or lack thereof) in the civil rights movement. Consider this brief excerpt from the article:
“I can’t understand it,” Cole said of the attack. “I have not taken part in any protests. Nor have I joined an organization fighting segregation. Why should they attack me? I’d just like to forget about the whole thing.”
Roy Wilkins, the executive secretary of NAACP sent Cole a telegram after the attack, “You have not been a crusader or engaged in
...January 27th, 2018
It was the kind of New York night not fit for man nor beast. Sleet and wind whipping about, snow banks and ice everywhere. With my ‘49 Dodge slipping and sliding on the Village streets, I make my way to the Vanguard to catch the midnight set. The small sign outside the entrance inconspicuously announces: “Bill Evans Trio.” This is the 1962 edition of the trio, reformed after bassist Scott LaFaro’s death the year before; and this is the club where Bill had played his last sets with
...January 25th, 2018
Godmother of the gypsy tramp
half-breed goddess, unparalleled queen
of less is more, effortless weaver
of that old black magic—
your strength lay in the space between
the screaming sax and the scatting singer.
If midnight blue velvet were sound,
January 24th, 2018
In this short excerpt from David Amram’s 2002 biography Offbeat: Collaborating with Kerouac, Kerouac talks with Amram about how the “Beatnik crap” that Kerouac and his friends reluctantly represented was “distorting everything,” and “cheapening the memories of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk.” It is an interesting and entertaining view of that era, filled with the vigor, passion, wit and wisdom Kerouac is remembered for.
_____
In January of 1959, we collaborated with a once-in-a-lifetime group of artists on the film Pull My Daisy. In addition to appearing in the film as Mezz McGillicudy, the deranged French horn player in the moth-eaten sweater, I composed the entire score for the film and wrote the music for the title song, “Pull My Daisy,” with lyrics by Jack [Kerouac], Neal Cassady, and Allen Ginsberg.
The idea of making a film based on Jack’s work was easier to
...January 22nd, 2018
(in response to an invitation
musical and raucous from the fingers
of Wild Bill Davis tickling the keys
of his organ seeking a musical response
by someone and something of equal stature)
Illinois I say accepted the challenge and blew
some blue some very blue blue blue notes
that set listeners
January 19th, 2018
Poetry is a courageous art form. No poet can possibly succeed without the willingness to create a completely transparent window into his or her soul. A poet rarely achieves by faking it.
A successful poet’s thoughts are naked to the world, and this full-on exposure — because it is so often blunt and painful for the poet — leaves the reader with a reasonable understanding of lives led and footsteps taken (or not). These revelations build a rewarding and intimate connection.
I have never met or spoken to Mike Faran, whose poetry I occasionally publish on Jerry Jazz Musician. I only outwardly know him by the short biography he sent me — retired lobster trap builder from Ventura who has had some work published in journals around the country. That’s it, really. I don’t even have a photo of him.
He has periodically sent me emails with a poem or two attached to them, seeking my interest in publishing them. (“Here is another poem that I hope will meet with your approval.”) Although I haven’t published them all, they almost always
...January 17th, 2018
Miles boils his bitches brew
in a night of worlds much blacker than black
His demons and angels let out slack
January 14th, 2018
I.
All those good times
might’ve been what Duke
had in mind when vamping
his silky-fingered B-flats,
letting Coltrane counter
until tenor notes cluster
close to the
...January 9th, 2018
The winter I ran away, I moved into a garret in Provincetown, where I wrote poetry under the light of a candle far into the wee hours. Out my window, two stories up, I could see snow glistening on slanted rooftops that led like an uneven staircase to the bay. Below me, a twisted narrow path led to Commercial Street, peaceful and stark as an unwritten page. It was 1973 and I had run to the end of the world as I knew it to find freedom.
I knew Provincetown from spending summers with my dad and Grandma Tess in her cottage in Truro. It seemed she’d lived most of her life since Grandpa’s passing as a beachcomber. I liked following behind her when we collected
...January 8th, 2018
In Robbie Robertson’s entertaining biography Testimony, the rock guitarist tells a short story about a conversation he overheard Bob Dylan having with The Byrd’s Jim (a.k.a. “Roger”) McGuinn concerning John Coltrane’s influence on McGuinn when he wrote “Eight Miles High.”
The setting was Los Angeles, 1966, during a Dylan tour that employed Robertson and, among others, bandmates Rick Danko and Richard Manuel, who are referred to in the excerpt. The “Levon” in the story was the drummer Levon Helm, who left the tour after a month out of frustration of playing with Dylan during his initial “electric” period, when folk music purists routinely
...January 7th, 2018
Halema
with the soulful jazz eyes
deep dreaming the notes
January 5th, 2018
The night I truly ‘got’ the shining genius of Charlie Parker I was in my girlfriend’s apartment on the Lower East Side. The year was 1961. I was nineteen, she was much older and hipper, and had turned me on not only to some great music but to getting high as well. She had all the essential jazz records, including the one on the turntable that night. It was The Fabulous Bird, on the old Jazztone label, consisting of reissues of some of Bird’s phenomenal 1947 Dial sessions. She had a very low-fi stereo—I can still see the nickel she had scotch-taped to the tone arm to keep it in the grooves. But the fidelity didn’t matter, in part at least because this evening I had just smoked a
...January 3rd, 2018
croons “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire;”
voice velvety as cocoa butter
warms listeners, seats them round a hearth;
every word, every idea, clear as a bell,
...December 25th, 2017
As Time.com’s Billy Perrigo reminds us in his excellent December 22 piece “How the U.S. Used Jazz as a Cold War Secret Weapon,” the U.S. State Department “hoped that showcasing popular American music around the globe would not only introduce audiences to American culture, but also win them over as ideological allies in the cold war,” and that jazz, in particular the music of Armstrong, Gillespie and Brubeck could help “keep communism at bay by whatever means possible.”
The history Perrigo brings up is itself well-traveled, having been explored in depth by several writers, notably
...December 24th, 2017
Jazz rained down in rivers
catching out strong soul
and soft hands
rising to the call of music prayers
among blind angels
who fail on color
and possess
December 22nd, 2017
According to BMI, “The Christmas Song”(a.k.a. “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”) is the most performed Christmas song, made especially famous by Nat Cole. The song was written, according to one of the co-writers, during a blistering hot summer, and in an effort “to stay cool by thinking cool.” Bob Wells was one of the songwriters of this classic 1945 tune…Who was his co-writer?
Mel Torme
Irving Berlin
Cole Porter
Bing Crosby
Benny Goodman
George Gershwin
Lionel Hampton
Duke Ellington
Go to the next page for the answer!
...
December 21st, 2017
The slow tumble of snow past
my partially open window
recalls the year in Amman
I sat for hours watching
a bleak whiteness deepen
all through the abandoned farm fields
surrounding my apartment
while the cool sound of Miles
gave shape and form to my grief
thousands of miles from
December 19th, 2017
It’s like talking of a lemon light, a blue mist,
a pale moonlight. In this case a pink rain.
It was something to do with Christmas
and I was leaving the supermarket,
buzzed, bugged, by muzak’s soothe and slink.
I walked out, into December,
...December 14th, 2017
snow fell
like notes from
Jan Garbarek’s saxophone
as we stood in Raekoja Plats
drinking mulled wine and marveling
at the size of the Christmas tree.
It was crowded and festive; somewhat loud
sure, there was a
...December 12th, 2017
December 6th, 2017
Near the end of high school I thought myself sophisticated, a fan of Pink Floyd and King Crimson and Kevin Ayers, but at a Weather Report Concert in 1972 I had a nearly religious conversion. It was as though a stranger had run up to me and said, “hold this for minute” and ran off. Then the music exploded. I had never heard anything like this. Everything changed.
It was as though I grew hair in secret places and a new appendage. I became a different creature. After that night few of my suburban DC white friends’ guitar and lyrics-oriented ears could hear what mine could; the joy and heartbreak in this unfamiliar and ebonic timbre, this canvas painted in horn, acoustic bass, and polyrhythm; this blues, this brokenness, this homesickness.
There it was, though, for anyone who had ears for it—there, in the absence of verse, in the uncertainty and unpredictability of lengthy solos, in the timelessness of power beyond the moment from which
...December 1st, 2017
That old red Dodge maybe
has a new muffler –
sounds like soft jazz
Ol’ Leroy Gathercole thinks
he’s still in his
forties or fifties;
wears a bright yellow beret &
drives with one hand –
plays the blues if he can find
November 30th, 2017
Jerry Jazz Musician is fortunate to have had hundreds of accomplished writers and poets submit their work for consideration of publication during this calendar year. Thanks to everyone who thinks enough of this website to desire sharing their creative vision with our readers. The works published are outstanding examples of the connections that exist between jazz music, its culture, and the literary arts.
I am proud to report that I have nominated six exceptional published pieces for the prestigious Pushcart Prize, and they are
...November 29th, 2017
Gifts and Messages. Which
the more important?
Dissonance launches
me listening feels
more like I’m playing that
swooping of sax waiting counterbal-
answer slowly fading
November 24th, 2017
After you indulge on Thanksgiving, consider giving Duke Ellington’s “simply steak” diet a try! In his 1973 autobiography Music is My Mistress, from a chapter titled “The Taste Buds,” Duke Ellington writes about his special diet, losing thirty pounds while on it, and the resulting onstage antics.
__________
In 1955 my doctor, Arthur Logan, told me I would have to take off twenty-two pounds. I tore up his suggested menu and made one of my own. Mine was simply steak (any amount), grapefruit, and black coffee with a slice of lemon first squeezed and then dropped into it. With the exception of a binge one day a week, I ate as much of this
...November 23rd, 2017
The great jazz singer Jon Hendricks died in New York earlier today at the age of 96. In his New York Times obituary, Peter Keepnews writes that “Mr. Hendricks did not invent this practice, known as vocalese — most jazz historians credit the singer Eddie Jefferson with that achievement — but he became its best-known and most prolific exponent, and he turned it into a group art.”
His work with Lambert, Hendricks and Ross was one of my gateways into jazz music. My childhood home had only a few mostly dreadful record albums (and my beloved mother’s favorite radio station was KABL/San Francisco, with Mantovani and 101 Strings in heavy rotation on the Philco clock radio on the kitchen counter), but somewhere in the bowels of the house was Sing a Song of Basie LP that would somehow occasionally make its way on to our Hoffman stereo system’ turntable — in competition for time with Creedence and the Doors and Beatles 45’s. Even as a little kid I could tell this was “hip” music, and it ultimately led me to an unforgettable experience.
When I was living in Berkeley in the late seventies I went to see him on stage in a small North Beach
...November 22nd, 2017
Tonight I’m spinning
the ugly, unhip
jazzmen of Beehive records,
sweating in their transition shades,
mustaches sincere and wide,
collared tapestry shirts,
hair erupting from ears and noses
and they’re killing—
bellicose ogre grunts
November 22nd, 2017
Upon leaving Charlie Barnet’s orchestra in 1941, this trumpeter wanted to start his own group, and, with the help of publicist/journalist Leonard Feather, became the first white leader in jazz history to organize an all-black group. Who was he?
Mugsy Spanier
Bunny Berigan
Bob Burnet
Harry James
Ziggy Elman
Bobby Hackett
Go to the next page for the answer!
...
November 21st, 2017
At risen angles my furniture sits
each chair fills with blood
with a pulse that could strike, may cease.
Blue couch slants toward vibration
my black arms embracing, hold on
for the dark clots of bass hammering
initials into the
November 19th, 2017
This was all her fault, Sarah thought, as she watched the Victory Lounge clear out. She should have known Branchville wasn’t ready for improv jazz. But the bass player, Tommy Williams, had been so supportive after the workshop with the graduate wind students. Sarah had gotten so interested in the group’s ideas about jazz and improvising that she had gone straight to the practice room after the workshop and found their website. Earbuds in both ears, she was improvising to one of the rhythmic bass tracks there when she happened to raise the bell of her clarinet on a long high note the way she’d seen the quartet’s wind players do, and there was Tommy knocking on the door.
He had been so just what a jazz bass player from Chicago should be, Sarah thought, with his dusky skin and his smoky voice, and his rakish fedora tipped over one eye. And at the same time he had been so genuinely
...November 18th, 2017
The legendary pianist Erroll Garner’s most famous composition, “Misty,” was written as an instrumental in 1954 for his 1955 album Contrasts. Lyrics were added in 1959 by Johnny Burke and it became the signature song of Johnny Mathis, and was subsequently recorded by Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Etta James, and countless others. Garner’s version was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1991.
In this excerpt from an interview with the drummer Art Taylor, Garner describes how he wrote “Misty:”
...November 16th, 2017
From red kite country, driving South,
Dai Grandpa, fresh from yesterday,
such yesterday. Only when the
June sun sank, had Dai – dudein’
up my shirt front, puttin’ on
the shirt studs – reached evening’s land
– and such a yester-e’en. (Dai caught
the breeze, his ship came home.)
He breakfasts now in wild kite
November 13th, 2017
Henry Bell wished the actress on the TV interview show wouldn’t smile so much. Most show folk, he thought, were not memorable. They were things, as he had written in one of his songs, made on the cheap from neon and crepe. Sometimes he believed it too. Then he’d remind himself that human beings wrote all kinds of wonderful tunes, like “The Wind” — the number that had made his mind reel when he was very young and made him think he could write songs.
“The Wind” was eight, maybe nine, minutes of continuous jamming colored in with jazzy chords, an understated vocal and poetry. As a kid, listening to Dick Summer’s Subway show late at night on his transistor radio, stuck under the pillow to muzzle its volume, he thought he could trek into “The Wind” and the journey through its changes would be endless.
Now, nearly forty, he wasn’t a kid anymore, and jazz-inflected rock music wasn’t his thing. At some point too, he’d decided that Circus Maximus was a pretty dumb name for a
...November 11th, 2017
we all were
three fifteen year olds
along with one of our fathers.
we were
the only white guys
in the club.
it was at dino’s club
in st.louis, in the fall of 1962
at the corner of
November 10th, 2017
In this entertaining short excerpt from Arnold Shaw’s 1971 homage to the jazz clubs of New York, 52nd Street: The Street that Never Slept, Ralph Watkins, owner of legendary New York City clubs like Kelly’s Stable, the Royal Roost (the famed chicken restaurant nicknamed the “Metropolitan Bopera House” due to it being near the Metropolitan Opera House) and Bop City, remembers the blind pianist Art Tatum:
“The 52nd St. performer that stands out in my mind is Art Tatum, above everyone else. Not only his musicianship but the fire in him. He had a way when he was annoyed. When people were talking during his playing, he’d stand up, bang the piano shut, stare in their direction, and tell them off: ‘Quiet, you
...November 9th, 2017
In 1952, this trumpeter made his recording debut with the R&B group Chris Powell’s Blue Flames. The following year, he toured Europe with Lionel Hampton’s band and led some recording sessions. In early 1954, he recorded brilliant solos at Birdland with Art Blakey’s quintet, and by mid-year had formed a quintet with Max Roach. Who is he?
Freddie Hubbard
Booker Little
Clifford Brown
Fats Navarro
Kenny Dorham
Lee Morgan
Art Farmer
Donald Byrd
Go to the next page for the answer!
...November 8th, 2017
Oh, to see back into the beginning,
To 1944, and 52nd street,
To Minton’s Playhouse, and the Royal Roost,
To Monk and Bud’s first rehearsals,
To see the fever spread,
To see the disciples line up to sit in,
November 7th, 2017
At first, I simply sit on the front steps of my building, letting the summer sun bake my knees while I’m planning my getaway, trying to decide which subway to take to get to Caroline’s place faster. I know nobody will miss me. Nobody will even notice. Not like the first time I ran away.
The first time I ran away – OK, maybe I didn’t exactly run away, as the only thing I did was leave my house in the morning to go down to New Utrecht Avenue to sit in a subway station. But I didn’t come back. I wasn’t going to. I sat there all day, until it got late and dark, and eventually even darker and so late that it was time for my mom to come home. And when she did and saw that I’m gone, she called the cops and they found me instantly. Picture a pink haired girl sitting on a bench in an all Hasidic neighborhood. Not a rocket science to spot my cotton candy stack of hair even in the middle of a dark subway station. So I was brought home that same night, safe and sound, and feeling like an
...November 5th, 2017
His voice, cucumber-crisp,
coaxes silence to step aside
Sates the air with tender words
suspended in song’s sweet
November 4th, 2017
Fats Domino is remembered as a rock and roll legend, and idolized by many musicians of his era, including Elvis Presley, who, according Peter Guaralnick, author of Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, referred to Fats as “The King of Rock and Roll.”
In 2006, Jerry Jazz Musician contributor Adrienne Wartts interviewed Domino’s biographer Rick Coleman…You can read it by
...October 30th, 2017
October 27th, 2017
Dizzy Gillespie — born 100 years ago today — recalls his childhood in this excerpt from his 1979 autobiography, To BE, or not…to BOP
*
The pictures show me as a very beautiful boy, but I was the last of nine children and my arrival probably didn’t excite anybody. So many people had been born at our house before. I don’t think Mama felt too blessed about having nine children, unless “blessed” means “wounded” like it does in French. She probably figured someone had put the bad mouth on us.
Every Sunday morning, Papa would whip us. That’s mainly how I remember him. He was unusually mean; and hated to see or hear about his
...October 21st, 2017
In the fall of 1944, shortly following his medical discharge from the Navy, Artie Shaw formed a 17 piece band (without strings) that featured Barney Kessel on guitar, Dodo Marmarosa on piano, Ray Coniff on trombone, and the brilliant trumpeter Roy Eldridge, famous for his work with Gene Krupa’s band in the early 1940’s. The band, according to noted critic Leonard Feather, was “quite impressive” and exhibited “a refreshing lack of bad taste and bombast.”
This era of Shaw’s band resulted in several excellent recordings, among them
...October 21st, 2017
When Miles Davis gets back into his mood
I go where I need to be in my own
somewhere in or near Mal Waldron’s Love Span
over the River Tender where moons flow
reflecting piano keys rippling night
October 17th, 2017
This pianist was a founding member of the Jazz Epistles, and was nicknamed “South Africa’s Monk”? Who is he?
Phineas Newborn
Ahmad Jamal
Randy Weston
Albert Ammons
Dollar Brand
Roland Hanna
Go to the next page for the answer!
...
October 12th, 2017
We have stood over record bins, thumbing through his records, moved by his breathtaking originality and creativity.
We have made friends over his music, made love to it, cruised in the car to it, introduced our children to it, and defended it against those who don’t quite comprehend his genius.
We love the emotions his music brings out in us – joy, tears, humor, inspiration.
We continue to sit up when we hear “Straight, No Chaser,” marvel at the brilliance of
...October 10th, 2017
Eric Dolphy blowing out little curlicues
Booker Little baby-burping back to him
trumpeted weird diminutive 2-way messaging
thump thump thump and thump again
bass bass you grandfather clock clocking
October 6th, 2017
September 28th, 2017
This truly foreign language
absorbs me into its differences,
rosetta stone hidden
in a cave of similarities
certain words share
with those of spanish
September 16th, 2017
This famed jazz artist played the piano professionally as a seventh grader before switching to drums, learning to play in the styles of Chick Webb and Sid Catlett. Before forming his own band in the early 1950’s, he played with Mary Lou Williams in New York, toured the South with Fletcher Henderson’s band, and was the drummer in Billy Eckstine’s group from 1944 – 1947. Who is he?
Elvin Jones
Roy Haynes
Philly Joe Jones
Kenny Clarke
Jo Jones
Max Roach
Art Blakey
Go to the next page for the answer!
...
September 12th, 2017
He could only play
when he had the heart and hope
that a bit of heaven
would persist in his deliverance,
a warmth that resembled
those long summer afternoons
where the sun flowed
upon a crown of greens
beneath an ever present
September 11th, 2017
Allie drove her taxi with a smart ass attitude, smacking gum ceaselessly, and wore a Yankees cap backwards on her head on the job, even though she’d never watched a baseball game in her life, didn’t even like the game. Her dad had named her after a pitcher who’d won five straight World Series and Allie was always grateful that pitcher hadn’t been named Lefty or something like that.
Allie’s father had been the true baseball fan and Allie wore his cap in his memory. His real gift to her was love of music, jazz in particular. In her cab, she listened to WBGO, 88.3, remembering times she hung out with her dad in the garage listening to Miles Davis, Chick Corea, Wayne Shorter, experiments in sound, beautiful chaos while he fixed things. The garage was Bert’s space and his peace, or rather, the music was, and the smoke and silence that rose between them accentuated this. Whenever the strangers she drove around asked about her father, Allie always told them, “He went the way of the Marlboro man.” Cancer.
It surprised people to hear that she, a Millennial should enjoy jazz. “Jazz was like my Gerber food,” she liked to say. As a teen she dug hip hop enough to explore its fusion with jazz, but the fusion didn’t
...September 8th, 2017
A deep, raspy New Orleans jazz
Its staccato notes shoot up my pulse
My legs shiver from that long, wavy vibrato
Born-again in your love, I cry like a baby
Yearning to be
September 7th, 2017
all day a light breeze baptizes the landscape
gentle and captivating as a Paul Desmond solo
bushes rap windows and walls with rhythms
unusual and unexpected that Joe Morello would
approve would groove to and trees sway with
...September 1st, 2017
In the hazy glow of streetlights through the window
the jazz man sits
drinking in the music
sipping slowly with his mind
He thinks of all the past loves
the broken promises
the unpaid
August 24th, 2017
Being retired allows the occasional opportunity to lay around and revisit favorite music. Today was such a day…
My key takeaway from today is a reminder that the late trumpeter Kenny Dorham’s music absolutely smokes! For evidence of this, revisit his 1961 album Whistle Stop (including Hank Mobley on tenor) which jazz critic Gary Giddins calls “one of the great jazz albums,” and Una Mas from 1963, featuring the recording debut of tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson.
In the midst of all this listening, I ran across a colorful and short web biography of Dorham, a native of Austin, Texas. Written in the late-2000’s by
...August 15th, 2017
To understate the obvious, our world has not been the same since January 20. Science has become fiction, democratic institutions are being threatened, global relationships that have been nurtured for generations are devalued and misunderstood, and our world is in complete turmoil. Like Hillary or not (and God, how I liked her – her grace, intelligence, experience, resilience, strength, and compassion – all qualities we are starved for today), it is tough to argue with what is now clearly the most honest assessment of Donald Trump during the campaign, when she said, “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.” Alas, this most basic and obvious warning — which should have elicited a major national conversation before the election — got lost in the noise of campaign coverage more concerned with her oh-so-scandalous emails!
So this is where we are, living on the brink of catastrophic war due to our man-child president’s narcissism, his endless lies, and his addiction to
...August 10th, 2017
WHY HE ASKED
Bereft of family, his only voice
a sax that created a neighborhood
of lost love and no future,
he slipped into memory where his story
was etched into daguerreotypes,
sketches of abandonment and hints of
...August 2nd, 2017
Before his popularity peaked in the mid-1960’s with a #2 pop chart hit, this pianist’s trio included bassist Eldee Young and drummer Red Holt, and was initially known as the Gentlemen of Swing. Who was the piano player?
Duke Jordan
Ramsey Lewis
Ahmad Jamal
Keith Jarrett
Billy Taylor
Dave Brubeck
George Shearing
Go to the next page for the answer!
...
August 1st, 2017
I edit my life
clothesline pins & clips
hang to dry,
dirty laundry,
I turn poetic hedonistic
in my early 70’s
reviewing the joys
and the
July 30th, 2017
Paul Morris is a graphic designer and writer who collects album art of the 1940’s and 1950’s. He finds his examples of influential mid-century design in the used record stores of Portland, Oregon.
In this edition, Paul features album covers of his favorite pop singers of the 1950’s
July 29th, 2017
Clear my palate
so my mind wanders.
Flap down sweet
childhood memories.
Bare endless fields
of willowy cotton.
Open up vistas
of
July 22nd, 2017
dressed to slay
smokes and drinks every note
as if the night was terminal
and her table never lacks
for attention
July 20th, 2017
Wade missed the sweat. The sticky air that hugged you like a fat friend. The languid, dirty stench of swampy gutters. Of Bourbon street piss and puke. Of Dat Dogs at three in the morning, and the street mutts that cawed at the Mississippi. The rats and cockroaches scuttling around your shoes. The humidity. The heat.
He missed all of it.
New York was cold. Not just the weather, but the people, too. Hardened pedestrians crushed the MTA platforms like stone statues, eyes glazed onto their phones or the wall or the floor. No smiles. No inward space given away to strangers. They hugged into their
...July 18th, 2017
Teddy Wilson once said this about a fellow jazz pianist:
“That man had the most phenomenal musical gifts I’ve ever heard. He was miraculous. It’s like someone hitting a home run every time he picks up a bat. We became such fast friends that I was allowed to interrupt him anytime he was playing at the house parties in Toledo we used to make every night. When I asked him, he would stop and replay a passage very slowly, showing me the fingering on some of those runs of his. You just couldn’t figure them out by ear at the tempo he played them.”
Who is the pianist he is describing?
Bud Powell
Art Tatum
Oscar Peterson
Fats Waller
James P. Johnson
Willie “The Lion” Smith
Jelly Roll Morton
Go to the next page for the answer!
...
July 10th, 2017
piano dances listeners down the street
feet must move to keep up
crowds gather round
street life jumping this way and that
...July 1st, 2017
Zorida had two fingers wrapped
around the stem of her wine glass
but never took a sip
Few of us did
while ol’ Leroy Wilcox blew the
shit out of
his
...June 28th, 2017
Shit was flying everywhere
like sparks from welders’ tools.
They were putting something
together up there on stage –
June 26th, 2017
This trumpeter played with many famous bands in the 1940’s — including Lionel Hampton’s in 1941 — participated in the fabled bop sessions at Minton’s Playhouse and Monroe’s Uptown House, and is known as the “missing link” between trumpeters Roy Eldridge and Fats Navarro. Who is he?
Ruby Braff
Howard McGhee
Kenny Dorham
Freddie Hubbard
Buck Clayton
Benny Carter
Clifford Brown
Go to the next page for the answer!
...
June 25th, 2017
when you fell out of a window
… you made me give up on you.
(maybe I shouldn’t have).
when the movie about you
recently came out: all of us
believed ethan hawke
was you, in “born to
June 22nd, 2017
In this August, 2016 27, 2016 Detroit Free Press piece by Mark Stryker, Ron Carter – the most recorded bass player in the history of jazz – talks about the ten favorite recordings he appeared on during his distinguished career…
_____
Saying the Detroit-bred bassist Ron Carter has made a lot of recordings is like saying American swimmer Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympic athlete of all time, has won a lot of medals.
Carter, who was born in Ferndale and graduated from Cass Tech, has more than 2,221 recording credits to his name. According to the Guinness World Records, he is the most
...June 20th, 2017
The purpose of motion begins,
A clear mind, aware and in focus,
Ahead, the optical pathway lies empty and silent,
Slow at the start, breathing steady,
Stepping through the changes,
Favouring a motif,
Blowing hard,
As the intensity builds,
June 18th, 2017
Swoosh! Shhh. Shhhhh! I hear the ear numbing screech and the train finally stops moving. Nine seconds and the loud beep will announce the door opening. Heels clack against the icy early morning pavement. The mass of cigarette smoke hazes my sense of direction until we finally reach the end of the Binario 12 and my ears welcome the familiar sound of strings.
It’s distant and quite mellow but I can still make out the song. It’s a new one. He’s only played it a few times. I know it. Everyone loves it because it’s from that movie. The one with
...June 15th, 2017
Them knees,
full of bees again,
two gates
flapping in a stuttering breeze,
hands rapping
tables, thighs,
high up on
...June 12th, 2017
You bring out the jazz in me
The art blakey, max roach the roy haynes in me
Seeing you shake your hips like
Congas…the way you move your hips to a mamba
My heart pounding like drums inside my head
But this fever won’t put me in bed
Instead I get out on the dance floor
June 11th, 2017
That winter we lived among mice in the Berkshires, in a little cabin set not far from a large white clapboard house that belonged to the owner Betty, who was a widow. Two steps up to the cabin did nothing to keep the mice away. Their constant tweaking and bustle made me feel I was living in an indoor forest. Betty, who was a nice old lady, warned us. “You’ll never be able to keep the mice out. If you can stand them, the place is yours.”
We had come up to the Berkshires figuring we might have to rough it, but had no idea. Van and I had been together about two years then. The summer before we had been married on a beach in
...June 6th, 2017
Michael continued down the darkening street. A gust of wind blew off the Lake. His eyes watered. He turned his back to the wind, and the wind blew hard, unfurling his coat and his pant legs. He bent into it to soften its assault, but he soon turned his back to protect his face against the onslaught. A man and a woman hurried across the street, almost bumping into him, holding hands as if one would fly away. The lid blew off of a trashcan and crashed wildly into the street; a car rattled by up ahead at the intersection. When at last the street was empty with no more cars and no more men or women about, Michael found himself alone but for a few
...May 24th, 2017
In the circus mind of my dying spirit
I listen for the tinkling keys of Monk-
Yeah, Monk Mingus moonlight madness
I long to be, though tonight it’s a new
moon, meaning no moon and my madness
May 19th, 2017
May 18th, 2017
It’s the anybody;
the horned rimmed glasses,
book reader, bus rider, bow tie,
felt hat or tattoo that holds the
jazz. Distilled in flavor, an aroma
gentle and fierce. Its nail scratching,
May 13th, 2017
The wordsmith paints a picture,
A kind of bebop exchange,
Rambling around the neighbourhood,
Conversing apropos,
Curbside to parkside,
Phrasing with style,
May 8th, 2017
Somewhere between the wide open spaces
And those tiny, secret places in the heart,
The sound of nursery rhymes and temple chimes
Mingle with incense and nonsense
Until even the air has to smile.
That’s where you’ll find me, in my hiding place,
Making up rhymes and trying to keep time
To the pace of the
May 4th, 2017
Five stylized photographs taken during an April, 2017 Blue Note performance…
...April 30th, 2017
the kitchen sits
in fruit soup…
steamed apricot
mango shadow
down thru spinning
smoke into hot light
blink beat
body ends dangle
April 29th, 2017
Paul Morris is a graphic designer and writer who collects album art of the 1940’s and 1950’s. He finds his examples of influential mid-century design in the used record stores of Portland, Oregon.
_____
In this edition, Paul features samples of Alex Steinweiss album covers, created during the early 1940’s, at the beginning of his career
...April 26th, 2017
2017 is the 100th birthday year of several jazz immortals – among them Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Buddy Rich, and, today, Ella Fitzgerald.
As a young and naïve jazz fan in the 1960’s, like Louis Armstrong, Ella seemed “square” to me – her voice too sweet and happy for my ears, especially when compared to the singer who most moved my soul to discover more of the music, Billie Holiday. Plus, the Songbook series she became internationally famous for seemed too smartly packaged, slick in a Madison-Avenue-way that tore me away from the bins that stocked her record albums.
Over the years, however, I eventually came to appreciate and cherish her, especially as I learned the courageous and inspirational nature of her biography, and played her recordings with Chick Webb, and dug the collaborations with the Ink Spots, Louis Jordan, and eventually, of course,
...April 25th, 2017
Do you remember growing up and always running into that one kid that just could do it all? Or at least did something better than you that you just wished you could do? It could have been art, sports, holding his breath under water – whatever it was it seemed it was a natural gift for him, like he was born with it. Who didn’t wish he or she was “born with it”?
During my childhood, I was always told I was special. Sure we all hear that growing up, and each one of us believes it. No one could make a bed as well as you, no one could
...April 24th, 2017
Watch her closely; loosen your clothes.
Her quiet storm makes love to listeners
in the heat of each performance,
cuts through crap, produces mystic music…
She’ll seduce you with contralto soul
until you lose your mind,
...April 19th, 2017
IT WAS ALL ABOUT SAX
when man said the wind man
blowing when does the wind do
its voodoo upon leaf and bud
bloody the morning the storm
warning it is on its way its windy
winding wickedly roaring crack
thunder and snap way paving
the air for
April 12th, 2017
This pianist with a “categorization problem” is known primarily for his songwriting. His songs have been recorded by the Who, Leon Russell and Bonnie Raitt, and is admired by the likes of Tom Waits, John Mayall, the Rolling Stones and Van Morrison. He credited the songwriter Percy Mayfield, “the Poet Laureate of the Blues,” as being a major inspiration on his songwriting. Who is he?
Dave Frishberg
Mose Allison
Ramsey Lewis
Phineas Newborn, Jr.
Vince Guaraldi
Tommy Flanagan
Paul Bley
Go to the next page for the answer!
...
April 10th, 2017
Saxophone Girl
She sat comfortably cross-legged
On a straightback chair,
Outside the small studio practice room
...April 7th, 2017
The dank and chilly hall echoed with a Marksmen rehearsal taking place. Lea and her spanking-new group rehearsed their music on a stage bordered by tables holding overturned chairs. And as David sat unnoticed in the dark hall, Lea’s caramel voice melted to run down the walls, and warm the empty pockets in his heart.
*Daydreams, I’ve got daydreams galore.
Cigarette ashes, there they go on the floor.”
Scooting around, he wrestled with the chair’s wooden slats and wobbly legs versus his long limbs.
And while Lea was singing the third stanza, *”Let them laugh, let them frown … “ David was plotting his exit from the trailer. He was so engrossed with his plans that he didn’t notice the
...April 5th, 2017
Unlike New York City
L.A. is a woman who will love you back
But she gives her love freely and often
On a not so beautiful morning,
I went to the movies and thought
about you as the credits rolled.
Tried to wash you out of my hair,
but love lingers like a
April 2nd, 2017
Tomorrow is opening day of the 2017 baseball season. The first day of major league baseball always provokes simultaneous thoughts of renewal and nostalgia – the return of sunshine (at last!) and an optimistic spirit is coupled with the thoughts of days gone by, when the likes of Mays and Mantle and Aaron roamed the outfield and Ellington and Armstrong and Miles set the rhythm of our culture.
Baseball and jazz are well connected, as theorized by trombonist Alan Ferber, who wrote that “baseball players and jazz musicians both strive for a perfect balance between disciplined practice and spontaneity.” They also shared the spotlight in popular culture, when
...April 1st, 2017
Someone in the back of my
VW bus said it would be good to
turn our rock & roll band
into a jazz trio.
I turned off the radio. Complete
silence except for
the whistle of wheat as we swept
through Nebraska
Then Pete said that he could
...March 31st, 2017
You may have noticed that Russia is in the news a bit these days. (It is tough to avoid). So, while revisiting James Lincoln Collier’s 1989 biography Benny Goodman and the Swing Era, the story of Goodman’s 1962 U.S. State Department sponsored tour of the Soviet Union caught my eye.
Collier reminds us that Goodman and his group – the first American band to tour the Soviet Union since the 1920’s – was considered by many to be too “old fashioned” for the times and that “many critics felt that the Ellington band, playing a more complicated and perhaps more worthy kind of music” should have been chosen for the tour instead. Nonetheless, given Goodman’s popularity around the world, he was considered a
...March 21st, 2017
swing swagger and sway
she bop she bop drift those feet
first one way then another
swirl round and round and back again
light up the floor fly up above
March 13th, 2017
Years later he became a professor, a scholar—wrote a well-received book on epistemology. But back then he was just a guy in love.
They’d taken a cheap room in Venice for the summer, a run-down place a couple of blocks from Dockweiler Beach. You could always smell the sea, its powerful mix of salt freshness and rot. He’d never lived with a woman before; she’d had other boyfriends. She was from back-county San Diego, told him she’d come to L.A. looking for a real life. He’d just graduated from
...March 11th, 2017
Thank you
For showing me
That black comes in
All shades
That being corny can
Be cool
That even
March 8th, 2017
As a child, this vocalist — most famous as the “canary female” in the pioneering ensemble that revolutionized vocal music with the 1957 album Sing a Song of Basie — had an acting role in the Our Gang series. Who is she?
June Christie
Chris Conner
Annie Ross
Julie London
Helen Morgan
Martha Raye
Jo Stafford
Go to the next page for the answer!
...March 6th, 2017
I wake up when the door opens. Instant-awake, alert. I’m staring at the ceiling, at the ornate medallion in its center. Late-night city glow from the windows casts awkward shadows on the plaster. The light clicks on, and I hear a gasp. I feel a sympathetic shot of adrenaline hit my chest. I look toward the door, and there’s a woman there, a stranger. A beauty, too, dressed in a black pants-suit, purse slung over a shoulder, the jacket cut and fitted to her slim waist matador-style. Beneath the jacket, she’s wearing a white blouse with an enormous collar that flares out over her shoulders and breast, like gull wings. Her hair is loose, brown, shoulder-length, streaked with bits of blonde, her face around her dark eyes a mix of fear and puzzlement.
“Who are you?” she says, her hand still on the light switch. “What are you doing here?” Her voice quivers.
I look around. The ceiling looks like my
...March 4th, 2017
Many thanks to Doug Ramsey, honored jazz journalist and publisher of the blog Rifftides, who during his visit to Portland to cover the PDX Jazz Festival, took the time to meet with me and learn about the “Jazz in the Schools” program we instituted at PDX Jazz. You can read his report and get information about the program by clicking here.
...February 22nd, 2017
Yes, it is hot,
night sweats beneath
Spanish moss and the terror in trees
now knowing no cover of darkness
to greet a Sunday morning
10:22 a.m.
under the stairs
16th Street Baptist Church.
“Three minutes”
and the siren wails
February 19th, 2017
Wind-swept sheets of rain, notes
gusting from Oscar Peterson’s fingers, grounded,
soaked up by rock-steady Ray
February 13th, 2017
She didn’t want to drink
anymore
so we walked hand-in-hand
half-way home before
it dawned on us that we had
a car
parked behind the
February 11th, 2017
Paul Morris is a longtime friend and contributing writer of Jerry Jazz Musician. He currently writes “Cover Stories with Paul Morris,” a frequent column about classic record album art and design.
Paul shares a memory of the legendary jazz writer and journalist Nat Hentoff, who died on January 7 at the age of 91.
_____
In the late 1970’s I was a jazz fan who liked reading about the music as much as listening to it. My next music choice often came from a recommendation from a jazz critic’s liner notes or articles. Nat Hentoff proved to be a reliable guide in his early jazz books and the occasional article.
These years were the heyday of the Village Voice, where Hentoff was a regular. He concentrated on First Amendment issues in his Voice column, but from time to time he would mention
...January 30th, 2017
Jeffrey’s fingers hovered inches above the ivory. His heart pounded. The oak bench creaked as he leaned forward, only the toes of his scuffed leather shoes making contact with the floor. The hand-written notes on the page in front of him bounced up and down with every panting breath. He recognized most of the squiggles and lines cascading up and down the staff, but he couldn’t read a single word that surrounded them. Ms. Joetta’s voice echoed in his head, reverberated out of the hole in his threadbare fedora. Play, son. The first chance you get, and don’t look back. He could feel lightning in his fingers, almost driving him past the fear deep in his
...January 28th, 2017
In addition to co-leading a quintet with Zoot Sims, this tenor saxophonist may be best known as the man who replaced Herbie Steward as one of the “Four Brothers” in Woody Herman’s Second Herd. Who is he?
Art Pepper
Al Cohn
Stan Getz
Bob Cooper
Charlie Ventura
Boots Mussulli
Charlie Mariano
Go to the next page for the answer!
...January 26th, 2017
In the late 1950’s, the photographer W. Eugene Smith happened to be Manhattan neighbors with musicians Dick Cary and Hall Overton, who used their apartment as a gathering place for the great jazz artists of the era. In this small apartment space, Smith catalogued the lives of the likes of Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Lee Konitz in 4,000 hours of recordings and 40,000 photographs. Among the most noteworthy is a recording of Monk and Hall Overton as they rehearse for their famous 1959 Town Hall recording.
The ongoing effort preserving this work known as “The Jazz Loft Project” includes the musical recordings and photos as well as conversations among the
...January 19th, 2017
His fingers move
with sounds of rain,
while clouds roll
within eyes of long years.
Sweat marks the work undone,
A river hammer beats
streams of jazz
into his
January 12th, 2017
I was eighteen when I read Nat Hentoff’s Jazz Is, and it changed my life. I’d always thought good jazz was just the crafting of pretty notes with a smooth feel. I’d never imagined it could be a “cry for justice.” Or a captivating tour through a heart lay bare. The greatest jazz goes even beyond that: the symphony of a soul freshly released and taking flight, nothing less than what Nat calls “spirit-music.”
As readers know, Nat Hentoff was far more than a jazz authority. He was a spectacular writer and a freedom-of-speech icon with no tolerance for hypocrisy. He was a great hero of
...January 11th, 2017
a leaf flutters rises and glides
to its rest a blues note
in autumn as a slow rain falls
at the end of a windy day
and a scattering of distant
voices creates
January 11th, 2017
I am saddened to read of the passing of journalist Nat Hentoff, who died yesterday at the age of 91. Hentoff’s work was published by the Village Voice for 50 years, and was also frequently found in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, the Wall Street Journal, and Jazz Times. He was also editor of Downbeat during the mid-1950’s. There are many obituaries available to read about Nat and his career – including Robert McFaddin’s in today’s New York Times.
As I began publishing original content on Jerry Jazz Musician in 1999, I had the privilege of having my site embraced by the three most prominent jazz writers of the time, Gary Giddins, Stanley Crouch, and Nat Hentoff. All three of them got involved in Jerry Jazz Musician in their own way.
Giddins — who I was able to catch up with during a recent trip I took to New York — and I developed an interview series called
...January 8th, 2017
At the abandoned jazz club,
where I once debuted,
only spiders and rodents
reside behind the acoustical panels
that once resonated my dreams.
I see my distorted image
reflected upon the scarred ride cymbal
of a headless drum set
and feel like an intruder,
disrupting a Buddy Rich riff
when he
December 16th, 2016
Where have all the flowers gone?
Have I been asleep?
Gone
The brilliant yellow sunshine crispness of
June Christy….
The seductive red rouge intimacy of
Jeri Southern…
The smooth rich rose caress of
December 14th, 2016
This holiday season, you may want to consider making “Millionaire Meatloaf,” a dish the late, great bass player Milt Hinton and trombonist Tyree Glenn conjured up while touring with Cab Calloway. This story is not only one of food, but also of the culinary creativity required of jazz musicians during a time of segregation, when even getting a meal was a tremendous challenge.
...December 13th, 2016
Her voice shredded, turned to gravel
by cigarettes and whiskey, she navigates
grocery aisles and checkout lines
as sotto voce she sings old songs
both jazz and country. People stare
in amazement as her ruined voice
elicits tears from listening bystanders.
In her living room she croons with
December 10th, 2016
“What a shame,” people always said whenever they saw the two of them, Jeremy and Jade. What a shame the beauty of the boy had escaped the girl, who had her mother’s small oval face and father’s prominent nose and small dark eyes that were filled with a peculiar, almost unnatural intensity. “Such a shame,” relatives observed unabashedly at family gatherings. The remaining phrase that hung in air unspoken was, ”that she isn’t the beautiful one. “
To herself in the mirror, Jade’s own face and visage seemed fine, just a part of her, not even all that consequential. Didn’t brains and character matter more? She was striking much in the way Zelda Fitzgerald had been—a beauty you could not capture in photographs, more in movement, gesture, articulation. Somewhere, not far from the small, provincial town where Jade lived, where people stared at you if you did not fit a mold, there were people like her who were different and proud of their differences and she looked forward to meeting them one day. In the meantime, she would have to deal with challenges.
Growing up, many of them had to do with her brother, who was two years older. Although Jade garnered high marks in school, not much was made of it so
...December 8th, 2016
after playing, my upright
kay bass, my fingers
still loving, the birds eye maple
neck & strings:
my left arm
hurt the next day.
after playing my old
...November 14th, 2016
I had them
all down
pat
from the winged
Studebaker
to the old
Henry J
November 10th, 2016
“Miles & Me”
slash here
semi-colon there
dash and a
period
comma down to
colon
lead me back
to quotes
November 6th, 2016
In the back of a closet, on top of a shelf, under two empty shoeboxes, and behind a small, carry-on bag lurked a humped, black, plastic case. Years of knocking about in the backs of vans and offstage in smoky clubs had etched lines into its surface. Every song had scuffed another memory: Dewey Redman’s “Imagination” or Clifford Brown’s “Night in Tunisia”. An accidental kick from a ska fan had left a dent even after the shell had popped back into place. For twenty years, it had remained closed, a relic of temptation, while inside a saxophone slumbered, waiting for its silent call to beckon again. It was patient. It had time.
Nathan Gold heard the call. It was a Saturday morning in mid-spring as he returned from racing his mountain bike along the Long Beach boardwalk. Pumping the pedals, he glided up the
...November 1st, 2016
Best known as the trumpeter who replaced Cootie Williams in Duke Ellington’s orchestra, he was also one of the finest jazz violinists of the 1940’s. Who was he?
Eddie South
Claude Williams
Stuff Smith
Johnny Dunn
Ray Nance
Tommy Ladnier
Jabbo Smith
Go to the next page for the answer!
...October 28th, 2016
… a great song
by frank loesser
played by gene harris, piano,
& his quartet.
played by two black guys
& two white guys …
jazz brothers, in the
...October 18th, 2016
A marsh harrier soars above the Norfolk broads
circling higher and higher
rather like a Gillespie trumpet solo that rises and rises
to dizzying heights of pitch and volume
eventually the bird slides behind billowing clouds
and vanishes into distance
so the trumpet reaches and
...October 4th, 2016
John McCluskey, a contributing poet to Jerry Jazz Musician, submitted six photographs of jazz musicians he took while recently visiting New Orleans. John writes that the shots were “deliberately processed…in the most colorful way possible to illustrate the sensibility of the performers.”
These photos feature musicians performing on Royal Street, New Orleans, in April 2016.
...September 29th, 2016
Carlito Dumas didn’t leave his
drums at intermission,
just lit a cigarette and stared
into space
From our small candle-lit tables
some of us glanced at him —
Would he rattle off a jazzy solo
as a legacy, his
September 27th, 2016
There had to be hundreds of people standing in the rain, waiting to get into Misty’s Supper Club on Lenox Avenue for my brother Ishmael’s memorial. I swallowed the lump of grief in the back of my throat and surveyed the crowd, fans and protégé’s of his music, as varied as a pot of jambalaya.
Some people recognized me from seeing
...September 20th, 2016
For years, the autobiography proved elusive,
speeding east like the double-jointed run
that skipped from white keys to black,
soldiers chased from Central Avenue battles.
Then the book took a rest, hiding out
in a nondescript store among academic texts,
tomes whose covers bore geometric shapes.
Cardboard screamed orange, red, and white,
the slow burn of a
September 13th, 2016
Paul Morris is a graphic designer and writer who collects album art of the 1940’s and 1950’s. He finds his examples of influential mid-century design in the used record stores of Portland, Oregon.
In this edition, Paul features examples of vintage kitsch on several themes
...September 6th, 2016
I watch my hand remove the phone from the wall above the couch’s arm and there is a sweat in my ear as I hear a distant Miles Davis. I am called by the distorted voice of Miles Davis rasping my name.
John, he says, are you busy?
I let my eyes blur into my mother’s sofa, melting a monotonous no out of my mouth toward the receiver. I feel the room sloshing peacefully in waves around me and the buzzing of my lips from my mouthpiece and reed. My saxophone sits strewn across the floor along with my
...September 3rd, 2016
Long ago
in quiet caverns,
summer breezes
wrought with song
brought secrets
of the forest–
shared earth songs
nurtured through
...September 2nd, 2016
Rikki spun, spun
and leaped, twirled
and dipped,
James Brown
on the jukebox, the small
bar filled with smoke, clinking
glasses, Filipinas in short dresses,
and a couple dozen G.I.’s profane,
obscene, and three-quarters in the bag;
Rikki, half-black, half-
Filipino, ten, living
in alleys and under bars, danced
August 25th, 2016
Bobby Hutcherson, the most eminent postbop jazz vibraphonist who helped define the sound of Blue Note Records during the 1960’s and 70’s, has died. Described by contemporary vibes player Stefon Harris as “by far the most harmonically advanced person to ever play the vibraphone,” his career included the release of more than 40 albums as leader, and as a prominent sideman on many great records, including Eric Dolphy’s classic Out to Lunch and Jackie McLean’s One Step Beyond. I saw him many years ago at Kimball’s in Oakland (long since shuttered), an exciting set that, if memory serves, included
...August 16th, 2016
“I don’t know…I still don’t see it.” I grumble to myself, sloping my head down in a perfectly coordinated position with the rest of my body. Slope. Coordinated. It all just makes me think of math. Math. “That’s it,” I tell myself silently, still looking around the empty halls, though no one is there. I sigh. I suppose it may not really be a fact, but everyone knows that statistically minded people, like me, see numbers. But people like her – well, I guess they see what I’m looking at. “No,” I run a hand through my gelled hair. She would see it all differently. What did she say again? I check my phone and then casually hold up what she said it would look like to the picture. “A black parked car with white windows near the dock in a blazing sunlight overlooking the ocean.” I focus on the
...August 13th, 2016
He was becoming the ground.
Saturating the soil with jazz sweat
as he loosened the lines to men
and women and the breaths that seek
the flame of him
and the fire shared to ears that hear.
August 11th, 2016
Paul Morris is a graphic designer and writer who collects album art of the 1940’s and 1950’s. He finds his examples of influential mid-century design in the used record stores of Portland, Oregon.
In this edition, Paul features choice selections from Decca Records
...August 9th, 2016
The faraway trumpet’s trill drifted into the home we shared. The tune stirred the heavy air. It should have been spring weather, but a heatwave had taken over our parish. It made the air heavy and made us languid during the days.
Mama hummed along with the hand-me-down song while she worked, stirring the wash or cooking supper or mixing herbs. Her mama taught her to hear it, same as she taught me. It was as constant as the wind.
Mama’s gray strands peeked from beneath a dark blue kerchief, the majority braided then twirled in an age-thinned bun. She didn’t know how old she was. Best she could figure, she was
...August 1st, 2016
Playing bottleneck guitar, an octogenarian.
His arthritic fingers coax a life’s history,
ring changes of love and loss,
sketch joy’s birth in pain,
the rhythm an invitation
...July 25th, 2016
I was playing my weekly gig at Café Reinhardt when Bella, one of the waitresses, whispered in my ear, “They want you out back.”
She had disturbed me from a zone. I had been through all of my arrangements and was improving on the chords to “Minor Swing.”
“They?” I asked.
She shrugged her shoulders. Straight to the point, no small talk, Bella was my kind of gal. In the second it took to place my guitar on my guitar stand a million thoughts circled around in my mind. Did Chad, the drummer, want to borrow money again? Had the musician’s union caught on to the fact I wasn’t paying my dues? Another one of the agent Jimmy’s scams? Groupies? Oh yeah, jazz musicians haven’t had groupies under the age of forty-five since the 1940s.
I stood up, and as Bella was strolling to a table near the front door, she said, “Take your guitar.”
Ah, nothing complicated just someone wanting to test out my chops before a gig. People can be peculiar when it comes to inviting musicians into their home. They want to meet you, form a relationship, and get the feel for
...July 20th, 2016
Yesterday’s Travel section in the New York Times was led by a fabulous feature by Sloane Crosley, “Exploring the France that Josephine Baker Loved,” which described her world while living in the Chateau des Milandes — the castle overlooking the Dordogne in the Périgord region in which she raised her 12 adopted children. Crosley’s piece is a tantalizing invitation to visit a beautiful region of the world, while reminding us of the complexity of her career and life in France.
...July 18th, 2016
I wonder if it will take another body to stream into the Infinite….
For this was the odd idea that stirred me eerie
Like a push into the wild past from my future spirit to relive my final day,
Or a siren calling me to steal the virtuose of fire.
I was looking for Charlie Parker that night,
Improvising my footsteps under porch lights which spotted
July 13th, 2016
T-Bone Williams was the first
to use the
double-D harmonica &
he employed some lyrics that
seemed compatible —
this was way before Bobby
Dylan
sometime in the late ‘40s when
he did his 12-string
guitar experiments
July 11th, 2016
It was a persistent and gentle nudge—always was. He knew who was prodding him and what she would say without turning, so he continued to run his fingers up and down the keys—there was a major seventh followed by a fifth interval; repeat several times, arpeggiate, transpose—
“Sir? I’m sorry sir—”
The nudging again. He spoke as if distracted—which he was: “Yes?”
“Some of the people are trying to work,” she said.
“Have them come and talk to me,” he replied, and continued to play.
The barista was put-off for a moment, but she jostled him again. “If you could just play a little quieter—”
The words were like daggers. They weren’t new, they weren’t original, and they brought hate like bile to his mind and body; coursing in and throughout him like a thousand
...July 9th, 2016
Paul Morris is a graphic designer and writer who collects album art of the 1940’s and 1950’s. He finds his examples of influential mid-century design in the used record stores of Portland, Oregon. In this edition, Paul writes about album covers picturing designer furniture
...July 8th, 2016
Why is my race your foe needling you to lord over me, saving me from my own savagery?
Why is my skin color a phobia gnawing at your innards,
making door locks snap as I approach?
Why is my punishment swift revealing deep seated prejudices, exposing unrecognized biases?
Why is my street flashing “blue”
when verdicts and fines from the 2008 meltdown are reversed?
Why is my excessive “heat” normal
...July 7th, 2016
Young and Gifted and Little Girl Blue
wants only to play classical ways of
Bach, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Beethoven,
but Curtis – Philly, perhaps Carnegie too, whether prejudice or preference,
doesn’t think her particular hue
belongs with the masters, so she skips circus tents, every star in the sky,
June 24th, 2016
Who was occasionally billed as “The World’s Fastest Saxophonist”?
Illinois Jacquet
Flip Phillips
Ike Quebec
Charlie Ventura
Charlie Parker
Arnett Cobb
Johnny Griffin
Go to the next page for the answer!
...
June 23rd, 2016
During the 1950’s and 60’s, when Louis Armstrong was one of the most famous people in the world, his opinions were often reported on, and would at times ruffle feathers on both sides of a political argument.
I recently came across an April 27, 1960 newspaper article that was published at a time when Armstrong was caught between 1) advocating for his country (while on tour as the country’s “jazz ambassador”) and 2) for his fellow African-American countrymen in the midst of the struggle for civil rights.
Titled “Satchmo Silent on Racial Crisis,” (from an unknown source but catalogued in the Armstrong file at the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University) this excerpt – transcribed at the time by the reporter in a
...June 15th, 2016
Barnacles scratch the hull of a voice
that grinds coral to grit in salty water
while a tune plays the tide
which whispers sandy beaches
and blows free on the wind.
Ships far from port halt in the night
to hear the fog-horn song,
to feel, to know and share
June 7th, 2016
Chet Baker Sang
in velvety slender voice
thin on gender identification
thick with fracture-able delicacy
scared it could fall away forever at it’s very next note.
Wispy high clouds of mellifluous tones,
...May 25th, 2016
In a brilliant piece titled “Universal Consciousness: The Spiritual Awakening of Alice Coltrane,” Britt Robson writes that “the closer one examines the genuinely phenomenal life, music and spirit of Alice Coltrane, the more inevitable it seems that she will also someday receive her proper due. The most striking aspect of her biography is that she became a master musician and a spiritual guru in the same way, by carrying forth all her accumulated wisdom in a welcoming synthesis, rather than shedding, judging and discriminating her way to ‘growth’ and ‘maturity.'”
This extensive biography focuses on Alice’s musical path, her marriage to John Coltrane, her ensuing spiritual awakening, and her influence on
...May 23rd, 2016
Paul Morris is a graphic designer and writer who collects album art of the 1940’s and 1950’s. He finds his examples of influential mid-century design in the used record stores of Portland, Oregon. In this edition, Paul writes about the album cover art of Erik Nitsche, a pioneer of modern design
...May 21st, 2016
Grabbing the blue basket of bottles I’d promised
to take to a recycle plant and then forgotten,
I drove too fast down a twisting mountain road,
safe in a young man’s faith that death is abstract
truth until a radio voice — speaking over Johnny Hodges’
sweet tenor on his “Take the A Train” — intones,
May 17th, 2016
PIANO MAN BLUES
Back room –
I sit & light a cigarette,
staring at my hands;
I can barely feel them
Doc says it’s neuropathy
probably pre-diabetic
I tell him there is
numbness in the
May 2nd, 2016
“Liner Notes for ‘Stardust’ — In Seven Choruses” is a cycle of short poems framed as imaginary liner notes and prompted by poet Doug Fowler’s favorite musical covers of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust.” In essence, according to Fowler, they are “imaginary liner notes for a real song about an imaginary song about love.”
The cycle is also partially a tribute to Chu Berry, who died as the result of a car accident in Conneaut, Ohio, in 1941, not far from where Fowler lives.
...April 25th, 2016
The other day, while stumbling around the Internet, I came across the first official Playboy interview — that of Alex Haley’s 1962 conversation with Miles Davis. The interview was published in the September edition and was considered quite controversial at the time. Consider this comment from the interview, and keep in mind what the world was like in 1962, and the shock it may have caused in certain segments of our society: “In high school I was best in music class on the trumpet, but the prizes went to the boys with blue eyes. I made up my mind to outdo anybody white on my horn.”
Now 54 years later, in the context of today’s world the interview doesn’t seem as controversial, but it remains a significant window to the soul of the era’s most revered
...April 22nd, 2016
I’ll have it spare as the reverence you feel for silence
in your long melodic lines, where the music cries
in the sacred spaces you leave between the notes…
I’ll have the long curve of your back bending over
your shadow on the keys as you play “Turn Out
the Stars”, written for your father when he died,
Blue Notes stretching out as if you’d have them last
...April 15th, 2016
This saxophonist’s first important jobs were during the 1940’s with Lionel Hampton, Fletcher Henderson, Louis Armstrong’s big band, and Billy Eckstine’s Orchestra. Additionally, he was a Savoy Records recording artist as a leader before being an important part of the scene on Los Angeles’ Central Avenue. Who was he?
Stan Getz
Wardell Gray
Dexter Gordon
Bob Cooper
Gene Ammons
Sonny Stitt
Brew Moore
Go to the next page for the answer!
...
April 14th, 2016
The revival of the landmark all-black Broadway musical “Shuffle Along” – originally produced in 1921 and opening at New York’s Music Box Theatre on April 28 – reminds us of the great Noble Sissle/Eubie Blake compositions (most famously “Love Will Find a Way” and “I’m Just Wild About Harry”), but also the challenges (and humiliation) performers, theater owners and audiences faced within a racist American society. “’Shuffle’ wasn’t exactly forward thinking on race,” John Jeremiah Sullivan writes in a recent New York Times feature titled “American Shuffle.” “It broke boundaries, no doubt, but mainly through its success, and by having great pop tunes. Otherwise, it was a blacks-in-blackface production.”
“An area in which the show genuinely pushed things forward,” Sullivan writes, “[was] romance.” This during a time when white America found black sexuality
...April 11th, 2016
Oh, Mister Silver, please please please,
don’t make me beat my feet
no more no more no more.
I’ve been finger poppin’, thinking
about Juicy Lucy, dreaming
of some sweet stuff,
wanting to come on home to some
...April 9th, 2016
In a just recorded podcast, two of this era’s most accomplished jazz writers — the New York Times’ Ben Ratliff and Nate Chinen — discuss the two first-run biopics now out on Miles Davis and Chet Baker, the ingenious trumpeters who each experienced great drama in their professional careers and personal lives, most obviously their chemical dependency and great personal charisma. You can hear the journalists discuss
...April 8th, 2016
Some lives turn out healthy and long, some more fulfilled than long. Bro was sick and much older. He passed away last spring, so his voice sounds both new and familiar to me, as it whispers,
“Go to my place and visit my old room.”
“Why?”
“I’ll let you know.”
An ascending airliner outside wakes me up, and I realize I was dreaming. I’m still yawning as I look up a weekend bus, but the online timetable shows more blanks than connections.
It’s dry September weather, so I grab my key to his door, fill up my water bottle, and make this a bike trip in heat haze instead, like the
...April 6th, 2016
No trickster god,
demon, savior, saint or
train wreck, but human, very.
Not irrational, primal,
primitive, dark unconscious,
exile or martyr.
No more priapic
than your Sunday morning
erection. Not lost or liminal.
March 26th, 2016
In an opinion piece titled “Hollywood’s Fake Version of Nina Simone,” the New York Times’ Brent Staples takes on the decision to cast Zoe Saldana as Ms. Simone in the upcoming film Nina. The casting controversy involves whether or not Ms. Saldana’s skin is dark enough, especially considering that, as Staples writes, “Ms. Simone’s embrace of her blackness was essential to both her art and who she was as a person, and that any number of talented
...March 21st, 2016
Man of the blues,
Sing me a song
Plead, moan and holler those blues.
Sing…
Of love and passion
And joy and sadness;
Of being alone
and being together;
Of payback to enemies,
March 18th, 2016
Gerry Mulligan
My Funny Valentine
What is There to Say?
Swinging baritone sax
soaring trumpet
wrap my
funny valentine
in cool love
...March 16th, 2016
Elvin Jones
the Bear
He surrounded us with his sound
He was the safety net when the tightrope
walkers began
Can you hear him?
There is a new thunder in the sky
March 8th, 2016
The port of Casablanca was crammed with Vichy officers, soldiers, cops, thieves and criminals. Each night I slept behind sand dunes, and each morning, washed in the freezing sea and shook myself dry in the winter wind. My shirt and trousers were stiff with salt and stuck to my chest, arms and legs. I figured it would be easy to steal a sweater or coat, grab it off a café chair while its owner ate and drank. But each time I stuck my head inside a restaurant and started weaving between tables, the owner threatened to call the cops.
No cops, no officers, no father whipping me, never again. I’d lie low, steal what I needed, and owe no one a damned thing.
Ten days after I arrived in Casablanca, a shipload of
...March 2nd, 2016
This pioneer pianist of the bop era had short term associations with Benny Carter, Boyd Raeburn, Lester Young, and Charlie Parker, but led such a troubled life that he only recorded once between 1947 – 1971. Who is he?
Mel Powell
Jess Stacy
Joe Albany
Dodo Marmarosa
Lennie Tristano
Al Haig
Hampton Hawes
Phineas Newborn
Go to the next page for the answer!
...
March 1st, 2016
Paul Morris is a graphic designer and writer who collects album art of the 1940’s and 1950’s. He finds his examples of influential mid-century design in the used record stores of Portland, Oregon. In this edition, Paul shares some jazz covers from the 1950’s.
...February 26th, 2016
naked
her scar
Miles’ howling horn
spring morning sparrow
tripping across my sun-splashed lawn
Thelonious kisses the keys
February 16th, 2016
So many great songs to choose from for marking Valentine’s Day…The standard that most immediately comes to mind is an obvious choice, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s “My Funny Valentine.” Written for their 1937 Broadway musical Babes in Arms, the piece was overshadowed on Broadway (and in the film version starring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland) by “Where or When,” “I Wish I Were in Love Again,” and “The Lady is a Tramp,” and was not made relevant until Frank Sinatra’s recording of it in 1953. It was eventually recorded by more than 600 artists on countless albums, and became synonymous with Chet Baker, who recorded it over 100 times. Will Friedwald, author of Stardust Melodies: The Biography of Twelve of America’s Most Popular Songs — an entertaining and essential work of popular music history — wrote that “the tune could be said to follow Baker from the grave, since it’s usually included in memorial tributes to him.”
Friedwald writes, “What makes the whole [song] so remarkable is the happy/sad nature of the lyric, brilliantly mirroring the major/minor nature of the music. It’s a love song, but far from those ‘I love you and everything’s rosy’ tunes so popular in the twenties (vis-a-vis Iriving Berlin’s ‘Blue Skies’). It’s vaguely optimistic, but it couldn’t
...February 14th, 2016
Miles’ horn blows
thru my head
down to my toes
down baby down
i need to blow
my bleeding nose
a red note bleeding
dododowaaaah
a smile with my heart
she just tore me apart
wuwuwuwaaaah
don’t know myself no more
February 12th, 2016
On the heels of the deaths of iconic rock musicians David Bowie and Glenn Frey comes the very sad news that Maurice White, the founder of the Earth, Wind and Fire, has died today at age 74. White’s music came to prominence in the thick of soul’s musical ascent, and E W & F embodied the sound of urban America at the time, their message communicated optimistically and on a large scale. White’s band possessed an unusual crossover appeal — the fact that his death has invited praise from
...February 5th, 2016
INSIDE THE LANDSCAPE LOUNGE
We drank bourbon & listened to
Hank Gathercole on sax
cutting a throat
through heavy pink clouds of
cigarette smoke
Man was he cuttin’ it!
& all the while his feet were sliding
February 5th, 2016
She stood in a room at The Met glancing at the painting on the wall, which was of two women kissing. From her vantage point, standing slightly away and to the side, the two women lying together interlocked in bed appeared cushioned awkwardly in space, free-floating yet connected.
The painting was by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, the alcoholic French dwarf artist, and she tried to imagine what it was like living when he did in Paris at the time of the painting, 1892, and what it might have been like for these two prostitutes and others like them who often turned to one another for relief from a world of men then.
Mireille, it was reported, was one of the girls in the brothel in the Rue d’Amboise, when Lautrec was commissioned to create a series of panels about the lives of the girls there, and she was one of his favorites. He visited the salons of the brothels in the Rue des Moulins and Rue d’Amboise many times to study and paint the women, who felt very free to be
...February 2nd, 2016
Drive that engine, all eight
cylinders, ripping down the open
road faster than can be
clocked, hurricane in our faces,
thunder from the wheels, open
throated, full voiced whole body
January 27th, 2016
Put the Blame on Mame Rita Hayworth in Gilda (1946)
There was never quite a dame as hot as Rita in Put the Blame on Mame
Gilda with luscious red locks
And strapless slit dress
We can imagine her while dancing in a state of undress -but I digress
Hair wanton and free expressing sexuality
In ample quantity
Gilda/Rita undulating to jazzy accompaniment in sultry climes
A time capsule of those forties’ times
January 25th, 2016
Songs overflow from doors
opening to the sidewalk
where neon lights
baptize the weak, stirring the curiosity of
a night strung tight
while others pray in alleys
whispering their sins
under a celestial curtain as
stars cross behind the black
of space where not
a molecule is out of place
January 16th, 2016
ray’s voice
is what a brotha
feels like after he’s had
a good piece of
pussy
i know now why mama didn’t want us
playing secular music in her home
and why white kids love
r and b so much
it was heroin
for your ears
ray was the only brotha
January 15th, 2016
In a recent University of California, San Francisco study involving jazz pianists, according to the public release document associated with the research, neuroscientists have concluded that “the workings of neural circuits associated with creativity are significantly altered when artists are actively attempting to express emotions.”
The public release, entitled “Mind of Blue: Conveying Emotion Affects Brain’s Creativity Network,” reminds us that during the act of improvisation, a brain region known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), which is “involved in planning and monitoring behavior” is deactivated, allowing the musician to enter into a “flow state” that artists enter to
...January 14th, 2016
Throughout his career, this saxophonist was known as the “Vice Prez” because he sounded so similar to Lester Young. Who was he?
Earl Bostic
Paul Quinichette
Ben Webster
Coleman Hawkins
Johnny Hodges
Arnett Cobb
Herschel Evans
Go to the next page for the answer!
...January 13th, 2016
uncle ping made my lemon chicken sing
with dueling jazzaphones
and unexpected tunes
there was no moon cake after
but the honey walnut prawns
laid down their own
January 11th, 2016
We like to immortalize talent in this culture, and in so doing, often decontextualize it, absolving it of complexity and stains. Media especially likes to make angels out of demons, and vice versa, stripping the truth out of images and ideas.
In the case of Chet Baker, William Claxton’s photographs helped especially to immortalize the singer and trumpeter, fixing him in time and space, freezing an idea of him as beautiful, ethereal, ideal.
Chet Baker is almost always remembered as the
...January 10th, 2016
January 7 marked the 125th birthday of Zora Neale Hurston, a towering literary figure of the Harlem Renaissance whose best known published book is Their Eyes Were Watching God, a 1937 work that Time Magazine lists among the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923. Controversial at one time due to the strength of the black female protagonist’s character (resulting in the book actually being out of print for nearly thirty years), it is now considered essential reading in the study of African-American letters.
In addition to her work as a novelist, Hurston was a folklorist who studied the African-American culture of the rural South. During my 2002 interview with Carla Kaplan, author of Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, she describes Hurston as a
...January 9th, 2016
Viewers of 60 Minutes this past Sunday were treated to “Little Jazz Man,” a segment devoted to 12-year-old jazz pianist Joey Alexander, whose career is being closely followed by devotees of the music. The two-time Grammy nominee (including Best Jazz Album for his 2015 debut, My Favorite Things) has already performed on the main stages of Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Newport Jazz Festival, and has been described by Wynton Marsalis as “my hero.”
Is he the best pianist in the world? Not a chance. Not now. But with the appropriate
...January 8th, 2016
this young girl playing
trumpet in all the supermarket
parking-lots
so loud the sun showers
gleams
of gold
January 5th, 2016
Paul Morris is a graphic designer and writer who collects album art of the 1940’s and 1950’s. He finds his examples of influential mid-century design in the used record stores of Portland, Oregon. In this edition, Paul looks at the art of London Records.
...December 29th, 2015
This morning came news of the passing of Meadowlark Lemon, the face of the Harlem Globetrotters for more than 20 years, his peak coming during the height of the civil rights movement. It was a complex time to be a Globetrotter, who at one time (prior to Lemon’s tenure with the team) was a legitimate and powerful basketball entity that was so good in 1948 it beat George Mikan’s Minneapolis Lakers, to that of a team so focused on clowning that, in the words of Bruce Weber in today’s New York Times obituary, “some thought to be a discomforting resurrection of the minstrel show.”
It was also a complex time to be a fan of the Globetrotters, whose occasional appearance on national television always elicited
...December 28th, 2015
This self proclaimed “reformed boogie-woogie player” got his start filling in for Art Tatum in San Francisco’s famed Black Hawk club, and was eventually known in San Francisco music circles as “Dr. Funk.” In addition to having a gold record with his 1963 hit “Cast Your Fate to the Wind,” he is also known as the pianist on the recording A Charlie Brown Christmas, one of the top selling Christmas records of all time. Who is he?
Russ Freeman
Vince Guaraldi
Lennie Tristano
Bobby Troup
Monty Alexander
George Shearing
Dave McKenna
Dave Frishberg
Go to the next page for the answer!
...
December 24th, 2015
the pain contained within those
seemingly effortless sounds
lifts us from our couches
to applaud years
after the event
the tone arches stretches slinks struts
leaps to fence tops and deftly prances
December 18th, 2015
For fans of what was once the record business, the Colin Hanks film All Things Must Pass — which chronicles the history and demise of retailing giant Tower Records — can’t be recommended highly enough. While not a complete or thorough (or necessarily accurate) account of what happened to the chain and record retailing in general, it is a fabulous look inside the head of music retailing’s superstar — owner Russ Solomon. Fiercely loyal to his employees and a close friend to many in the label community, Solomon had one great (and at the time courageous) vision for retailing — marketing records in volume in a storefront devoted to music only. This was at a time when consumers would typically find a limited selection of records in a rack in the local appliance and furniture store.
Solomon’s vision carried his company for over 40 years and through multiple music format changes, but ultimately
...December 16th, 2015
the lion.
man, this cat could play
formin’ the stride
a jazz musician of the times-
sophistication-harmony._____
enter the lion
...December 10th, 2015
This definitive New Orleans trombonist of the 1920’s was a member of the band Spike’s Seven Pods of Pepper Orchestra (featuring Mutt Carey and Dink Johnson), which was the first black band from New Orleans to make a jazz recording on the west coast. Who was he?
Jimmy Harrison
Miff Mole
Kid Ory
George Brunis
Honore Dutrey
J.C. Higinbotham
Go to the next page for the answer!
...December 4th, 2015
The music theory professors
took their treatises
to the dumpster,
their pianos to the tuner,
then took themselves
and their students
into the fields
where timbres circled
November 25th, 2015
From a recent edition of Slate comes a lovely blog post from Isaac Butler, who rediscovered his passion for jazz after challenging himself to find the fragment of music originally responsible for his interest in jazz. It is a brief, satisfying read…
_____
More than two years ago, as summer changed to fall, I was walking to the gym when I heard, wafting out of the window of a restaurant, a snatch of a jazz song. It was a minor third, descending to the root, first on a trumpet, then on a
...November 23rd, 2015
Camp looked through glass doors and across the shoulderless highway. A patch of grass across the road was covered with white trailers washed clean by the rain. He stared out a side window at the brown back of a gas station. A red and yellow sign, mounted so high he had to twist his neck to see it, seemed like it should have been turning but sat still against a gray sky.
What do you find in a bus station? Long waits under dirty fluorescents, grimy floor and seats, gloom on scattered faces. Soup, coffee and candy vending machines. If someone could gather it up, all the pieces a bus station’s handed down through the years, you could start a museum. You could cover the walls with
...November 16th, 2015
LITTLE LIZA JANE
Sing me up. Bring the jazz
for the baptizing of souls,
living strong, breathing cool
fires from river running out of
the Ohio snaking down mightily
to Louisiana where the steps
get wide and songs speak
of folks left behind, walking
river banks, looking south,
November 11th, 2015
Prior to his time with Stan Kenton’s Innovations Orchestra , this trumpeter — who some have said could play higher than any other trumpeter up to that point in history — gained experience with the big bands of Boyd Raeburn, Jimmy Dorsey and Charlie Barnet. Who is he?
Bill Coleman
Maynard Ferguson
Shorty Baker
Ruby Braff
Conte Candoli
Conrad Gozzo
Jack Sheldon
Go to the next page for the answer!
...November 8th, 2015
I’ve been revisiting some favorite recordings this week, among them the classic 1958 Cannonball Adderley-led session Somethin’ Else, with Hank Jones, Art Blakey, Sam Jones, and, in a rare appearance as sideman, Miles Davis. The tune I have been stuck on is “One For Daddy-O,” a blues written by Cannonball’s brother Nat that features a flawless blues solo by Miles.
I dug into the liner notes and was reminded of how the critic Leonard Feather used this particular solo as a platform on which to describe the essence of the “deeper and broader blues of today,” refuting a “misinformed” Ebony piece of the era that suggested that
...November 5th, 2015
HARRY AT THE PARK
Today the trees
in constant motion, you’ve
seen the same thing
at cocktail parties, in restaurants,
on the beach, bodies
moving to the breath
of the world, do wop,
November 3rd, 2015
She was born into a family of musicians. Her father had played bass in a jazz band and traveled with Dizzy until an accident had cost him his arm and his career. Getting out of a limousine that had stalled on the highway en route to a gig in Chicago, he opened the car door to get out at the wrong time, just as a truck was passing.
“C’est la vie” he always said about that, as if it meant something. He had to go on, a musician without a limb, without his instrument, because he was a man and had children and a legacy to uphold through them, but inside, where nothing touched him, he felt as torn as his shoulder had been that night. Something had shifted. Only his wife, his gentle, meek and attendant wife who saw him sitting at the edge of their bed each night head bowed counting his blessings, all but one, only she knew what
...November 1st, 2015
Dizzy in Thurston Howell garb steps samba-like
through the airport exit. On film, he and his entourage
move like dancers tapping clave in a Las Vegas
revue called A Night in Havana. His embrace
of space defies ground and grounding.
Amiri, you called him high priest, royalty,
a monarch who flew you from dusty bebop
October 24th, 2015
Long admired by the likes of Tom Waits, John Mayall, and the Rolling Stones, and having had his songs recorded by Bonnie Raitt (“Everybody’s Cryin’ Mercy”), Leon Russell (“I’m Smashed”), and The Who (“Young Man Blues”), this pianist/vocalist has long suffered from a “category” problem, once even saying; “There’s a lot of places I don’t work because they’re confused about what I do.” Who is he?
Bob Dorough
Mose Allison
Paul Bley
Bob Dorough
Dave Frishberg
Ben Sidran
Dave McKenna
Monty Alexander
Go to the next page for the answer!
...September 7th, 2015
Slow slow slooooooooooooooow; the river was practically dry, a river in name only, a few puddles on the mudflats where standing water reflected the cottony clouds that moved perpetually east, dropping nothing anymore but empty promises. Unsettling in the most literal sense. Many people sold their houses or just abandoned them, heading north, and those who stayed finally got serious about
...August 22nd, 2015
Paul Morris is a graphic designer and writer who collects album art of the 1940’s and 1950’s. He finds his examples of influential mid-century design in the used record stores of Portland, Oregon.
August 20th, 2015
Roger Singer, our most prolific and accomplished contributing poet, recently submitted three new poems for our consideration, which we proudly publish here. Singer reports that he has now had almost 800 poems published in magazines, periodicals and online journals — 400 of which are jazz poems — and has recently self-published a Kindle edition of his book of jazz poetry called Poetic Jazz.
“Jazz poetry flows out with such ease,” Singer writes on his blog. “The people and places, the alleys and sawdust jazz clubs. The stories that bring jazz alive with horns and voices, from sadness and grief to
...August 18th, 2015
In November, 1946, at the height of his popularity, Dizzy Gillespie took his big band out on the road, and in 1947 hired Ella Fitzgerald to tour the South. According to Ella’s biographer Stuart Nicholson, she had been added to this tour in response to Gillespie’s Hepsations tour in 1945, whose groundbreaking sound “had confused and confounded the southerners,” and because Ella could “create balance after the unrelieved diet of bop…The Gillespie band saw Ella as a former swing era star, light-years removed from what they were doing, a palliative to help their music go down with the public.”
Even with Ella, however, things could be challenging. The audience would “listen, stand around and applaud,” band member Howard Johnson said,” and try and pretend they dug it. I think they appreciated the artistry of Dizzy because
...August 17th, 2015
Known early in his career (when with Chick Webb) as a Louis Armstrong sound-alike both on trumpet and on vocals, his recording of “On the Sunny Side of the Street” sounded so much like Armstrong’s live version that people actually thought it was Armstrong who was copying this trumpeter. Who is he?
Taft Jordan
Jimmy McPartland
Ruby Braff
Frankie Newton
Snooky Young
Shorty Baker
Red Allen
Hot Lips Page
...August 12th, 2015
Tumbling out of the second story window —
an accident, I swear — passing the first floor,
and, “You’ll never make it as a musician, Chet!”,
an endless string of notes plays by my ear,
one solo interlude strung out forever,
reaching, reaching, for the ultimate chord,
my sideman lost in a tinkle of piano keys,
the percussion of the vibraphone,
July 10th, 2015
Three times a year, we award a writer who submits, in our opinion, the best original, previously unpublished work.
John Hyde Barnard of Los Angeles, California is the winner of the 39th Jerry Jazz Musician New Short Fiction Award, announced and published for the first time on July 3, 2015.
*
“The Lot”
by John Hyde Barnard
He brought the cigarette up to his lips. As he took a hit the orange
glow briefly lit his face and faded back into shadow as he slowly exhaled
a cloud of blue smoke. He crushed the butt on the windowsill, sparks and
dying embers leaving a trail that quickly became black and cold. As he
flicked the butt into the night air he glanced over the rooftops. It
seemed the horizon was a shade lighter. Had he been sitting there that
long?
Unable to sleep since arriving at the apartment some hours earlier,
he sat at the open window: musing, arguing, longing and laughing with his
thoughts. He had not discovered an epiphany or revelation, only a comfort
with the warm night. It was the first warm night of the season; the
unmistakable promise of
July 3rd, 2015
Besides being one of the first to be influenced by Charlie Christian, in 1944 this electric guitarist employed Charlie Parker on his first recording date and eventually led an R&B-oriented group “The Rockin’ Highlanders” that featured the saxophonist Red Prysock. Who is he?
Herb Ellis
Tiny Grimes
Grant Green
Wes Montgomery
Eddie Lang
Freddie Green
Mundell Lowe
Go to the next page for the answer!
...July 1st, 2015
In the Sunday, June 21 New York Times, Salamishah Tillet writes, “Fifty years after her prominence, Nina Simone is now reaching her peak.” The three new films she has inspired, along with a tribute album and an excellent 2012 biography by Nadine Cahodas, has brought additional importance to Ms. Simone’s music and the way she lived her life, to the point where writers like Tillet opine that Simone “broadened the parameters of the great American pop artist.”
“Simone’s androgynous voice, genre-breaking musicianship and political consciousness may have concerned ’60s and ’70s marketing executives and concert promoters,” Tillet writes, “but those are a huge draw for today’s gay, lesbian, black and female artists who want to
...June 25th, 2015
Besides doing his best to help raise three kids, during my 1960’s childhood my father worked his heart out at two jobs — one of which was as owner of a restaurant on Oakland’s Telegraph Avenue, and the other as a musician, playing trumpet and viola throughout the San Francisco Bay area, mostly on evenings and weekends in “casual” jobs. For years he was part of a strolling quartet that entertained San Francisco’s elite at the World Trade Club — an ensemble that at its peak toured the Philippines, playing to an audience that included
...June 21st, 2015
Paula Hackett’s four newly published poems include pieces on Max Roach, Billie Holiday and Milt Jackson…
_______
Billie Holiday
(lullaby)
Sometimes when nature is quiet
and the moon shines just where you are
I can hear you singing the spirit world to rest
I remember as a child, your voice would
wrap me in cotton
as you felt the blows for all of us
Born into a country that tried to
make your voice illegal
poise and elegance was your response
And tonight like so many
June 20th, 2015
While hunting around the Internet for tributes of Ornette Coleman (a collection of which I will attempt to point readers toward tomorrow), I was reminded of the critic Francis Davis’s essay titled “Ornette’s Permanent Revolution.” Originally published in the September, 1985 edition of The Atlantic, Davis, now the jazz critic for the Village Voice, writes eloquently about the complexities of the great saxophonist’s “clean break from convention.” It is a worthy and timely read…
_____
All hell broke loose when the alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman made his East Coast nightclub debut, at the Five Spot Cafe, in Greenwich Village on November 17, 1959—twenty-five years ago last fall.
The twenty-nine-year-old Coleman arrived in New York having already won the approval of some of the most influential jazz opinion makers of the period. “Ornette Coleman is doing the only really new thing in jazz since the innovations in the mid-forties of
...June 17th, 2015
“Making music is like a form of religion for me, because it soothes your heart and increases the pleasure of your brain. Most of all, it’s very enjoyable to express something that you can only hear and not see, which is not bad.”
– Ornette Coleman
1930 – 2015
...June 11th, 2015
In addition to co-founding the New York Jazz Quartet, in 1970 this pianist was given knighthood by the President of Liberia in recognition for a series of concerts held to benefit Liberian children. Who is he?
John Lewis
Roland Hanna
Mal Waldron
Tommy Flanagan
Dave McKenna
Randy Weston
Go to the next page for the answer!
...June 9th, 2015
In what is described by New York Times classical music writer Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim as the company’s “wider shift toward more new music,” on June 5, Opera Philadelphia will present the premier of composer Daniel Schnyder’s “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird,” which stars Lawrence Brownlee as the bebop legend.
According to Fonseca-Wollheim, Opera Philadelphia has “a general willingness to take risks on unorthodox subjects and genres. Philadelphia’s last season featured the American premiere of Ana Sokolovic’s ‘Svadba,’ a raucous Balkan wedding ritual; October will bring a ‘Popera’ about Andy Warhol, mixing elements of cabaret and opera.”
“The mix of musical styles is especially risky in ‘Yardbird,’” Fonseca-Wollheim writes, “since it offers
...June 1st, 2015
Chantal Doolittle wasn’t like anybody else she knew. Who else, for example, would stand transfixed before a record player or stereo, still as stone while listening to music — not merely attending to it — her very cells taking in the song, calculating and absorbing. “That girl is special,” Nana Esther always said.
When she was a kid and Motown was the thing, Chan would sing Marvin Gaye’s tunes to her grandmother in their high ceilinged apartment, where, more often than not it was soul music, the harmonizing voices of The Four Tops, The Temptations, The Supremes, drifting in from the surrounding windows and disappearing into the sky that was perennially a washed out gray, as if there was an invisible flag always at half mast, hanging outside heaven. From the time she was five or six, all Chan had to do was hear a song once and she would know it. She knew all the Motown tunes word for word, and sang them right on key, perfectly, which is why Nana Esther dubbed her, “my little songbird.”
Of course, there was nothing little about Chantal, but, being her grandmother’s one and only, she was “a little one” to her. Chantal was tall, big for her age, and when she developed as a young woman, busty too. She stood out even before she opened her mouth, due to her attitude. Her nana had taught her to be “confident as a man,” and she had seemingly
...May 30th, 2015
His jazz is thick,
mantled in hair
black with twists
rich with shine
absorbing the lights
as his hands
push the track of
strings
chasing
demons
of his love
while fingers
May 27th, 2015
Following Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 assassination, this famous singer was offered unofficial leadership in the civil rights movement by King’s widow, Coretta Scott King. Who is she?
Ethel Waters
Aretha Franklin
Josephine Baker
Ivie Anderson
Dinah Washington
Carmen McRae
Alberta Hunter
Go to the next page for the answer!
...May 22nd, 2015
Bruce Lundvall, a record executive best known among fans of jazz music as Blue Note Records president for 25 years, died yesterday at the age of 79. In addition to his work at Blue Note, Lundvall was president of CBS Records during the heyday of the LP business, and was responsible for signing many of that label’s major artists, and for expanding the jazz division of Columbia Records.
My own experience with him was always very favorable. Although I hadn’t spoken to him for several years, whenever I did reach out to him, either as a record executive myself or as publisher of Jerry Jazz Musician, he always made himself available and was supportive of my work.
In 2003, I hosted a conversation on the state of the business of jazz with Lundvall, New York Times columnist Ben Ratliff, and saxophonist Joshua Redman. Part of the discussion dealt with
...May 20th, 2015
Paul Morris is a graphic designer and writer who collects album art of the 1940’s and 1950’s. He finds his examples of influential mid-century design in the used record stores of Portland, Oregon.
May 9th, 2015
While he had a long career in jazz, including stints with, among others, Coleman Hawkins, Roy Eldridge, Sonny Stitt and Stan Getz, he will always be remembered primarily as the pianist in Charlie Parker’s classic 1947 quintet. Who is he?
Duke Jordan
Lennie Tristano
Mel Powell
Bud Powell
Al Haig
George Wallington
Hampton Hawes
Go to the next page for the answer!
...April 27th, 2015
In 1969, in the midst of rock music’s ascent and the social protests that effectively changed the way we looked at war, race and feminism, the great jazz musician Rahsaan Roland Kirk emerged as the leader of “The Jazz and People’s Movement,” a movement to, as John Kruth, author of Bright Moments: The Life and Legacy of Rahsaan Roland Kirk describes it, “rescue black classical music from certain oblivion and thrust it into the consciousness of the unwitting public.” Part of their plan was to “disrupt the prime time airwaves for the sake of the music they dearly loved and believe in,” and they were largely successful at it, disrupting the shows of Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett and Merv Griffin. Their tact was to
...April 23rd, 2015
Sad news this morning…The great comedian and satirist Stan Freberg, who was also successful as an actor (and voice over actor), recording artist, puppeteer, advertising creative director and radio personality, died yesterday at the age of 88. His career was filled with artistry and courage. His comic recordings were always hilarious and often biting – his mocking of Senator Joseph
...April 8th, 2015
Baseball’s back
It’s crackling on a radio
Sitting by a canning jar filled with fireflies
A barefoot summer, always afternoon in voluptuous-full July.
The screen door slams and flies scatter
A stick and ball routine with umpteen possibilities
Written in the DNA of the Americas
...April 6th, 2015
Paul Morris is a graphic designer and writer who collects album art of the 1940’s and 1950’s. He finds his examples of influential mid-century design in the used record stores of Portland, Oregon.
April 1st, 2015
Three cars honked almost in union. Then successively, each a blare in order, one two three, then two three one three four with the line through, beat ripitum boom, ba, riptum boom, now hear it a little faster, just a little faster, lips to instrument, trumpet, three valves, infinite notes to jot to sing to blow, perched lips, fat cheeks, cosmic energy of the union, the intertwined with keys of ivory.
Marcus Breck was recalling stepping on stage the first time. Nervousness rising from toes to a tingling head. Dry mouth, the initial silence of the room that precedes the beginning of
...March 31st, 2015
I awoke this morning to the sound of a Gene Ammons ballad, “Stella by Starlight.” As a disciple of the sound of Ben Webster and Lester Young, and having been in the forefront – along with Von Freeman — of the “Chicago school,” where a bluesy “expressiveness” was paramount to their style, his music has always moved me. His personal life had its challenges, having been incarcerated on a couple of occasions for narcotics possession, but his sound overcame that, evidenced by the contract he signed with Prestige Records following his 1969 release from prison, which at the time was the largest ever offered by the label.
While some critics questioned the relevance of his style, the pianist
...March 27th, 2015
“Cover Stories with Paul Morris” is a popular feature found on Jerry Jazz Musician that looks at the serious art – and serious comedy – of vintage album cover art. Paul is a dear friend of mine and fellow Portland resident who happens to be a music scholar and album cover collector. In most cases, it is not the music he seeks, it is the work of the artist who created the design.
Yesterday was a pretty typical late March Portland day – cool, gray and drizzly with an occasional dose of sunshine. It was “jacket weather” but no umbrella was necessary. It was a great day to hit a few record stores, of which there are many in this amazing town. Portland has more record stores (predominantly selling vinyl) than any other
...March 26th, 2015
I finally got around to watching Whiplash over the weekend, accurately described by The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw as the “Full Metal Jacket of jazz drumming.” Other than being recommended by several friends and casually knowing it involved a young musician attending a music conservatory, I did no research of the film prior to watching and had no expectation for it. I was struck by the brilliance of the performances – both acting and musical – but taken aback by the bizarre, near sadistic relationship between teacher (Terence Fletcher, played by Academy Award winner J.K. Simmons) and student (Andrew Neyman, played by Miles Teller).
It was great, but ultimately dispiriting art. How could anyone who purports to love music as much as Fletcher treat
...March 24th, 2015
I like The Jazz
We listened to Roland Kirk
and Eric Burdon sing of
Roland Kirk
And the hum of the freezer
Roland borrowed a phrase from Coltrane
and I borrowed a phrase from
March 19th, 2015
Further evidence that life can indeed be very good…I am spending several days in Arizona, attending spring training games. Warm weather, major league baseball, (expensive) beer, (expensive) ballpark grub, good companionship, and the occasional ballpark organist all add up to quality vacation time. I will be in the bleachers for a
...March 7th, 2015
New Short Fiction Award
Three times a year, we award a writer who submits, in our opinion, the best original, previously unpublished work.
Don Dewey of Jamaica, New York is the winner of the 38th Jerry Jazz Musician New Short Fiction Award, announced and published for the first time on March 5, 2015.
Till’s Piano Lesson
by
Don Dewey
_______________________________
“You’re early, Till. I told you never come early.”
“Sorry. I guess my watch is off.”
“Buy a new one.”
Klein refit the crutches under his armpits and swung his crabbed legs back toward the studio, leaving Till to enter the living room for himself. Till didn’t like living rooms. He thought them banal in their predictable assembly of tables, chairs, lamps, and rugs. What he wanted to see someday was a living room with people who dropped dead as soon as they put a foot outside it. Living rooms should have been what they claimed to be.
Klein’s pupil in the studio seemed to be trying to erase his presence through sheer aggression. Had Mozart started that way? Till didn’t think so.
...March 5th, 2015
I awoke to the very sad news that a prominent figure in the history of jazz music has died. Orrin Keepnews, whose work as co-founder of Riverside Records forever connected him to the lives and spirits of Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, Cannonball Adderley, and so many other great jazz musicians of mid-century America, died in California at the age of 91 (a day shy of his 92nd birthday).
Keepnews was a transcendent figure in jazz music, excelling as a journalist, entrepreneur, and producer. The recordings he produced were among the very first to
...March 2nd, 2015
I recall you
dream weaver
I remember you
You’re the one
who makes most dreams
come true
Sir Charles
just not your own
when the sax
ceases dreadfully
heroes fall
trumpets screech
Max Roach calls you
to attention
Sir Charles
listen to Diz
man just don’t fade man!
I hear Lover again
Bird you’re with me
like my mother’s voice
February 26th, 2015
During the Cold War era, America fought back with, among other “weapons,” the Jazz Ambassadors. Led by Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and others, these artists, in the words of Penny Von Eschen, author of Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War, “were cultural translators who inspired the vision and shaped its contours, constituting themselves as international ambassadors by taking on the contradictions of Cold War internationalism.” In a February 23 New York Times piece by Thomas Erdbrink called “Rebirth of the Cool: American Music Makes a Return to Iran,” the effect of a modern day jazz ambassadorship – this one led by saxophonist
...February 24th, 2015
As a Board member of PDX Jazz, the organization that produces the Portland Jazz Festival, I get to do a lot of very cool things. I wrote recently about my opportunity to present a program, “Jazz in the Schools,” to local high school students that combined a short history of jazz with its influence on art, photography, and graphic design.
After seeing classic film of Louis Armstrong and viewing a variety of album and jazz festival photography, art and graphic design, participating photography students went into the Portland community and took original photographs of any subject, person, object or setting that demonstrated their personal vision for jazz. They then collaborated with students from the graphic design class and combined their artistic visions, with each team creating a poster for the Jazz Festival.
The result is 39 outstanding contributions – all created by students who knew little (or nothing) about jazz music, but now do, and who now have an appreciation for its art and history, which is all we can ask for.
The four winning entries (as chosen by a panel of distinguished Board members and artists) are pictured on this page. To see all the entries,
...February 20th, 2015
Club Havana was known for hosting decent Afro-Cuban jazz bands. There was dancing Thursdays through Sundays, and Sunday afternoons, the management handed out free cigars. Hector became close to the house band, whose rhythm section inspired him. He thought the drummer Manny was off the charts. Completely bald, he wore leather bands that cinched his pump wrists as if to keep his hands from flying off his body whenever he played fast and furious. A skinny, short guy played bongos, and a drunk worked the tumbadoras. Jorge, Carlos and Javier, all dapper guys, played horns. As if to distinguish themselves, one wore a mustache; another, a hat; and the other, wire rimmed glasses. Additionally, there was a young Julliard graduate on piano, a white-haired Cubano on flute, and a sax player who looked exactly like Lester Young. One afternoon, before their gig, Manny and Hector got to talking, and Hector started messing around on the tumbadoras, imitating what he had so often seen and heard. Manny raised his eyebrows and cocked his head. He liked this kid, and his sound was good.
“Why don’t you come hang with us this weekend. A few of us like to jam at Columbus Circle. Come along and let’s see how you work those congas in a group.”
Over the course of the summer, Hector hung out in the park. It was there he met
...February 18th, 2015
This pianist wrote his first ragtime composition (“The Charleston Rag”) in 1899, became a songwriter of Broadway shows in the 1920s, and, before dying five days after his 100th birthday, became known as “the last living link to ragtime.” Who is he?
James P. Johnson
Scott Joplin
Tony Jackson
Eubie Blake
Cliff Jackson
Fats Waller
Jelly Roll Morton
Go to the next page for the answer!
...February 16th, 2015
Tonight, NBC presents a 40-year anniversary show on Saturday Night Live, which, during that time has presented many cutting-edge (and let’s face it, at times very drab) comedic moments and personalities. While the show is known for its comedy, musical performances have at times made the show staying up past normal bedtime hours a worthwhile option. One of those moments was a December, 1976 SNL hosted by Richard Pryor, who hand-picked his musical guest, the soul/jazz poet Gil Scott-Heron. That memorable appearance is reported on by Marcus Baram in this excerpt from his biography Gil Scott-Heron: Pieces of a Man:
_____
In the fall of 1975, Gil got a call from Richard Pryor, who invited him to be a musical guest on an upcoming episode of Saturday Night Live, which Pryor was going to host in a few weeks. Pryor invited him after hearing a story about Gil that impressed the comic: A few months earlier, Gil had been invited by singer Roberta Flack to perform on
...February 15th, 2015
They must have materialized at the open mike
out of carbon and nitrogen in the air,
those poets you’d never see in a jazz club.
A guy in Roman-helmet-like Mohawk
reads three-chord rhymes about Mingus,
an MC in Phat Farm jeans
fires machine gun words about Miles,
and a woman in high collar and sensible shoes
chops Art Blakey into fourteen lines of ten syllables.
Seems you can’t be a real poet
unless you
February 12th, 2015
Paul Morris is a graphic designer and writer who collects album art of the 1940’s and 1950’s. He finds his examples of influential mid-century design in the used record stores of Portland, Oregon.
February 11th, 2015
“Masters of the Jazz Kazoo” is a short story by Con Chapman about a man whose goal was to make it in New York’s cutthroat world of the jazz kazoo!
_____
Like all jazz kazoo players, getting to New York City was always my goal. To turn the Sinatra song on its head, until you made it there, you hadn’t made it anywhere.
Yes, I’d cut every kazooist in the Quad Cities, the sub-metropolitan area of Iowa that from the air appears to be what it is full of — squares. Then I’d moved on to Chicago, like Louis Armstrong, where I found a wider audience for my “kool kazoo” stylings. It may be America’s “Second City” (actually third, but who’s counting) but landing on my feet there was like a
...February 4th, 2015
I could make the argument that jazz being marketed as a “popular music” officially died on January 12, 1975. Why? Because that was the date of the last Super Bowl halftime show that featured jazz music, in this case a “Tribute to Duke Ellington” performed by the Grambling State University Marching Band and Mercer Ellington. Sure, in subsequent years there was the occasional Pete Fountain/Al Hirt exhibition to pump local tourism when the game was held in New Orleans, but Madison Avenue officially ended all attempts at presenting jazz to a mass audience at the conclusion of the halftime show for the ’75 Steelers/Vikings game. What followed was an era of musical malaise for halftime shows (Up With People performed in four of the next 10 shows, for chrissakes!) and then Michael Jackson’s 1993 show opened the eyes of big business to the value of that time, and things were never the same.
Hard to believe, but I found a clip on YouTube of the 1975 halftime show. It is very raw and the sound makes early recordings made in the Gennett Studio sound pristine in comparison, but it is a remarkable piece of history. The introduction by NBC’s veteran (and very square) sports reporter Charlie Jones of the “Tribute to Duke Ellington” is shortly followed by
...January 31st, 2015
Happy Birthday #104 to Roy Eldridge, who in addition to being one of the great trumpet players of his time, is known as the “bridge” between Armstrong and Dizzy. I loved the brightness of his playing, and for contributing to one of the great moments in jazz — his vocal duet with Anita O’Day, leading into a seldom-in-a-generation trumpet solo on “Let Me Off Uptown.”
When I was a kid, my dad used to tell me stories about his friendship with “Eldridge,” and in particular one eventful experience he had while he was traveling with his band in Pennsylvania. In 1998, two years before his passing, my father wrote this piece for Jerry Jazz Musician about this very special experience in his life. I hope you enjoy his telling of it…
...January 30th, 2015
This pianist was Billie Holiday’s regular accompanist during her last two years (1957 – 1959), and also played in the Eric Dolphy-Booker Little Quintet that recorded extensively at New York’s Five Spot in 1961. Who is he?
Mal Waldron
Al Haig
Duke Jordan
Hampton Hawes
Joe Albany
George Wallington
Go to the next page for the answer!
...January 27th, 2015
Lazy humid Lake Pontchartrain
breezes slip sideways
through turquoise louvered doors
past a cat, on a stool with its legs hanging
like green tangled moss
as the man, deep with pillow worship
lays still, breathing soft, his hands open and flat
holds court with dreams of last night
the jazz holding tight
the band cutting through
January 22nd, 2015
Described as a “Louis Armstrong sound-alike on both trumpet and vocals” whose recording of “On the Sunny Side of the Street” was so close to Armstrong’s live show that some listeners thought Armstrong was copying him, this trumpeter (along with Bobby Stark), was Chick Webb’s main trumpet soloist during the 1930’s. Who is he?
Red Allen
Shorty Baker
Bill Berry
Rex Stewart
Cat Anderson
Taft Jordan
Erskine Hawkins
Go to the next page for the answer!
...January 20th, 2015
I have long felt that students who learn something about jazz music will not only appreciate it as an important American art form, but, once exposed to it will also discover artistic inspiration from it. Fortunately, there are members of the Portland education community who share this view, so on Monday of this week I was privileged to teach a “Short History of Jazz” class to three photography/graphic design classrooms at Portland’s Lincoln High School. This is part of a project — “Jazz in the Schools” — we developed at PDX Jazz, the presenting organization of the Portland Jazz Festival.
After seeing classic film of Louis Armstrong and viewing a variety of
...January 17th, 2015
I spent a few days this week in Las Vegas, attending the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). I have been to about 25 of these shows over the years, and I never cease to be amazed by the enormity of the event — three immense halls and countless hotel lobbies filled with electronics that entertain, think, fly, read, snoop, power and transport. I witnessed people marveling at smart watches, smart belts, smart homes and appliances, robots, drones, driverless cars, curved sound bars and on and on and on…
This year, one of the big deals was a flat screen TV that is thinner than a cell phone. Hard to imagine life without something like that, huh? Products like this attract walls of people around it, snapping picture upon picture, expressing amazement in a variety of languages. Many of these same people were likely here a couple years ago when 3-D was the next “big thing.” That hasn’t worked out so well for either the
...January 10th, 2015
This Dixieland cornetist was an original member of the legendary Austin High School Gang (pictured) in the 1920’s, and was Bix Beiderbecke’s replacement in the Wolverines. He was eventually a featured soloist (along with Benny Goodman) in Ben Pollack’s band. Who is he?
Wingy Manone
Jimmy McPartland
Rex Stewart
Frankie Newton
Nat Gonella
Max Kaminsky
Sharkey Bonano
Go to the next page for the answer!
January 8th, 2015
“Father Kniest, Jazz Priest” is a short story by Con Chapman about “a man of the cloth…deputized by a higher power to save jazzmen’s souls from the lures and wiles and temptations of bad taste.”
_____
I’m getting too old for this, I thought as I made my way down Boylston Street, my tambourine in one hand, the Good Book in the other. I started ministering to the jazz scene in Boston back when Estelle Slavin and Her Swinging Brunettes were the house band at Izzy Ort’s Coney Island Club on Essex Street. Floogie Williams and the Unquenchables were ensconced at the Tip-Top Lounge, which didn’t sit well with the sconces that came with the place as trade fixtures, but so what? We were young and crazy for jazz — we didn’t care.
But now I’m closing in on eighty, and eighty’s looking over its shoulder, nervous as hell. I’ll catch it soon enough — if I don’t die first.
Back in ’55 I was just out of the seminary and was assigned by my
...January 7th, 2015
“If you can dance at all, you can dance to [Guy] Lombardo’s music,” the Metronome writer George T. Simon wrote in 1942. The Lombardo band’s popularity was once so immense and widespread that he set attendance marks wherever he went, including at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom. His appeal came despite what Simon described as the band’s “exaggerated sax vibratos, the clippety brass phrases with their illegitimate tones…and the style of singing that lets you hear all consonants and no vowels,” leading to what some musicians would ridicule as being “about as artistically creative as the average comic book.”
But, as Simon wrote in the chapter on Lombardo from his essential 1967 book The Big Bands, “Lombardo believed implicitly in his music, and he succeeded handsomely in selling it to two generations of dancers.”
For many of us born in the years following World War II – raised culturally by the likes of
...December 30th, 2014
He is best known for writing “(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66” — which Nat Cole made famous in 1946 — but his earliest musical success came with the song “Daddy,” recorded in 1941 by Sammy Kaye and His Orchestra, which was the #1 record for eight weeks. He was also famous for being married to the glamorous singer Julie London. Who is he?
Joe Albany
Jess Stacy
Russ Freeman
Pete Jolly
Dave Frishberg
Bobby Troup
Go to the next page for the answer!
...December 29th, 2014
Arguments abound about what is hip and what isn’t when it comes to Christmas music, but few can argue that Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas remains a breath of fresh air in a world otherwise dominated by recordings by Kenny G, Mannheim Steamroller, and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. Certified “triple platinum” by the Recording Industry Association of America, and ranked by Sound Scan as the #10 best selling Christmas album since 1991, A Charlie Brown Christmas — and his association with Peanuts creator Charles Schulz — is what Guaraldi is best remembered for.
What few of us probably know about Guaraldi, however, is that he was actually a self-proclaimed “reformed boogie-woogie player” who got his start filling in for
...December 25th, 2014
Joe Cocker, the flamboyant British rocker who died yesterday at the age of 70, was best known for his gravelly voice and charismatic onstage personality, but his career was especially noteworthy due to his successful model of interpreting popular songs of the day. The most obvious example -– the Beatles’ “With a Little Help From My Friends” performed before hundreds of thousands at Woodstock in 1969 -– was his signature career achievement, a performance Paul McCartney yesterday called “mind-blowing,” one that he was “forever grateful for him for having done that.” One could make the case that Cocker’s appearance at Woodstock and his filmed performance of that tune was indeed a defining moment of the rock era.
Cocker also successfully remade Arthur Hamilton’s “Cry Me a River,” a 1953 torch song originally composed for Ella Fitzgerald to sing in Pete Kelly’s Blues, the Jack Webb film in which Peggy Lee portrayed an
...December 23rd, 2014
Whitewalls better,
blackwalls cheaper.
White collar
has fines.
Inner city
December 22nd, 2014
Paul Morris is a graphic designer and writer who collects album art of the 1940’s and 1950’s. He finds his examples of influential mid-century design in the used record stores of Portland, Oregon.
December 18th, 2014
“Night of the living dead,” a voice screamed in Tom’s head. A softer voice pointed out it was still late afternoon. It sure wasn’t life as he wanted to know it. In reality, it was just another long Thursday afternoon of monthly staff meetings, with new mandates and standards flowing downhill from the top. All the nodding mannequins around the conference room would take it all in, shoot a few inane, brown nose comments back at the presenter, then go back to do their jobs tomorrow the same as always.
Sylvia’s attention was on the crochet hoop in her lap. Jack’s eyes had been closed for the better part of 45 minutes. Tom’s life support system came through the cord fed neatly up beneath the lapel, to the headphones partially obscured by thick sideburns and abundant head of hair. A collection of earpieces was present among these old codgers, but his was connected to the brand new cassette player in his suit coat pocket.
The tape Mikki turned him on to seemed to emanate from a place beyond his routine, tired existence. It was as if the music offered a
...December 16th, 2014
Even as I braced myself for it
It came without warning
But who adheres to
Love’s rules?
It’s like bargaining with the
Devil
Only this devil’s a redhead
And played piano as if
She could connect all the moments
Of the day and turn them into
December 14th, 2014
In 1960, Eric Dolphy told Down Beat magazine, “At home I used to play, and the birds always used to whistle with me. I would stop what I was working on and play with the birds.” This imitation of birds (who, according to Dolphy, sing in “quarter tones”) was embraced by none other than John Coltrane, who said that the addition of Dolphy — and his philosophy — to his quartet “turned [the quartet] all around.” Dolphy’s playing helped set the stage for the music Coltrane would create later.
Also critical was their friendship, which was especially important to Coltrane since he was so consumed at the time by his alcohol and heroin abuse. Quoting a Coltrane friend, John Fraim writes in his 1996 biography Spirit Catcher: The Life and Art of John Coltrane that “outside of Sonny Rollins, Eric Dolphy was his [Coltrane’s] only true
...December 12th, 2014
Tunes come to me at morning
prayer, after flax sunflower
seeds jammed in a coffee can;
when we went to Japan
I prayed at the shrine
for the war dead broken
at Nagasaki;
the tears on the lip of my soprano
glistened in the sun.
In interviews
I talked about my music’s
voice of praise to our oneness,
them getting caught up in techniques
of the electronic school
lifting us into assault;
in live sessions, without an audience
I see faces on the flues of the piano,
cymbals driving me into ecstasies on my knees,
the demonic angel, Elvin,
answering my prayers on African drum,
December 11th, 2014
Ask just about any jazz musician, scholar or fan for a list of the greatest jazz albums ever recorded, and John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme — recorded 50 years ago today — resides on it. My own first experience with it was in 1975, on a late evening in a dark, smoke-filled, back alley cottage on North Oakland’s Alcatraz Avenue. My listening was guided by a dear friend who understood that this was not just music — it is what happens when musical genius meets intensity, sensitivity, and spirituality. So many details of that evening remain with me 40 years later, not the least of which was how I sunk into the couch, eyes closed, the worn Impulse album jacket never leaving my grip. I was amazed and I was hooked.
Over the years, I have found that a favorite discussion among jazz fans is their recollections of their first experience with this album. When I began developing content for Jerry Jazz Musician, one of the first ideas I had was to interview people who were either
...December 9th, 2014
Once the most advanced trombonist in jazz, in addition to his time with the Original Memphis Five (starting in 1922), he is best known for his recordings with cornetist Red Nichols. Who is he?
J.C. Higginbotham
Tricky Sam Nanton
Lawrence Brown
Dickie Wells
Jack Teagarden
Miff Mole
Trummy Young
Go to the next page for the answer!
...December 8th, 2014
I am heading to Santa Fe, New Mexico for the weekend, and did some very light “research” about famous jazz musicians who may have hailed from the nation’s 47th state. The most notable is the great trumpeter Bobby Shew, whose impressive resume includes early career stints with Tommy Dorsey, Woody Herman, and Buddy Rich.
According to the New Mexico Music Commission website, in 1972, “Shew moved to Los Angeles…where he spent time with jazz legends
...December 5th, 2014
1. Savoy Blues
Mercies would have put blues on the menu if it could, but that was a province of the kitchen, where I worked four and a half months too many. I heard actual blues music and caught a gust of air conditioning whenever I snuck through the dining area early in my shift to use the guest bathroom before customers arrived, passing the line of booths next to the orange and black walls on which hung colorful modern paintings of jazz musicians and the
...December 3rd, 2014
Although only one story wins our thrice yearly Short Fiction Contest, since we typically receive well over 100 entrants, often times there are several worthy of publication. Our last competition, our 37th, was won by Kenneth Levine. His short story “Homage” — about the effect Chet Baker’s drug addiction had on a father and son relationship — was published on November 4.
A finalist in the competition was Adam Murray’s “Silent City,” an excellent story about “how we can’t have the things we can no longer have because they no longer exist.” In this case, what we can’t have again is the 1940’s jazz laboratory known as Minton’s Playhouse. When I sent an email to Murray requesting his permission to allow me to publish “Silent City,” he wrote back and agreed, informing me that he had written this story specifically for Jerry Jazz Musician and “from there just kinda’ crossed my fingers.” In that same email, Murray wrote; “I’m currently homeless in Australia and penned this piece with my back to the brickwork behind a little jazz joint here called Ellington’s, digging on the swing, the night and the street, so your acceptance is a fitting coda for me. I’d be honoured to appear in your publication with like minded souls and voices.”
Murray’s email is an extraordinary reminder
...November 19th, 2014
Toward the end of her life, Ella Fitzgerald, “The First Lady of Song,” faced several health challenges, most stemming from her battle with diabetes. The effects of the disease resulted in the amputation of her legs, and famously contributed to the debilitation of her eyesight. (Who can forget her frequent television appearances, when each successive performance seemed to bring new eye wear fashion and a more powerful eyeglass prescription). But it was her respiratory ailments and congestive heart failure that brought some of the biggest names in jazz together for a fund raiser sponsored by the American Heart Association Avery Fisher Hall in February of 1990. Hosted by Lena Horne and violinist Itzhak Perlman, “Hearts For Ella” featured a Benny Carter-led band that included
...November 18th, 2014
I submit this post with great thanks to all Veterans who have honorably served on our behalf…
For years I have thought the music that best honors those we celebrate on Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day is “Peace Piece” by Bill Evans. It’s a beautiful, simple and “peaceful” melody that is instantly memorable, and his playing is passionate and sensitive in a way Evans supremely communicates. Here is what Evans bassist Chuck Israels had to say about “Peace Piece”:
” “Peace Piece” is an example of the depth of Evans’ compositional technique. It is an ostinato piece, composed and recorded long before the more recent superficial synthesis of Indian and American music; in fact, it owes more to Satie and Debussy than to Ravi Shankar. The improvisation starts simply over a gentle
...November 11th, 2014
In 1956, this singer appeared in the film The Girl Can’t Help It, in which she wore a dress that had been worn by Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. She also appeared in several other films (including Spike Lee’s 1990 movie Mo’ Better Blues), and received a Golden Globe nomination for her role in the film For Love of Ivy. Who is she?
Helen Humes
Betty Carter
Abbey Lincoln
Sarah Vaughan
Shirley Horn
Ivie Anderson
Ethel Waters
...November 11th, 2014
New Short Fiction Award
Three times a year, we award a writer who submits, in our opinion, the best original, previously unpublished work.
Kenneth Levine of Wethersfield, Connecticut is the winner of the thirty-seventh Jerry Jazz Musician New Short Fiction Award, announced and published for the first time on November 5, 2014.
Homage
by
Kenneth Levine
_______________________________
I deplaned in Amsterdam to confront my father. In 1990, the year I was born, after the likes of Stan Getz and Freddie Hubbard dubbed him “the reincarnation of Chet Baker,” he quit his part-time job repairing cars in Gilbert, Iowa to go on a worldwide tour from which he never returned.
From the airport I boarded a train to Centraal Station, across from which the Prins Hendrik hotel is situated at the Northern end of Zeedijk Straat, and by early evening I had navigated through the designated lanes over which walkers, bicyclists, and motorists coursed to stand before a bronze tablet on the hotel’s brick front that featured a haggard Chet Baker playing the trumpet over an inscription that read: “Trumpet player and singer Chet Baker died here on May 13th, 1988. He will live on in his music for anyone
...November 5th, 2014
I received an email yesterday from noted photographer (and friend) Herb Snitzer, who is announcing the distribution of “Such Sweet Thunder,” a boxed portfolio containing 10 of his finest iconic photographs. The collection of 16″ x 20″ silver gelatin prints includes photographs of artists like Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane. Snitzer wrote that this portfolio is “a wonderful investment for children and grandchildren as the value increases with each passing year.” Originally valued at $1500, the collection is now worth
...November 4th, 2014
Paul Morris is a graphic designer and writer who collects album art of the 1940’s and 1950’s. He finds his examples of influential mid-century design in the used record stores of Portland, Oregon.
This edition features a selection of RCA Victor album covers from Paul’s collection
...November 1st, 2014
The Five Spot Café, a club located in New York City’s Bowery neighborhood, was the site of a six month gig for the quartet of Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, drummer Shadow Wilson, and bassist Wilbur Ware. This engagement — coming on the heels of Monk’s cabaret card reinstatement — marked the merging of two of the most original voices in American music, Monk and Coltrane, in a space where cheap beer and good music attracted some of the city’s most influential artists and writers. Regulars included Larry Rivers, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg.
In Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, author Robin D.G. Kelley quotes Five Spot co-owner Joe Termini remembering the impact Monk’s quartet had on his club: “Once we hired Monk, all of a sudden the place was crowded every night. And frankly, in the beginning, I just didn’t understand any of it.”
...October 30th, 2014
The critic Gary Giddins once told me that fellow jazz writer Dan Morgenstern has the “best ears in the business.” Morgenstern’s work as editor of Down Beat during the 1960’s and 70’s (when it was jazz music’s premier magazine) and as the director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers, according to writer Sheldon Mayer helped direct “a generation of jazz scholars and broadened the discussion and range of the discipline.”
In addition to his work at Down Beat and the Institute, I associate Morgenstern’s career with his defense of the latter-day Louis Armstrong, and for the many great liner notes he penned. In the introduction to my 2005 interview with Morgenstern (at the time of the release of his book Living With Music), I wrote: “Dan Morgenstern was the
...October 29th, 2014
In the October 17 edition of the New York Times Magazine, in an article titled “Streaming Music Has Left Me Adrift,” Dan Brooks articulates what many of us who grew up with the long playing record album have long mourned, the passing of the era when consumers “owned” their own music collection based on a dedication of pursuing musical interests.
With the current ability to listen to just about anything ever recorded with merely an insignificant monetary monthly subscription (Brooks calls it “sharing the same record collection”), gone are the days when
...October 24th, 2014
In the introduction to his 2011 autobiography, trumpeter Clark Terry writes; “I’d always thought that the most important thing was to play my horn — to get into this band or that band or Duke’s band, to have my own band, to perform, record. And I did enjoy those things. Worked hard to achieve them. But, later on, I had a new dream: helping young musicians to make their dreams come true. That became my supreme joy and my greatest aspiration.” Indeed, while Terry’s musical career is legendary (Dizzy Gillespie thought he was “the best trumpeter around”), his life may be remembered as much for his work with young musicians as his impact on the bandstand.
A new documentary, Keep On Keepin’ On, is evidence of Terry’s passion for mentoring younger
...October 21st, 2014
Described by one reviewer as “one of the pioneers of this raucous, rapid-fire, eight-to-the-bar piano style,” this pianist was active in Chicago from 1915 but remained unrecorded until 1939. In addition to his work as a pianist, during World War I he played baseball for the Negro Baseball League’s Chicago All-Americans, and was a groundskeeper for the Chicago White Sox throughout his life. Who is he?
Pete Johnson
James P. Johnson
Albert Ammons
Meade Lux Lewis
Luckey Roberts
Cliff Jackson
Jimmy Yancey
Tony Jackson
...October 20th, 2014
Fans of the trumpet may enjoy reading an interview I did with critic Gary Giddins on underrated jazz musicians. (This was part of my 15 part series of interviews with him called “Conversations with Gary Giddins.”) In this snippet from the interview, Giddins talks about Fats Navarro, Kenny Dorham, Booker Little, and a few others who never quite received their “due.”
*
GG: Another trumpet player that I never actually did a whole column on — and it sort of spooks me that I didn’t because he’s one of my favorites — is Fats Navarro, one of the very pivotal players of the late forties. I wrote a number of times about Clifford Brown, who in some ways arrived as Navarro’s heir apparent, but he’s another musician I feel I never did justice to because
...
October 17th, 2014
Her rhythms are held by open
waves of blue strength.
Faces cool under a crescent moon.
The insides of listeners turn red
with passion. The crowd reaches
for her flavor.
Words birth from her as the children
of sound. Fingers tap to the
October 10th, 2014
The lure of record stores was pretty strong during that industry’s glory days, and no chain record store was held in higher esteem than Tower Records. Founded by Russ Solomon in Sacramento in 1960, the chain would spread to major cities all over the country (Columbus and Bay in San Francisco, Sunset Blvd. In LA, and the two Manhattan locations were the chain’s most revered U.S. addresses), and eventually all over the world. Before the stores were liquidated in 2006, Tower had established itself as a major retailer, with consumer recognition of its logo among the top 20 in all of retailing.
Paul Morris turned me on to a terrific video of the Tower/Sunset store in 1971. In its nearly 11 minutes, you will see employees floor stacking albums, ringing up customers while dangling smokes from their lips, $2.77 new releases, and
...October 7th, 2014
Charles Mingus called him “the greatest trumpet player that I’ve heard in this life,” and he became well-known during his nine years playing in Count Basie’s orchestra, taking a “Pop Goes the Weasel” chorus on “April in Paris.” Who is he?
Roy Eldridge
Charlie Shavers
Ray Nance
Cat Anderson
Bill Coleman
Joe Newman
Thad Jones
...October 6th, 2014
I am in the early stages of reading pianist Hampton Hawes’ 1972 autobiography (written with Don Asher) Raise Up Off Me, which Gary Giddins called, in his introduction, “the first book to give an insider’s view of the most provocative and misunderstood movement in jazz — the modernism of the ’40s, bebop.” It is incredibly entertaining and a witty, lucid, and smart read.
In a paragraph representative of the book’s quality, Hawes writes about his respect for and appreciation of his instrument’s dependability:
The piano was the only sure friend I had because it was the only thing that was consistent, always made sense and responded directly to what I did. Pianos don’t ever change. Sittin’ there every day. You wanna play me, here I am. The D is still here, the A flats still here, they’re always going to be there and it don’t matter whether it’s Sunday, Ash Wednesday or the Fourth of July. Play it right and it comes
...October 4th, 2014
O you sweet be-
spectacled bird!
you’re too cool for me
sitting there perched
in your wild catbird seat
with your sleek black
beatnik goatee &
blindman’s shades
pulled down low over
your hot orange
djellabiya while you
spill out shrill jazz
riffs and raffs
October 3rd, 2014
This popular music singer once sang backup with her vocal group the Pied Pipers in Tommy Dorsey’s band and occasionally performed under the pseudonym “Darlene Edwards.” By 1955, she had sold more records than any other female artist, and one of her songs was the first record by a woman to reach #1 on the U.K. Singles Chart. Who is she?
Anita O’Day
Jo Stafford
Helen Merrill
Peggy Lee
Chris Connor
Carmen McRae
Lena Horne
Mildred Bailey
...September 29th, 2014
A finalist in our recent Short Fiction Contest, Willard Manus’ “When the World Was Young” is a love story between a man and a woman, and a woman and her musical inspiration — Clifford Brown
...September 25th, 2014
In this edition of “Reminiscing in Tempo: Memories and Opinion,” noted critics and musicians list their favorite jazz record albums of the 1970’s.
...September 24th, 2014
This trumpeter played in the bands of Lionel Hampton and Andy Kirk, and was a prominent figure in the transition from swing to bop, even described as the “missing link” between Roy Eldridge and Fats Navarro. Who is he?
Kenny Dorham
Clark Terry
Bill Coleman
Howard McGhee
Freddie Webster
Jonah Jones
Charlie Shavers
...September 22nd, 2014
In his 1973 autobiography Music is My Mistress, from a chapter titled “The Taste Buds,” Duke Ellington writes about his special diet, losing thirty pounds while on it, and the resulting onstage antics.
__________
In 1955 my doctor, Arthur Logan, told me I would have to take off twenty-two pounds. I tore up his suggested menu and made one of my own. Mine was simply steak (any amount), grapefruit, and black coffee with a slice of lemon first squeezed and then dropped into it. With the exception of a binge one day a week, I ate as much of this and as often as I please for three months.
When we returned to the New York area, my first date was
...September 20th, 2014
Pianist Joe Sample — who died on September 12 at the age of 75 — was a critical link to both the glories of hard bop and the perils of smooth jazz. His career will principally be remembered as a founding member of the Jazz Crusaders (ultimately just “The Crusaders”), a band he described as being “fathers of jazz-funk-fusion.” While his musical contributions are noteworthy, I also remember him for an altogether different reason.
In 1974, The Crusaders were all over the radio. In the San Francisco Bay area (where I lived at the time), their music — particularly their arrangement of Carole King’s “So Far Away” and a sweet ballad called “Way Back Home” — was in heavy rotation on the adult contemporary formatted KSFO-AM as well as on the era’s alternative rock giant KSAN-FM. In record industry parlance, they had “crossed over” into multiple formats. The Crusaders were “huge.”
In addition to being an important musical influence during
...September 18th, 2014
The stem pipe was cracked
he told me gently
as if I were an anxious relative
in a hospital waiting room
The craftsman nursed my boy’s trumpet
deciding it needed more oil, too
And while he was at it, fashioned a screw
replacing one long missing
September 17th, 2014
This pianist worked with (among others) the bands of Bunny Berigan, Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman, and was Bing Crosby’s musical director at the time of Crosby’s death in 1977. Who is he?
...September 15th, 2014
Julian “Cannonball” Adderley’s stellar career began in the era of hard bop and ended (far too soon) during the time of jazz fusion. In between, he played on some of the most prominent recordings in the history of jazz — Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue and his own Somethin’ Else among them — and ultimately became what the critic Gary Giddins described as “the patron saint of the soul-hymn movement,” a music that would reach a broad affluent audience while also keeping jazz relevant in the African-American neighborhoods.
...August 26th, 2014
Rahsaan Roland Kirk defined “musical brilliance.” Referring to jazz as “black classical music,” his genius, showmanship and originality for it was welcomed by some, but, as jazz entrepreneur Todd Barkin wrote, “Rahsaan created a universe of his own, musically, spiritually, and aesthetically — and that was too heavy for most people.” Some critics and musicians even derided his work as that of a “circus act.”
Fortunately, nearly 37 years since his death, a group of wonderfully eccentric New Yorkers — led by Kirk biographer John Kruth (Bright Moments: The Life and Legacy of Rahsaan Roland Kirk) — is assembling
...August 25th, 2014
Maurice Ravel acknowledged basing his Boléro on an improvisation of this clarinetist, who was also influential in the careers of Benny Goodman and Nat Cole, who made famous this musician’s theme song, “Sweet Lorraine.” Who is he?
Sidney Bechet
Johnny Doods
Jimmy Noone
Wilbur Sweatman
Frankie Teschemacher
Buster Bailey
Ted Lewis
...August 25th, 2014
Great “black” poet?
Is Robert Frost identified as “white” as snow?
I devoured every heart fired revolutionary syllable
Each righteous rectifying rhyme a mountainous memorial in time
Barefaced truth like Emit Till’s open casket
A little Harlem hustle humor
August 22nd, 2014
Paul Morris is a graphic designer and writer who collects album art of the 1940’s and 1950’s. He finds his examples of influential mid-century design in the used record stores of Portland, Oregon. This humorous edition features a “disturbing” and fascinating trend in 1950’s album art — Records on the Floor!
...August 20th, 2014
This posthumously-awarded Grammy winning musician/composer was the pianist and arranger for the vocal group The Hi-Lo’s in the late 1950’s, and after working with Donald Byrd and Dizzy Gillespie became known for his Latin and bossa nova recordings in the 1960’s. He was also frequently cited by Herbie Hancock as a “major influence.” Who is he?
Buddy Bregman
Lalo Schifrin
Clare Fischer
Tito Puente
George Shearing
George Russell
Cal Tjader
...August 11th, 2014
not even schroeder from the peanuts
comic strip
is as dedicated to the piano
and he has a bust of beethoven
gracing his steinway!
you pull sounds out of the air
making something out of nothing
you call it improvisation:
i say, god’s just using you as
a transmitter for his thoughts…
August 8th, 2014
The publication of Arya Jenkins’ “Broad Street” is the fourth in a series of short stories she has been commissioned to write for Jerry Jazz Musician. For information about her column, please see our September 12 “Letter From the Publisher.”
For Ms. Jenkins’ introduction to her work, read “Coming to Jazz.”
__________
The day I moved into Broad Street, the roiling waters of the Long Island Sound burst over sea walls along the Connecticut coast from New Haven to Greenwich, flooding Bridgeport so badly, a poor, emotionally disturbed man actually drowned in a sewer. At Seaside Park, water rushed across two parking lots, swirled around a few skimpy trees and headed straight for the historic set of row houses that included my basement apartment. It was early December as I arrived, two knapsacks in tow, only to find my new landlady Rosie and my neighbor Alice knee-deep in galoshes in muck, hauling out my furniture.
A week earlier, Alice had lured me with, “There’s a vacancy next door and it’s yours. Everybody’s an artist here. You belong.” I had felt that the studio with its cozy rooms
...August 5th, 2014
Known as “Mr. Entertainment,” this clarinetist’s band was second only to Paul Whiteman’s (pictured) in popularity during the 1920s. Who is he?
Fred Waring
Noble Sissle
Rudy Vallee
Ben Pollack
Phil Harris
Ted Lewis
...August 4th, 2014
Cannonball Adderley was an endearing, charismatic and cutting-edge musician who, as Adderley biographer Cary Ginell writes in the introduction of Walk Tall: The Music and Life of Julian “Cannonball” Adderley “brought an enthusiasm for his music to nightclubs around the world, expanding jazz’s boundaries with a fresh exuberance as the music progressed from the bebop of the 1940s and ’50s to combine with gospel and soul to help pioneer the subgenres of hard bop and soul jazz in the ’60’s.” His signature sound — though cut short at the age of 46 in 1975 — remains an essential ingredient of the music’s past, present and future.
I am in the process of working on an interview with Ginell, which I expect will be published sometime in August. Meanwhile, the book’s Foreward — a fond remembrance of Adderley by his friend Quincy Jones — is published here in its entirety,
...August 1st, 2014
Playing at Los Angeles’ Cocoanut Grove club, and featuring singers that included Bing Crosby, this bandleader led the top West Coast big band during the 20’s and 30’s. Who was he?
Ben Bernie
Gus Arnheim
Paul Whiteman
Ted Lewis
Jean Goldkette
Ben Pollack
Fred Waring
...July 28th, 2014
Guess who I saw today
The last one left
To sing the scales from butterscotch tease
To the willows that wept
A slippery taunt, toffee sweet
...July 23rd, 2014
Who was known as the “middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone?”
Dony Byas
Gato Barbieri
Chu Berry
Gene Ammons
Sonny Stitt
Stan Getz
Hank Mobley
Chico Freeman
...July 14th, 2014
In 2004, I had the privilege of interviewing Neil Lanctot, whose history of baseball’s Negro Leagues entitled Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution had just been published.
While preparing for the interview, the work of the noted Pittsburgh Courier photographer Charles “Teenie” Harris came to my attention. Among his many contributions to America’s archives are his photographs of the Negro Leagues, taken during the League’s pre-war and wartime era, mostly in Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field, where the Pittsburgh Crawfords played many of their games.
With baseball’s All Star Game scheduled for Tuesday evening in Minneapolis, it feels like a good time to revisit some baseball (and American) history, and there is no better way than to view some of Harris’ amazing work.
With grateful appreciation to Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art — who granted us permission to use these historic images — we present a photo gallery of rarely seen Harris photos,
...July 13th, 2014
Three times a year, we award a writer who submits, in our opinion, the best original, previously unpublished work.
Yvonne McBride of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is the winner of the thirty-sixth Jerry Jazz Musician New Short Fiction Award, announced and published for the first time on July 12, 2014.
Fever
by
Yvonne McBride
_______________________________
Royal had studied her from the bandstand each and every night since their first gig. Such a little thing she was. Nicely curved, tightly packaged — but such a small little thing he had a notion she would break if even his fingertips glazed her. And he had tried. To touch her. Had been trying to get close to her for the past two and all night long.
July 12th, 2014
This tenor saxophonist played with Hoagy Carmichael’s Teenagers, as well as Buddy Rich, Lennie Tristano (pictured), and Lee Konitz. He collapsed and died on stage at Los Angeles’ Donte’s club in 1987 while playing “Out of Nowhere.” Who is he?
John Gilmore
Chico Freeman
Warne Marsh
Ted Brown
Al Cohn
Bob Cooper
Buddy Tate
Buddy Collette
Go to the next page or the answer!
...July 7th, 2014
Paul Morris is a graphic designer and writer who collects album art of the 1940’s and 1950’s. He finds his examples of influential mid-century design in the used record stores of Portland, Oregon.
This edition features Alex Steinweiss album covers from his prime period — the late 1940’s and early 1950’s.
...July 6th, 2014
The convergence of poetry and jazz has long been a part of the counterculture, and it has always interested me. An early interview I did for Jerry Jazz Musician was with David Amram, once known as Jack Kerouac’s musical collaborator. In the interview he talked about Kerouac’s love of music, telling me that “he had an enormous memory for music and for jazz and the classics. He could sing the melodies from different Haydn and Beethoven string quartets. He was like an encyclopedia of music and classic literature from Europe. He also had an enormous knowledge of Buddhism. He had a tremendous knowledge of Judaism, as well as the writings from the Old and New Testaments as well as from the Mass. He had this knowledge of so many different things. When he was reading, I would submerge myself into whatever it was he was reading, and I tried to anticipate what would happen next.”
So, the collaboration of words and music is fascinating, and has deep and intellectual roots. It was the basis for my interest in an email I received a while ago from reed player Kevin Flanagan who, like Kerouac, is a Lowell, Massachusetts native. Flanagan’s Riprap Quartet recordings, he informed me, “feature compositions by the band setting the works of Pulitzer Prize winning-poet Gary Snyder” and is
...July 3rd, 2014
Virtually all recordings of this influential trumpet player are available, but the only known film footage of him is in a 1955 appearance on the Soupy Sales variety show, which was one year before his death. Who is he?
Booker Little
Clifford Brown
Donald Byrd
Lee Morgan
Freddie Hubbard
Art Farmer
Roy Eldridge
Fats Navarro
...June 30th, 2014
Breaking into the white market without losing his African-American vernacular identity was an amazing achievement for Louis Armstrong — particularly during his era. I talk about this in an excerpt from my recent interview with Thomas Brothers, author of Louis Armstrong: Master Of Modernism.
__________
JJM In the winter of 1925 – 26, while making a name for himself at classy venues like the Dreamland Café and the Vendome Theater, Armstrong was also extending his reputation thanks to the Hot Five series on OKeh Records. The recordings sold in Chicago, but the main target audience was African Americans in the Deep South, where “race records” were immensely popular. What was OKeh’s marketing strategy for this series?
TB Yes, they certainly sold in Chicago, and they sold in all northern cities where there were African-American communities from the Great Migration. The target of these “race records” was of course to appeal to the African-American mass audience, and to do so in a low-budget way. They were not interested in paying musicians any royalties – they would get a flat fee
...June 25th, 2014
Where would jazz be without New York’s “joints’ of the 1920’s – 1950’s? If Ellington hadn’t been hired to play the Cotton Club, what direction would his orchestra have taken? Without the Royal Roost, would Parker play with Miles and Max Roach, and would Miles have had a venue to perform “Birth of the Cool” in? And, where would Monk and Coltrane have played if not at the Five Spot?
I came upon this terrific history today, “Jazz Joints Through the Ages.” Written by noted jazz historian Ashley Kahn and originally published in Jazz Times in 2006, the feature provides short biographies of many of the most important clubs in jazz music’s past.
...June 24th, 2014
After joining Billy Eckstine’s band in 1944, Eckstine named this new band mate “Jug” when straw hats ordered for the band did not fit. Who is he?
Sonny Stitt
Sonny Clark
Jackie McLean
Gene Ammons
Dexter Gordon
Tadd Dameron
Fats Navarro
...June 23rd, 2014
Last night, CNN aired an episode of the Spielberg/Hanks/Goetzman-produced documentary “The Sixties” that focused on the Vietnam War. Lots of historic and horrific footage — some I have never seen before — that will hopefully serve as a blunt reminder about the cost of involving ourselves in an unnecessary war. So many wonderful young men of my generation paid the ultimate price…
Two of the key commentators on the program are Karl Marlantes, author of the essential Vietnam war novel Matterhorn that focused on the aims of the war — which was not about gaining territory but solely on the mass killing of the Viet Cong — and David Maraniss, author of They Marched Into Sunlight, an account of the war on the battlefield,
...June 20th, 2014
Concerning yesterday’s passing of the great pianist Horace Silver, others much more qualified than I will write of his musical brilliance, and communicate his importance to the music’s growth. (To that end, there is an excellent life remembrance of Silver by Peter Keepnews in today’s New York Times that you can read by going here). I would just like to devote a couple paragraphs to my own introduction to his music, and what it meant to me at the time.
When I moved from Berkeley to Portland in the summer of 1978, I was already a pretty passionate listener of jazz, but I was still in the “101” phase. I knew and loved the “A Team” — Basie, Ellington, some early Armstrong, Monk, Bird and Miles. Coltrane’s ballads were gorgeous, and I loved his playing on
...June 19th, 2014
Still tingling with Basie’s hard cooking,
between sets I stood at the bar
when the man next to me ordered
scotch and milk. I looked to see who had
this stray taste and almost swooned
when I saw it was the master.
Basie knocked his shot back,
then, when he saw me gaping,
raised his milk to my peachy face
and rolled out his complete smile
June 18th, 2014
In the mid-1950’s, after a failed audition for the Benny Goodman band, this drummer found work in New York, toured with Charles Mingus’s band, and performed on J.J. Johnson’s J Is for Jazz. Who is he?
Jimmy Cobb
Joe Morello
Clifford Jarvis
Philly Joe Jones
Jo Jones
Joe Chambers
Jack De Johnette
Elvin Jones
...June 16th, 2014
Besides doing his best to help raise three kids, during my 1960’s childhood my father worked his heart out at two jobs — one of which was as owner of a restaurant on Oakland’s Telegraph Avenue, and the other as a musician, playing trumpet and viola throughout the San Francisco Bay area, mostly on evenings and weekends in “casual” jobs. For years he was part of a strolling quartet that entertained San Francisco’s elite at the World Trade Club — an ensemble that at its peak toured the Philippines, playing to an audience that included “strongman” Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda.
Prior to that, in the 30’s he traveled the country and led his own band in Sacramento. In the 40’s, he spent the war years as a member of the Winged Victory Orchestra. And, in the late 40’s and 50’s, among many musical pursuits (although toned down once he married my mom in 1947), he played in the Jack Fina Orchestra, as well as in Ernie Heckscher’s orchestra, which famously played at the Fairmont Hotel atop Nob Hill.
He loved his music, and part of my own early appreciation for music came as a result of hearing his practice sessions. To this day I can still very clearly hear the sound of his viola
...June 15th, 2014
In Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism, Thomas Brothers picks up where he left off with the acclaimed Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans, following the story of the great jazz musician into his most creatively fertile years in the 1920s and early 1930s, when Armstrong created not one but two modern musical styles. Brothers wields his own tremendous skill in making the connections between history and music accessible to everyone as Armstrong shucks and jives across the page. Through Brothers’s expert ears and eyes we meet an Armstrong whose quickness and sureness, so evident in his performances, served him well in his encounters with racism while his music soared across the airwaves into homes all over America.
Brothers discusses his book with Jerry Jazz Musician publisher Joe Maita in an April, 2014 interview.
...June 15th, 2014
Before becoming a full time musician, this pianist was a welterweight boxer who once fought “Sugar” Ray Robinson. Who is he?
Red Garland
Mel Powell
John Lewis
Billy Taylor
Elmo Hope
Wynton Kelly
Barry Harris
Hank Jones
...June 9th, 2014
Coltrane
by Alan Patterson
His Voice
crying in the wilderness
sighing, screeching, singing,
of soul secrets and sufferings
stark, silent sound
invoking Heaven’s muse
and Purgatory’s cleansing fire.
Who, speaking in toungues
created new language
who captured Eternity’s essence
June 5th, 2014
“The Weary Blues” — a poem about the importance of music and the blues in everyday life — is a signature work of Langston Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance writer whose poetry helped change the way art created by African Americans was viewed, and influenced the writers of the beat generation. Written in 1925, the melancholy poem is set in a Harlem bar where a piano player plays the blues, and is one of the first poems to mix poetry and music.
Besides being a great writer, Hughes was an eloquent communicator, and it is a wonderful experience to hear him read his own poetry.. This 1958 film shows him reading “The Weary Blues” to the accompaniment of a Canadian group led by pianist Doug Parker.
...June 3rd, 2014
This bassist played with Charlie Barnet (pictured) in 1942, was on the recording session of Coleman Hawkins’ “The Man I Love,” appeared in a mystery movie called The Crimson Canary, “inadvertently” discovered Cannonball Adderley, and is considered the pioneer of the cello as a solo instrument in jazz. Who is he?
Milt Hinton
Jimmy Blanton
Oscar Pettiford
Charles Mingus
Charlie Haden
Red Callendar
Curly Russell
Walter Page
...June 2nd, 2014
Between 1933 – 1938, this legendary arranger led his own band in California that eventually became the backup group for Skinnay Ennis. Who is he?
Sy Oliver
Stan Kenton
George Russell
Quincy Jones
Pete Rugolo
Jimmy Giuffre
Gil Evans
...May 26th, 2014
This trumpeter was the spark plug in Gene Krupa’s band, and was known as “Little Jazz”. Who is he?
Dizzy Gillespie
Roy Eldridge
Fats Navarro
Chet Baker
Shorty Rogers
Conte Condoli
Bunny Berigan
Jonah Jones
...May 12th, 2014
As a jazz musician for seven decades, and as a chronicler of its intellectual and spiritual development through his fascinating, award-winning photography, Milt Hinton acts as an essential connecting point for the music and its associated culture. Hinton played bass alongside iconic figures like Cab Calloway, Dizzy Gillespie, and Louis Armstrong, and, as a photographer, brought these men and a host of others into focus as musicians, artists, and vital contributors to twentieth-century American life.
With the generous consent of David G. Berger and Holly Maxson, who along with Milt Hinton co-authored Playing the Changes: Milt Hinton’s Life in Stories and Photographs, Jerry Jazz Musician presents a photo exhibit, “Jazz: Through the Life and Lens of Milt Hinton.”
...May 9th, 2014
In February, 1928, a large ad in Variety heralded this Chicago-based orchestra’s arrival in New York, referring to it as “THE BIG ORCHESTRA WITH THE LITTLE LEADER.” This orchestra featured some of the biggest future talents in popular music. Who was the orchestra’s leader?
Jean Goldkette
Jimmie Lunceford
Luis Russell
Tommy Dorsey
Ben Pollack
Bob Crosby
Charlie Barnet
Paul Whiteman
...May 5th, 2014
STAR WORSHIPPING
Her message encouraged
tears from hiding, like light
exposing corners; no emotion
remains uncovered.
She walked a line through resistance.
The eyes and hands of judging formed
May 5th, 2014
Ken Nordine’s first “Word Jazz” recording featured a band who worked under the alias of the “Fred Katz Group.” Who was its leader?
Bob Brookmeyer
Stan Getz
Zoot Sims
Hank Mobley
Elmo Hope
Lee Morgan
Stan Kenton
Chico Hamilton
...April 28th, 2014
While a member of Lionel Hampton’s band, his “Flying Home” solo was considered to be the first R&B sax solo. Who was he?
Johnny Board
Eddie Chamblee
James Moody
Buddy Tate
Illinois Jacquet
Frank Foster
Willie Smith
Dexter Gordon
...
April 21st, 2014
The morning glory —
another thing
that will never be my friend.
— Basho
Rain has a way of darkening the bark on trees,
deepening the wood cracks in fences.
Grass appears softer, envious of clouds
that tease with their rootlessness,
their promise of travel and a good night’s sleep.
Normally, I’d have a little Johnny Hodges
playing in the background or Casablanca
splashing silvery-blue against a wall,
April 19th, 2014
The publication of Arya Jenkins’ “Epistrophy” is the third in a series of short stories she has been commissioned to write for Jerry Jazz Musician. For information about her column, please see our September 12 “Letter From the Publisher.” For Ms. Jenkins’ introduction to her work, read “Coming to Jazz.”
__________
Disenchanted leaves fell early through the trees the summer I left my life for an ashram. The path to the ashram snaked into the woods not far from Tanglewood and reminded me less of where I had been than where I was going with its rotund emphasis on kindness and formality-Within a year I would be studying Buddhism in a monastery and teaching English at Cornell in Ithaca.
I was attempting to put a punto finale to the moneyed nonsense in which I’d lived too long in Fairfield County, and wanted to quell my fulminating instinct, my destructive fires and find some kind of peace and stability, even at the expense of boredom–which may have been expecting too much.
...April 16th, 2014
This artist may be best known as the author of a book whose concept was playing jazz based on scales rather than chord changes — a theory that helped pave the way for the modal revolutions of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Who is he?
Herbie Nichols
Bill Evans
George Russell
Lennie Tristano
Gil Evans
Anthony Braxton
Tadd Dameron
...
April 14th, 2014
“Reminiscing in Tempo” is part of a continuing effort to provide Jerry Jazz Musician readers with unique forms of “edu-tainment.” As often as possible, Jerry Jazz Musician poses one question via e mail to a small number of prominent and diverse people. The question is designed to provoke a lively response that will potentially include the memories and/or opinion of those solicited.
This edition asks the question “What are 3 or 4 of your favorite jazz record albums of the 1960’s?” Respondents include the musicians John McLaughlin, Vijay Iyer, Warren Wolf, Jane Ira Bloom, Don Byron, Robin Eubanks, and journalists Gary Giddins, Dan Morgenstern, Terry Teachout, Neil Tesser, John Goodman and lots more…
...April 10th, 2014
Paul Morris is a graphic designer and writer who collects album art of the 1940’s and 1950’s. He finds his examples of influential mid-century design in the used record stores of Portland, Oregon.
This edition features teenagers of the 1950’s enjoying their music!
...April 9th, 2014
In 1938, Charlie Parker stayed in this musician’s New York apartment, despite the wife’s objections. Who is he?
Roy Eldridge
Coleman Hawkins
Billy Eckstine
Art Tatum
Dizzy Gillespie
Lester Young
Kenny Clarke
Buster Smith
...April 7th, 2014
In 1949, this artist coined the phrase “Bop for the People,” which implied a more accessible form of the music. Who is he?
Charlie Ventura
Lionel Hampton
Red Norvo
Gene Krupa
Zoot Sims
Stan Getz
...March 31st, 2014
You Can Be A Genius And Be Sane
Watching Monk and watching self,
One senses that one can have genius
And be sane.
You can
Be odd,
The brain its own,
To nail the themes
Your thought-extremes deem right.
Monk plays and pounds
In rhythmic spasms;
March 30th, 2014
“I think there are only three things that America will be known for 2,000 years from now when they study this civilization: the Constitution, jazz music and baseball. They’re the three most beautifully designed things this culture has ever produced.”
—Gerald Early, cultural critic
__________
Spring is upon us, and so is the start of the baseball season. As Gerald Early points out, there are great connections between jazz and baseball, prominent of which is the role that desegregation of each institution played in creating the political climate essential to the civil rights movement.
There are interesting similarities among two of the leading African American figures of the era who helped integrate their professions, not the least of which was the quality of their character. To Branch Rickey, after thoroughly investigating the college-educated Jackie Robinson, he felt
...March 28th, 2014
In “Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism, author Thomas Brothers writes about Armstrong’s early fascination with marijuana — an interest that began in Chicago, 1928, while playing the Savoy Ballroom. This interest led to a marijuana possession arrest on November 13, 1930 in the parking lot of Los Angeles’ Cotton Club. “Armstrong was allowed to finish out his night work before they hauled him off to jail around 3:00 A.M.,” Brothers writes.
The following book excerpt begins with a rather humorous transcript from his trial, and then
...March 25th, 2014
In 1929, this trumpeter replaced Bubber Miley in Duke Ellington’s band. Who was he?
Red Allen
Rex Stewart
Ziggy Elman
...March 24th, 2014
Known as “Mule,” this bassist was also known for singing along with his bowed solos (much like Slam Stewart). Who was he?
Major Holley
Oscar Pettiford
Curley Russell
Tommy Potter
Gene Ramey
Buster Williams
Red Callender
John Kirby
...March 17th, 2014
I’m lonely most nights. It’s part of my job. You can’t be happy if you want to play the blues. But there were some nights that made my misery worth it, where I felt light for once and everything fit together. I’m sure it was the absence of thought that did it. When I think about things, I realize how awful they are. But when I float out of my chains, having known what they were like, the freedom is all the sweeter.
January 8th was such a night.
...March 15th, 2014
Who was known as the “middleweight champion of the tenor?”
John Coltrane
Johnny Griffin
Ike Quebec
Gene Ammons
Hank Mobley
Eddie Lockjaw Davis
Cannonball Adderley
Cleanhead Vinson
...March 10th, 2014
On the heels of terrific books on Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington comes Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism, author and Duke University Music Professor Thomas Brothers’ follow-up to his revered Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans.
In the book’s introduction, Brothers reports that his book picks up where Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans left off, with Armstrong’s 1922 Chicago arrival, and ends ten years later. He writes, “My main thesis is that the success of this nimble-minded musician depended on his ability to skillfully negotiate the musical and social legacies of slavery. Indeed, his career can be understood as a response to these interlocking trajectories.” I have just begun reading it and have been taken in by “Welcome to Chicago,” the book’s first chapter that tells the story of what Armstrong would have seen as he entered Lincoln Gardens for the first time in August, 1922; for example, the racially inflected floor show whose “centerpiece of the presentation is a row of light-skinned dancing girls;” dancing couples in an environment where “correct dancing is insisted upon” (to keep immorality charges at bay); and the local white musicians — “alligators” — described as “the little white boys…motivated to learn the music and cash in.”
I had the privilege of interviewing Thomas Brothers following the publication of Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans, and he has accepted my invitation for an interview about his new book. It is
...March 7th, 2014
Paul Morris is a graphic designer and writer who collects album art of the 1940’s and 1950’s. He finds his examples of influential mid-century design in the used record stores of Portland, Oregon.
In this edition, Paul returns to the work of Alex Steinweiss, when he used the pseudonym “Piedra Blanca.”
...March 6th, 2014
It’s light on silver-black and white,
Grainy footage of a smoky room,
A woman at the keys. A spotlight
As perfectly round as the moon
Frames her form. She picks at a tune.
This is jazz, now, it’s uncertain.
Her fingers stop, hover, resume.
She stands, walks behind a curtain.
Years later — in color now –her
Faith allows her to break that long
Silence, permits her to
March 5th, 2014
What sax player initially turned from the alto to the tenor sax in a purported effort to escape his image as a follower of Charlie Parker?
_____
Dexter Gordon
Cannonball Adderley
Nat Adderley
Sonny Stitt
Sonny Rollins
Gene Ammons
Roland Kirk
...March 3rd, 2014
Dizzy Gillespie, with Yugoslav composer Nikica Kaogjera in tow, cycle the streets of Zagreb during a State Department tour designed to counter Soviet propaganda.
____
During the peak of the Cold War, propaganda was king, and was especially played out in the non-aligned, emerging nation regions of the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Responding to what was termed by the U.S. State Department as the Soviet Union’s “gigantic propaganda offensive,” in 1954 President Eisenhower created the Emergency Fund for International Affairs, whose role would be to present American culture abroad for the purpose of demonstrating the benefits of freedom (and capitalism) on artistic expression. According to Penny Von Eschen, author of Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War, “Eisenhower resented Europeans’ depiction of the country as a ‘race of materialists’ and was distressed that ‘our successes are described in terms of automobiles and not in terms of worthwhile culture of any kind.'”
...February 19th, 2014
Show me a clarinet, teacher,
one from a distant continent’s wood
that has suckled nourishment
from a heated, morning sun
then show me the reed,
the dried, shallow, vibrating stick,
that will tickle sound
through many dark nights
when those with flicking tongues
articulate their passion
between panted breaths.
Show me the silver,
flailing fingers have mined
with a synchronized motion
February 18th, 2014
In 1959, this bandleader toured Europe with a group originally put together to play for Harold Arlen’s show Free and Easy. Who is he?
Gerry Mulligan
Mayard Ferguson
Gerald Wilson
Don Ellis
Gil Evans
Stan Kenton
Quincy Jones
Sun Ra
...February 17th, 2014
So many great songs to choose from for marking Valentine’s Day…The standard that most immediately comes to mind is an obvious choice, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s “My Funny Valentine.” Written for their 1937 Broadway musical Babes in Arms, the piece was overshadowed on Broadway (and in the film version starring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland) by “Where or When,” “I Wish I Were in Love Again,” and “The Lady is a Tramp,” and was not made relevant until Frank Sinatra’s recording of it in 1953. It was eventually recorded by more than 600 artists on countless albums, and became synonymous with Chet Baker, who recorded it over 100 times. Will Friedwald, author of Stardust Melodies: The Biography of Twelve of America’s Most Popular Songs — an entertaining and essential work of popular music history — wrote that “the tune could be said to follow Baker from the grave, since it’s usually included in memorial tributes to him.”
Friedwald writes, “What makes the whole [song] so remarkable is the happy/sad nature of the lyric, brilliantly mirroring the major/minor nature of the music. It’s a love song, but far from those ‘I love you and everything’s rosy’ tunes so popular in the twenties (vis-a-vis Iriving Berlin’s ‘Blue Skies’). It’s vaguely optimistic, but it couldn’t
...February 14th, 2014
Names like
Little Bird & Bicycle Horn
missed your tracking
Parker solos faster
backward to the future,
higher than Shaker Heights,
further than armies marching
to spiritual masterlocks
missing the Trane
to the Future Truth
marching in.
French Mayonnaise
sustained journeys
to Sweden & Denmark
where pickup players
kept standard time
while you advanced
February 13th, 2014
With the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ appearance on Ed Sullivan prominently in the news this past week, it is interesting (and entertaining) to revisit some of the critical perspectives of their music following the performance.
On February 10, 1964, Theodore Strongin, music critic for the New York Times (who Wikipedia describes as a “champion of new music”) wrote that “The Beatles’ vocal quality can be described as hoarsely incoherent, with the minimal enunciation necessary to communicate the schematic texts.” Three days later, acknowledging the phenomenon that hit our shores, George Dixon of the Washington Post wrote, “Just thinking about the Beatles seems to induce mental disturbance. They have a commonplace, rather dull act that hardly seems to merit mentioning, yet people hereabouts have mentioned scarcely anything else for a couple of days.”
Months later, William F. Buckley, the era’s chief conservative voice and founder of the National Review got into the act, writing
...February 11th, 2014
Marc Myers is a busy guy…In addition to being a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal (where he writes about jazz, rock, and other culture), he also posts daily on his award-winning blog Jazz Wax and travels around the world promoting his pursuits. Perhaps his most important contribution is his book Why Jazz Happened, described by his publisher (University of California Press) as “the first comprehensive social history of jazz.” Myers’ perspective is fresh and thorough and wonderfully entertaining. For those who love the history of this music, it should be on your night table.
I recently interviewed Myers about his book, which he took the time to converse in great detail about — topics like how the G.I. Bill altered the direction of jazz; the advent of the extended jazz solo that came with the introduction of the LP; and how the suburbanization of Southern California ushered in a new harmony-rich jazz style in contrast to the music played in urban markets. It is a great read!
What follows is part conversation/part history class about Myers’ fascinating cultural study of why, in his opinion, “jazz happened.”
...February 7th, 2014
On occasion I have taught a very basic 45 minute “History of Jazz” class to first and second graders. I play music and show video, hold up classic record album covers, and read a quotation or two. Without fail, the 6 – 8 year olds are excited by the music and images, and it is exhilarating to see them get to their feet and unabashedly dance, inspired by the music of Armstrong, Goodman, Ellington, Basie, Billie, and Monk. Their energy is unbounded, and is a reminder of what lives inside children before many unlearn their “hip” roots.
Whenever a new book geared toward teaching children about jazz music is released, I am moved to share the news…Check out Journey to Jazzland, a picture book to inspire kids to learn about jazz. Conceptualized by Gia Volterra de Saulnier, she writes that she hopes to “get more kids inspired to learn at least a little bit more about jazz,” and to get them to know about “this important music history that really should be kept alive.”
...February 5th, 2014
Lester Young was the “Pres.” Who became known as the “Vice Pres?”
Paul Quinichette
Dexter Gordon
Hank Crawford
Paul Gonsalves
Don Byas
Johnny Griffin
Arnett Cobb
Lou Donaldson
...February 3rd, 2014
ON DIVISIDERO
A hill with faces
and sidewalks,
green shoes and sneakers
without laces,
chalkboard menus,
peppers and onions
and bicycles passing
apartments with yellow
shutters and
terracotta pots with
flowers reaching over
touching heads
as buses crawl
and street cars
February 2nd, 2014
Born Norma Egstrom in 1920, this singer was so scared during her first recording session that her boss, Benny Goodman, was encouraged to fire her. Goodman recognized her talent and kept her. Who is Norma Egstrom?
Anita O day
Billie Holiday
Doris Day
Lena Horne
Peggy Lee
June Christy
Jo Stafford
Mildred Bailey
...January 27th, 2014
Paul Morris is a graphic designer and writer who collects album art of the 1940’s and 1950’s. He finds his examples of influential mid-century design in the used record stores of Portland, Oregon.
In this edition, Paul invites readers to revisit the 1950s with images of fans holding and enjoying their albums.
...January 24th, 2014
Described by the New York Times as a “bebop Beowulf,” Stanley Crouch’s Kansas City Lightning: The Life and Times of Charlie Parker is a love song to the life and times of Bird, one of jazz music’s most critically important figures. Mr. Crouch, himself an essential participant in both contemporary criticism and in the delivery of live performance (through his work with Jazz at Lincoln Center), discusses his long-anticipated biography with Jerry Jazz Musician in a recently conducted interview.
...January 22nd, 2014
In anticipation of our very soon-to-be-published interview with Charlie Parker biographer Stanley Crouch (see the preview below), poet Erren Kelly defends Parker from the caricature portrayed in Clint Eastwood’s 1989 film Bird.
Bird Read Beckett
bird read samuel beckett
he read novels and plays
he lived his life as one long
exstitential episode
he prided himself on being
intellectual
bird loved his fried chicken
and preferred his gin
to go down smooth
like his solos
mr. eastwood,
take that lie back
and apologize!
January 21st, 2014
Who was nicknamed “Hootie” after “becoming literally intoxicated by Kansas City’s nightlife?”
Willie Dixon
Walter Page
George E. Lee
Bennie Moten
Harlan Leonard
Jay McShann
Joe Turner
Buddy Tate
January 20th, 2014
“Reminiscing in Tempo” is part of a continuing effort to provide Jerry Jazz Musician readers with unique forms of “edu-tainment.” As often as possible, Jerry Jazz Musician poses one question via e mail to a small number of prominent and diverse people. The question is designed to provoke a lively response that will potentially include the memories and/or opinion of those solicited.
This edition’s question is “Who was your childhood hero?” Participants include Gary Burton, Pat Martino, Gary Giddins, Nat Hentoff, and others.
...January 16th, 2014
My friend Carl lived in a house full of ghosts with an evil sonofabitch brother who stole his shit, I mean all of it. But Carl himself, man, Carl was good as gold. He would give you the shirt off his back–everything, and did.
I moved in with my ex-old lady across the street from him in the late 80s when I was drying out and desperate for change. Marcy took me in, even after I had been such a dick. She knew it was the booze made me sleep around, and even though she kicked my drunken ass out on the curb, she took me in once she saw I was sober and clean. By then, she was already shacked up with a polite, fat, slob who was everything I wasn’t or would ever be.
Homestead Avenue, where we lived, was a pleasant street in a nice section of Fairfield called Black Rock, near the water. At the time, people were starting to navigate to the hood, although since then real estate prices have dropped due to the many storms–there have been too many storms in the area, man. But because of Black Rock’s proximity to the sound, which is like the sea, artists and strange people gravitate there.
I noticed Carl right off the bat. You couldn’t help but see him sitting on his porch with his supersized feet, head and limbs, a Franken monster. So I crossed the street one day to meet my neighbor, who looked a sorry sight–blackish long hair
...January 14th, 2014
Amiri Baraka, the poet, author, playwright and activist who, as described by the New York Times, “spent his early career as a beatnik, his middle years as a black nationalist and his later ones as a Marxist,” died on January 9 at the age of 79. In Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and its Critics, John Gennari called him “the pioneer and preeminent symbol of the 1960’s black cultural revolution” who, along with Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael, and Huey Newton gave “black power a distinctive masculinist intonation.”
As a jazz and blues writer, he was brilliant, essential, astute and polarizing. Of Baraka’s writing in the 1960’s (while LeRoi Jones), Stanley Crouch — himself a brilliant and polarizing jazz writer — said that he was “the first
January 14th, 2014
What big band leader was known as “The 20th Century Gabriel?”
Billy Eckstine
Cootie Williams
Benny Carter
Jimmy Lunceford
Jay McShann
King Oliver
Erskine Hawkins
Roy Eldridge
...
January 13th, 2014
1
Man is the animal that knows
the clarinet
makes his living
on the docks, a stevedore,
110lbs., carrying what loads
he can
the Depression comes along,
his teeth rot, no money and
he has to accept silence
January 3rd, 2014
Her 1920 recording of “Crazy Blues” for Okeh was the first blues song recorded by an African American singer. Who is she?
Ethel Waters
Bessie Smith
Mamie Smith
Josephine Baker
Ma Rainey
Ida Cox
Sippie Wallace
...December 30th, 2013
Earl “Fatha” Hines was born on this day in 1901. As one of jazz music’s most influential pianists, his work has touched the creative heart of American culture since 1925, when he first met Louis Armstrong at a Musicians’ Union poolroom in Chicago.
Hines is one of those figures who contributed to the development of jazz on a variety of levels. In The Chronicle of Jazz, Mervyn Cooke credits Hines’ “trumpet style playing” for being the “first tangible departure from the post-ragtime stride idiom, cultivating a right-hand melodic technique more directly comparable to that of front-line melody instruments.”
...December 28th, 2013
In memory of George Lewis, Great Jazzman
1
Man is the animal that knows
the clarinet
makes his living
on the docks, a stevedore,
110lbs., carrying what loads
he can
December 27th, 2013
This west coast-based musician was a hot tenor of the forties who appeared in many of the top jam sessions during his era, including “The Duel,” with Dexter Gordon. Who was he?
Wardell Gray
Jimmy Giuffre
Buddy Collette
Bob Cooper
Teddy Edwards
Richie Kamucka
Zoot Sims
Lucky Thompson
...December 23rd, 2013
Paul Morris is a graphic designer and writer who collects album art of the 1940’s and 1950’s. He finds his examples of influential mid-century design in the used record stores of Portland, Oregon.
In this edition, Paul features jazz illustrations from the early years of the record album
...December 22nd, 2013
Saxophonist Jimmy Greene, who lost his daughter Ana in last year’s Newtown massacre, honors her — and life — in a very special and deeply moving “letter to himself” that can’t possibly be recommended highly enough. I encourage you to check it out…
...December 18th, 2013
This sultry singer experienced significant popularity during the 1950’s and 1960’s, appeared in film and on television, and was once married to TV’s “Joe Friday.” Who is she?
June Christie
Julie London
Betty Roche
Dinah Washington
Chris Connor
Anita O’Day
Rosemary Clooney
Lorez Alexandria
...December 16th, 2013
Few music writers had the resume of San Francisco’s Ralph J. Gleason: Columbia University School of Journalism; critic at the San Francisco Chronicle, where, in 1950, his criticism of popular music was the first such column in an American daily newspaper (before Gleason, newspapers regularly reviewed classical music only); produced the Jazz Casual television show for public television; witnessed and reported on all of the happenings of San Francisco during a time now known as the “San Francisco Renaissance,” when Gleason effectively connected the diverse endeavors of the era’s progressive musicians, literary figures, and comedians into an artistic aesthetic; co-founder of the Monterey Jazz Festival; writer on many a jazz record liner note (the next time you pull out Miles’ Bitches Brew, check out Gleason’s poetic description); contributing writer to Ramparts; co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine.
John Gennari, author of Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and its Critics – itself an important history of jazz journalism – described Gleason as “the jazz critic who
...December 14th, 2013
Richard Boyer’s entertaining and candid New Yorker profile of Duke Ellington first appeared in the June 24, 1944 edition under the title “The Hot Bach I.” (Parts “II” and “III” were published in subsequent weeks). Described by Ellington biographer Terry Teachout as “the most comprehensive journalistic account of Ellington’s life and work to appear in his lifetime,” the feature is filled with now well-known Ellington history (for example, his approach to composition and his appetite for food, women and the Bible), social history (Boyer’s casual description of the racial discrimination the band encounters on the road is notable), and some humorous interplay between Ellington and writing partner Billy Strayhorn, described at the time by Boyer as a “staff arranger.” The piece is a terrific companion to Teachout’s book, and another reminder of how important The New Yorker has been to the arts over the years.
...December 10th, 2013
This vocalist’s recording of “My Blue Heaven” was considered the top-selling recording of all-time prior to 1942, when Bing Crosby recorded “White Christmas.” Who was he?
Ray Anthony
Gene Austin
Bing Crosby
Cliff Edwards
Red Allen
Fats Waller
Jack Teagarden
Jelly Roll Morton
...December 9th, 2013
In the introduction to The Jazz Fiction Anthology, editors Sascha Feinstein and David Rife cite James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” as “the most famous jazz short story ever written,” and is pointed to by Baldwin biographer David Leeming as “the prologue to a dominant fictional motif in the overall Baldwin story, the relationship between two brothers that takes much of its energy from the close relationship between James and [brother] David Baldwin.” The story, originally published in Partisan Review in 1957, centers on the narrator’s need to, in Leeming’s words, “save his brother [Sonny] from the precariousness of his life as an artist.” Sonny, in turn, finds his voice by playing bebop in the Village, which results, according to Leeming,
...December 6th, 2013
December 5th marks the 41st anniversary of the bebop trumpeter Kenny Dorham’s death. Only 48 years old at the time of his passing from kidney disease, Dorham’s professional life enjoyed a great measure of respect from his fellow musicians, but, as Nat Hentoff pointed out in the liner notes to Dorham’s 1963 Blue Note recording Una Mas, “he has yet to break through to the kind of wide public acceptance which has occasionally seemed imminent.” His recordings are timeless – each and every one packed with delicious passion and brilliant playing that still sounds fresh — but Dorham never did “break through” in his lifetime, and continues to be classified by important jazz historians as “underrated.” In a Jerry Jazz Musician-hosted conversation on underrated jazz musicians, the most eminent jazz writer Gary Giddins said “when anybody wrote about [Dorham]
...December 5th, 2013
Before working with Woody Herman (and eventually marrying his singer Frances Wayne), this renowned composer/arranger contributed arrangements to Earl Hines’ big band, and subsequently played trumpet with, among others, Charlie Barnet, Horace Heidt and Charlie Spivak. Who was he?
Gil Evans
Pete Rugolo
Neal Hefti
Bill Holman
Benny Golson
Gerry Mulligan
Bob Brookmeyer
Eddie Sauter
...December 2nd, 2013
We all had Childhood Heroes…Excerpted from exclusive Jerry Jazz Musician interviews, our guests talk of theirs.
This edition…McCoy Tyner
JJM Who were your heroes?
MT When I was growing up, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk were basically the people who inspired me on the piano. Later on, I found out about Art Tatum and others. Bud and Thelonious were the main people who inspired me. Bud Powell, fortunately, moved around the corner from me when I was about 15.
...November 26th, 2013
What was the first jazz LP to sell one million copies?
Miles Davis, Kind of Blue
John Coltrane, Giant Steps
Dave Brubeck, Time Out
Charles Lloyd, Forest Flower
Bill Evans, Waltz for Debby
Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, featuring Mahalia Jackson, Black, Brown and Beige
...November 25th, 2013
50 years ago this week, Time magazine – at the time a critical weekly linking Americans to news and features of the world – had planned to run a cover story on jazz music, with the cover devoted to pianist Thelonious Monk. Instead, the events in Dallas on November 22 caused Time to shelve the story until February 28, 1964, and they ran a cover of Lyndon Johnson on November 29, 1963 instead. Reportedly, this decision, according to Monk biographer Robin D.G. Kelley, caused Time to destroy “the three million copies they had already printed bearing [Boris] Chaliapin’s portrait of Monk.”
This discussion about the Time article appears in our December, 2009 interview with Kelley:
...November 22nd, 2013
In a little town in Illinois, in a bar near the Wisconsin border, one man blew honey-dripping sounds from his saxophone. A woman’s body swayed in time with the sweetness emitting from that horn. She kept time with the beat and moved like melodic notes going up and down the scale. I imagined blowing musical sounds into her ear.
I crossed the wooden dance floor where she whirled, grabbed her hand and began to spin. Like musical notes, one black, one white, we danced all night. I softly sang into her ear, “Imagine how we’d dance in bed.”
She laughed in a low contralto voice, and changed it to a soprano when the high notes flowed.
...November 19th, 2013
Immortalized by Jack Kerouac in On the Road, this musician answered to the name of “Dark Gable.” Who was he?
Billy Eckstine
Slim Gaillard
Earl Hines
Charlie Parker
Lester Young
Chick Webb
Coleman Hawkins
Duke Ellington
...November 18th, 2013
George Cables is 69 years old today. The great bebop pianist — who played with Art Blakey, Dexter Gordon, Art Pepper (who called him “Mr. Beautiful”), Sonny Rollins, Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson, and countless others — continues to be an important contributor to jazz, but especially so during the 1970’s, when bebop was not the easiest musical genre to find on recordings of the time. When I was breaking into the record business in the late 1970’s, his Contemporary Records recording Cables Vision was a fixture on my turntable — a record that featured Hubbard on trumpet, Ernie Watts on sax, Bobby Hutcherson on vibes, and Peter Erskine on drums. To this day it sounds fresh and invigorating and irresistible.
...November 14th, 2013
my funny valentine
by ed corrigan
Miles’ horn blows
thru my head
down to my toes
down baby down
i need to blow
my bleeding nose
a red note bleeding
dododowaaaah
a smile with my heart
she just tore me apart
November 12th, 2013
Paul Morris is a graphic designer and writer who collects album art of the 1940’s and 1950’s. He finds his examples of influential mid-century design in the used record stores of Portland, Oregon.
In this edition, Paul focuses on the art of Columbia
...November 11th, 2013
In the 1950’s, this Los Angeles-based guitarist led “The Poll Winners,” a trio that included bassist Ray Brown and drummer Shelly Manne. Who was he?
...November 10th, 2013
What jazz diva won an amateur contest at Harlem’s Apollo Theater at age 17 and had her composition “Dream Of Life” recorded by Billie Holiday at age 18?
...November 4th, 2013
THE BIRTH OF JAZZ
Syncopated sounds
mingle in bayous,
roll with Mississippi currents,
splash in Lake Pontchartrain.
The haunting melody
sleeps in pine forests,
nestles in the cypress,
sways with willows,
stands with oaks.
November 1st, 2013
October 30 is Clifford Brown’s 83rd birthday. Long since deceased (he died in a car crash in 1956 at age 25), his birthday is a reminder of the musical joy he shared with his listeners, and of his classic sound. For me, it is a time of remembrance and appreciation for the contribution he made to intensifying my interest in jazz. To this day, my memory is thick with the sound of “Joy Spring” filling my Berkeley apartment in the mid-1970’s, when I was falling in love with the music.
Check out what bandmate Harold Land said about Brown, and then treat yourself to a listen to “Joy Spring.”
...October 30th, 2013
Who was once billed as “the world’s fastest saxophonist?”
...October 28th, 2013
Bud Powell was not only one of the greatest bebop pianists of all time, he stands as one of the twentieth century’s most dynamic and fiercely adventurous musical minds. His expansive musicianship, riveting performances, and inventive compositions expanded the bebop idiom and pushed jazz musicians of all stripes to higher standards of performance. Yet Powell remains one of American music’s most misunderstood figures, and the story of his exceptional talent is often overshadowed by his history of alcohol abuse, mental instability, and brutalization at the hands of white authorities.
...October 22nd, 2013
Born Lillie Mae Jones, this singer toured with Lionel Hampton from 1948 – 1951, during which time her nickname was “[First Name] Bebop.” And, legend is that Hampton fired this singer seven times during this 2 1/2 year period, only to rehire her each time at the insistence of his wife Gladys. Who is she?
...October 21st, 2013
Coltrane, Dig?
I suppose what it is with trane and me is
he takes all the time he wants to take
even outside of time, sidereal time,
stardust time, bessie blue time,
through-and-through-him time,
trancey groove time, even arranged time.
October 19th, 2013
While in the midst of reviewing the stories from the over 100 entrants in our current Short Fiction Contest, I have been impressed by the spirit of creativity that shines through in virtually every submission. No matter the story theme, the creative energy and spontaneity is as frequently evident in the writer’s turn of a phrase as it is in a jazz musician’s harmonic progression.
The other day I got into a conversation about how jazz musicians of the 1950’s and the Beat era writers shared an artistic language and had similar creative values that showed up in a variety of examples. The one that came to mind first was in Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” where Kerouac is inspired by a jazz performance in Chicago…This is what he writes:
...October 15th, 2013
This influential musician, composer and vocalist wrote the lyrics to Charlie Parker’s “Yardbird Suite.” Who is he?
...October 14th, 2013
Lots of interesting new poems have been published this week…
Here is a sampling:
DAVE BRUBECK
You can hear the youth of his heart
in the rhythmic pouncing of his block
chords. He’s a kitten when it comes
to his ball of twine. He’s in his ninetieth
October 9th, 2013
Album covers: to those who grew up in the vinyl era, the images printed on the sleeves of LPs were closely linked in our imaginations with the music they represented. The iconic covers of the ’60s – Sgt. Pepper, The Band at Big Pink, Cheap Thrills drawn by R. Crumb – put an enduring visual stamp on the pop culture of the time.
This art form has a relatively short history – only in the ’40s were 78 rpm album covers routinely decorated with art.
October 8th, 2013
Before following Anita O’Day as lead singer of Stan Kenton’s orchestra, she was known as Sharon Leslie, and sang with a group led by Boyd Raeburn. Who was she?
...October 7th, 2013
Fans of album cover art are in for a unique and entertaining experience — “Cover Story with Paul Morris” will debut on Jerry Jazz Musician on Tuesday, October 8. Morris is an avid Portland, Oregon collector who, in his words, will “share his enthusiasm for the artists who created album covers in the ‘40s and ‘50s.”
...October 6th, 2013
One of my more interesting experiences as publisher of Jerry Jazz Musician was producing a series of interviews that focused on the work of the novelist Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man was a favorite novel of mine as a young man, but it wasn’t until I reread it in the 1990’s before I began to understand the enormity of its cultural significance. At that time, Ellison’s second (and unfinished) novel Juneteenth was being published, and a variety of books on Ellison were released at the same time – among them Living with Music, a collection of Ellison’s writings on jazz music edited by Columbia University scholar Robert O’Meally, and Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray.
...October 2nd, 2013
I find comfort in a downpour.
The sound of intermittent pings
is almost a sonata, lulling me.
If Beethoven played on tin,
it would sound like the rain on my roof
October 1st, 2013
Born Lucius Venable, among this bandleader’s notable sidemen were Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Bill Doggett, and Dizzy Gillespie. Who was Lucius Venable?
...September 30th, 2013
Ever since Patrick Jarenwattananon of the NPR Classical Music blog Deceptive Cadence published a story called “Why Jazz Musicians Love ‘The Rite of Spring'” in May, there has been a lot of traffic on the Jerry Jazz Musician page devoted to the meeting of Charlie Parker and Igor Stravinsky. NPR linked their readers to our “Great Encounters” page called “When Charlie Parker played for Igor Stravinsky,” where Jazz Modernism author, the late jazz scholar Alfred Appel, tells the story of how “Stravinsky roared with delight
...September 27th, 2013
I recently published an interview with John Goodman, author of Mingus Speaks, a terrific book of interviews Goodman conducted with Mingus in the early ’70’s.
The following is an interview fragment…
...September 25th, 2013
“As an influence, Navarro was important almost immediately after he first made his presence felt in the mid-1940s Billy Eckstine band. Kenny Dorham was affected early in his career and you could hear Fats in Red Rodney too. Then, of course, came Clifford Brown and through him Navarro has indirectly influenced so many of the young trumpeters playing today.”
...September 24th, 2013
This legendary musician studied with Sidney Bechet and took his place in Willie “The Lion” Smith’s group. Who was he?
...September 23rd, 2013
For years, we have been publishing work by poets from all over the world who are dedicated to putting into words their relationship with jazz music. Our most prolific poet is Roger Singer, a living, breathing example of fire and love and brilliance. His contribution to the art of jazz is here – all 26 pages of it – in full glory, waiting for interested readers to discover.
Here is a new poem of his, just published today…
...September 20th, 2013
Ralph Ellison described this Oklahoma City native — eventually known as “Mr. Five by Five” — as once being a “compact, debonair young man who dressed with an easy elegance.” Who is he?
...September 17th, 2013
There is no disputing the fact that the power of jazz lies within the music itself. Giants of the art like Armstrong, Duke, Basie, Dizzy, Bird, Monk, Miles and Coltrane ushered us into this music with a display of genius so great that an entire lifetime isn’t ample space to fully absorb all their passion.
...September 16th, 2013
I am a bastard son of the late great Chogyam Trungpa, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher who came to this country in 1970, amassed many followers and bedded many women, among them, my dear mother. My parents never married. My mother left my father and moved with me to the Big Apple when I was still a toddler. While my mother met and married a broker named Irv and had my sister Pearl, my own father went on to become a famous teacher and big lush.
...September 15th, 2013
On the occasion of my 12th or 13th birthday, my father presented me with my own copy of a favorite album of his, Dave Brubeck’s Time Out and said, “This music is going to change your life.” The music sounded like nothing I’d ever heard. It was original and different and piqued my curiosity although I would not embrace it until later in my life. In the early 90s, when I was reading my poems in cafes that often played jazz in Connecticut, New York and Massachusetts, I started really listening to the music, and found it captivating.
...September 15th, 2013
For 11 years, Jerry Jazz Musician has sponsored 33 Short Fiction Contests resulting in 30 different contest winners. During that time, I estimate that I have read and considered over 3,000 short stories.
The stories vary in content and quality, of course, and it has been my goal to publish the best story regardless of its theme. This has at times led to confusion by some writers over the years who believe that, since Jerry Jazz Musician’s focus is on jazz history – and in particular within the confines and culture of mid-20th Century America – the winning story should always be about jazz or a character within that setting.
...September 12th, 2013
“Reminiscing in Tempo” is part of a continuing effort to provide Jerry Jazz Musician readers with unique forms of “edu-tainment.” As often as possible, Jerry Jazz Musician poses one question via e mail to a small number of prominent and diverse people. The question is designed to provoke a lively response that will potentially include the memories and/or opinion of those solicited.
What was the first motion picture you saw (in a theater) without your parents, and what do you recall about the experience? Jeff “Tain” Watts, Matthew Shipp and Pete Escovedo are among the contributors…
...September 9th, 2013
As a writer for Playboy, John F. Goodman reviewed Mingus’s comeback concert in 1972 and went on to achieve an intimacy with the composer that brings a relaxed and candid tone to the ensuing interviews. Much of what Mingus shares shows him in a new light: his personality, his passions and sense of humor, and his thoughts on music. The conversations are wide-ranging, shedding fresh light on important milestones in Mingus’s life such as the publication of his memoir, Beneath the Underdog, the famous Tijuana episodes, his relationships, and the jazz business.
Goodman discusses his book in a July, 2013 interview with Jerry Jazz Musician publisher Joe Maita.
...September 6th, 2013
This saxophonist was best known for “Night Train,” a song based on Duke Ellington’s “Happy Go Lucky Local.”
Who was he?
...July 17th, 2013
“Adolphus” had one of the longest careers in the history of jazz, having played with, among others, Bessie Smith, McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, Cab Calloway, Teddy Wilson and Benny Goodman.
Who was “Adolphus”?
...July 3rd, 2013
Charles Mingus is among jazz’s greatest composers and perhaps its most talented bass player. He was blunt and outspoken about the place of jazz in music history and American culture, about which performers were the real thing (or not), and much more. These in-depth interviews, conducted several years before Mingus died, capture the composer’s spirit and voice, revealing how he saw himself as composer and performer, how he viewed his peers and predecessors, how he created his extraordinary music, and how he looked at race.
...July 3rd, 2013
“Fine,” she says. “Give me your hand.”
Look up.
Empty spaces, open and promising for my skin to slip into, lie between the pale fingers that wag impatiently in my direction. I want to either kiss those milky tips or break the digits one by one. But my hand has no conflict and longs for nothing more than to fill those gaps left by her fingers. It knows where it belongs, and I watch as it begins to reach out, a thin layer of cold sweat over the palm.
...July 3rd, 2013
Loving Adverbs
I know I should love
nouns more than adverbs but
I definitely
don’t. The same weighty expectation
accompanies phenomena like the Beatles,
Harry Potter, or sushi. My loves never seem
to be trendy, and I say this with confusion,
not pride.
June 24th, 2013
In this June, 2013 essay, Scott Shachter shares many of the creative and business challenges he had to overcome before the first copy of his novel Outside In was pressed. It is a story many of our finest writers share today — that of remaining authentic in spirit and vision in a world where formula is most often rewarded.
...June 18th, 2013
Disparity in River City
THE MUSIC MAN (1962):
Robert Preston,
the picture’s star,
extols “76 Trombones”,
spots “Trouble in River City”,
earning immortality in the process.
June 9th, 2013
THE PATH
Real time straight jazz
curved the room.
Its ribbons of play formed justice
to notes,
releasing streams of fever.
May 26th, 2013
Pantoum, Kissed.
The elderly woman, crippled, wrinkled and Sitting in her wheel-chair
was once a sex-symbol, just as wild as you are now
you, who look down upon her with your slim thighs and golden hair,
bubble-gum and smooth talk, look at her thick veins in dismay.
May 16th, 2013
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. Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese but also monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, disease and malnutrition. Almost as daunting, it turns out, are the obstacles they discover between each other: racial tension, competing ambitions, and duplicitous superior officers. But when the company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them forever.
...May 4th, 2013
CRESCENT CITY LULLABY
Bbooooooo bboooooo,
Two octaves below a deep bass voice
river boat horns quake on the water.
Night scrambles the groan
with croaks of frogs, barks of herons,
gator cries and splashing fish.
April 28th, 2013
In cooperation with Frank Driggs and Chuck Haddix, authors of Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop — a look at the fascinating historyof Kansas City’s golden age through book excerpts, photos and music
...April 15th, 2013
Valentine
Listen to the music
Listen to the sound
Turn off your thoughts
Tune in turn on
Gather round
Miles Davis is calling you
Gather round
Listen to the sound
April 15th, 2013
“The piano ain’t got no wrong notes!” So ranted Thelonious Sphere Monk, who proved his point every time he sat down at the keyboard. His angular melodies and dissonant harmonies shook the jazz world to its foundations, ushering in the birth of “bebop” and establishing Monk as one of America’s greatest composers. Yet throughout much of his life, his musical contribution took a backseat to tales of his reputed behavior. Writers tended to obsess over Monk’s hats or his proclivity to dance on stage. To his fans, he was the ultimate hipster; to his detractors, he was temperamental, eccentric, taciturn, or childlike. But these labels tell us little about the man or his music.
...April 15th, 2013
Bad Luck Moan
Hard luck and trouble have hounded me all my days.
Oh yes, hard luck and trouble have hounded me all my days.
If I got some good news, I could change my ways.
April 15th, 2013
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…
...April 14th, 2013
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.
April 6th, 2013
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.
...April 6th, 2013
Bowl of Black Petunias (Version 2)
If you must leave me, please
leave me for something special,
like a beautiful bowl of black petunias
for when the memories leak
April 4th, 2013
Coltrane, Dig?
I suppose what it is with trane and me is
he takes all the time he wants to take
even outside of time, sidereal time,
stardust time, bessie blue time,
April 4th, 2013
SOUTHERN ELEGY
Just two “good ole boys”,
Levon from the Arkansas delta, Harry south Georgia,
gone within a month of each other,
both with big obits in The New York Times.
Who said we don’t honor earthiness!
April 3rd, 2013
BLUE SMOKE
The last yellowed leaves
from the Norway maple spiral,
dive and pirouette to ground –
hours of raking pyramid after
pyramid, the tedium of stuffing
bag after bag, the impulse
to light a match, to resurrect
the late fall smells from boyhood –
April 3rd, 2013
BURGLAR
Two days ago
the sun caught me stealing
the cardinal’s song
to construct a melody,
demanded restitution,
then reported me
to Mother Nature
April 1st, 2013
THE SAINTS LIVE
Live from Lincoln Center New Orleans jazz
reaches for higher ground.
Musical dynasty family Marsalis
Show the world that Dixie still lives.
March 28th, 2013
Featuring the complete text of chapters 1 – 5 from ‘Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya: The Story of Jazz As Told By the Men Who Made It,” a 1955 book by Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff
...March 26th, 2013
Although it only encompasses about six square miles, the New York City neighborhood of Harlem has played a central role in the development of American culture. Originally rural farmland, then an affluent suburb, since 1911 Harlemhas been predominantly an African American community. Its residents havehad a disproportionately large impact on all aspects of American culture,leaving their mark on literature, art, comedy, dance, theater, music, sports, religion and politics.
...March 18th, 2013
She didn’t dance to the music; she danced with it. The melody wrapped his arms around her and the chords ran ivory fingers through her curls. Harmony whispered in her ear and she laughed at all his jokes. She twirled up and down scales with him, the hem of her skirt swirling a single syncopated beat behind her. Her form in her red dress was as curvaceous as the treble clef, and her quick smile flashed staccato at the other dancers and drinkers, lingering largo in the hearts of those who were gifted with the lively beats.
...March 8th, 2013
Tommy
Tommy sweeps the floor
Content at his task
Is it wrong to ask
For a little more
A temporary worker at minimum wage
Not exactly where you’d expect to find
March 5th, 2013
Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond is the story of a jazz artist who transcended genres to establish one of the most immediately recognizable sounds in all of music. Long before his success as the alto saxophonist with the Dave Brubeck Quartet, decades before he wrote “Take Five ,” Desmond determined that he would be himself, never a disciple or an imitator, whatever the cost.
...March 1st, 2013
Hudson and Landry 45, 1973 (drunks is funny)
Bowling alley lounge
Liquor license
We’re served our burgers
Served our cokes
We laugh and horse
Enough to be warned
We’re not one-tenth as loud as the adults
We also did not vanquish Hitler,
Precious quarters, Vegas addict,
February 26th, 2013
Sam Bishoff, a high school student from Bainbridge Island, Washington, is the 2012 Jerry Jazz Musician “Accent on Youth” writer. His passion for jazz and the challenges he faces as a youthful fan of it is the focus of the column.
...February 26th, 2013
Three times a year, Jerry Jazz Musician awards a writer who submits, in ouropinion, the best original, previously unpublished work of approximatelyone – five thousand words. The winner will be announced via a specialmailing of our Jerry Jazz Musician newsletter. Publishers, artists,musicians and interested readers are among those who subscribe to the newsletter.Addit ionally, the work will be published on the home page of JerryJazz Musician and featured there for at least four weeks.
...February 22nd, 2013
Romare Bearden (1911 – 1988) was one of America’s great artistic innovators,blazing his own trail in a time of turbulent cultural change. Whilehis work offers an invaluable view of mid-twentieth-century African-Americanexperience, it has also come to occupy a significant place in the wider historyof American art and speaks to the universal concerns of artists everywhere.
...February 10th, 2013
The Negro League Baseball Photographs of Charles “Teenie” Harris, published with the permission of the Carnegie Museum.
...February 10th, 2013
Footprints ( for Wayne Shorter )
you speak no evil
when you talk about the miles
you traveled, the
way your sax sounded
like a thunderstorm
or spoke like a child
November 22nd, 2012
When my doctor released me from the asylum in Saint-Remy, he warned me to stay away from absinthe or my hallucinations would worsen. I didn’t tell him I had no need for absinthe to hallucinate. I often had company, even when there wasn’t anyone with me.
I’d spent some of my time in the asylum playing billiards. Everyone assured me that I was a natural, the best player they’d ever seen. Maybe, instead of painting, I’d play billiards for a living. As soon as I walked past the gates of the asylum,
...November 8th, 2012
Scales
My fingers flying like the wind
Dexterous and all so disciplined
From the bottom to the top and back
In a flash and right on track
November 7th, 2012
Bunny M’s columns appeared on Jerry Jazz Musician from 2004 – 2006 “Bunny M.” is an eighteen-year-old Dallas resident who plays drums, piano and clarinet. Her passion for jazz and the challenges she faces as a youthful fan of it is the focus of her Jerry Jazz Musician column, “Accent on Youth.” Listen to Dinah … Continue reading “Accent on Youth, with Bunny M.”
...August 22nd, 2012
Whenever I’m pissed off, I escape to the pit. Out the kitchen door, fists deep in the pockets of my tight ass jeans, I head towards the woods back of the house.
I cross the backyard, past Moreno, the poor chained up son-of-a-bitch boxer. Rosa clinches his leash, pulling him close like a kid. The poor son-of-a-bitch tenses as I go by, his spindly legs and stubby tail shivering at my wrath, ears perked, head cocked – Was up girl, grounded again?
...July 15th, 2012
The Jazz Singer
Looking over some old tapes.
Is that really me on the stage?
The Peoria boys jazzing away behind,
performing for a village hall audience.
A monthly gig that, for a short while,
takes them back to the time when…
April 22nd, 2012
The garden by the sea is just beginning to grow into itself. Its green has started to spill out over the fence and tumble onto the walk that lines the side of the shore house. The weather is warming, and combined with the rich soil of the ground, the plants reap the favor of the earth, led to grow lush and vibrant across the expanse. The tendrils of the cucumbers have travelled far up their trellises, continuing to curl out into the air, while the bushes of basil nearby explode into a happy, bright leafed green.
...March 8th, 2012
MONK WAS RIGHT
( A letter to Thelonius Monk )
Dear Thelonius,
I first heard you
In the darkness of stinky music rooms, toe-tappers’ tombs
where out-of-tone tunes played,
and where you prayed to the God of old blue smoke
to please choke the life out of those who said jazz was a joke,
February 22nd, 2012
Special 20
A breath in the silence
Playing on the silver
Wailing the words of lost souls
Notes burning like a fire
Under molded hands
Moving fingers
Reed notes risin’ like the wind
February 20th, 2012
Minstrel
North Beach evening
Listening to Lonnie Johnson
Through an open door
I didn’t have enough money
To go in
Car noise took away
Many of the notes
February 17th, 2012
ELEGY FOR HART, IN THE KEY OF CRANE
The pipe-organ sea on-drones a dirge for you
as it will for the last whale’s final soundings.
Deep in the ocean’s heart, Hart has found a home.
Before his final voyage, from the shore he watched
the breakers as they slipped each blow, master
February 10th, 2012
MY GRANDMOTHERS WAR
It was the war
She said,
As she laid her head
On the pillow next
To my fathers bed
In a raspy voice
From her cigarettes.
How she loved all that
February 1st, 2012
Naming of Hops
(July 30, 2009)
Today there will be naming of hops.
Today they’ll have a beer outside
the oval office of the White House.
Likewise our planet rotates with an oval orbit
around the sun of no determinate God,
whose purity and innocence informs
the white bars on the American flag.
January 12th, 2012
JUST ANOTHER PUNK ROCKER WRITING ABOUT JAZZ
They must have materialized at the open mike
out of carbon and nitrogen in the air,
those poets you’d never see in a jazz club.
A guy in Roman-helmet-like Mohawk
reads three-chord rhymes about Mingus,
an MC in Phat Farm jeans
November 14th, 2011
Blues Man
His calloused fingers fret the chord
The juke-joint crowd is hushed and still
His song is beautiful reward
He plays it with such easy skill.
November 14th, 2011
A game of cards
If you ever wanted to know about my grandfather
and his three younger brothers,
you should have paid a visit while my grandmother still lived.
All you had to do was ask.
November 13th, 2011
It’s a shame that, in the 21st century, there are still men of my age who do not know who fathered them. Setting aside the moral issues, I need to know about my family medical history and bloodlines. What if, through twisted fate, my one true love were revealed to be my half sister? Or find out, while facing an ill-informed press, that I am the progeny of some great hero, or desperate criminal, and under the presumption of similar habits. At forty-eight, I still don’t know if I should be honoring the birth of a savior, celebrating the miracle of lights or dancing naked in the woods on the dark of the moon.
...November 8th, 2011
I Dreamt I Was Here
Yes, I’m here in this hospital bed
But not having breakfast, like my dream said
I was sitting having Bran Flakes
And hot toast and tea
Twice I woke up having dreamt I was here
‘Twas beginning to quite confuse me
November 3rd, 2011
Chopin: Heroic Polonaise
It may be all
we’re looking for
It may be as simple
as that. As cramming the
sky into a jar, as catching the
milky way in the palm of your hand
October 31st, 2011
Untitled
God was laughing when he made you.
He held you up and pressed his lips against your skin
till you laughed, too.
October 20th, 2011
Ignition
my friend,
how you want to see the light
…be the light
but everyone that shines
dines with the whore of envy
October 19th, 2011
Comprehension of Music
You understand me
every emotion that’s buried into my heart
that lives in my soul trying to find
the right way to express itself to a world
that lacks true understanding of someone’s feelings
so I turn to you to create life into misunderstanding
and o how I love how you grasp it
September 7th, 2011
Singularity
That morning, you were overwhelmed
by the crunch of dawn
beneath your feet;
you wouldn’t believe me when I said,
...August 6th, 2011
And Now I Know
You just don’t do that! my daddy would say,
defining the line between father, son.
No new learning could change or make him sway
from using words like, Yisstidy, and Yurn,
July 17th, 2011
THE PENCIL OF NATURE
Imagine Talbot walking into a museum today-
how his eyes would pop at a toy fork
stuck in a cardboard refrigerator
or a towering hotel lobby,
its plaza digitally erased of people
and its colors pumped up
July 8th, 2011
ten minutes into sound and I have begun to lean, to lean forward in these shared chairs towards glissando, towards pluck and sizzle and crash. Ellen is a grace note, a cello curve beside me in this dark, lovely, smitten club of jazz.
that I know it’s Ellen’s thigh and hip accompanying mine is a testament to the radii of our ring fingers, the shiny bands there that play so seriously at patience and time.
July 8th, 2011
Crouching Sofa, Hidden Remote
Culprit Philosophy our kids behold
Media shuns us into our cold world
Therapeutic weapons couldn’t wrestle them all and
The broken lids, Therapeutic guns penetrate
Their anti-establishment walls, which crawl
With love shattered kids
June 19th, 2011
The Trip
we used to pile into my dad’s van, drive
all the way from Nebraska to Texas
mostly in
silence, because complaining about the unbearable
heat would just make my dad turn the car back
around, and home
April 8th, 2011
Clad in white tie and tails, dancing and scatting his way through the “Hi-de-ho” chorus of “Minnie the Moocher,” Cab Calloway exuded a sly charm and sophistication that endeared him to legions of fans.
In Hi-de-ho, author Alyn Shipton offers the first full-length biography of Cab Calloway, whose vocal theatrics and flamboyant stage presence made him one of the highest-earning African American bandleaders. Shipton sheds new light on Calloway’s life and career, explaining how he traversed racial and social boundaries to become one of the country’s most beloved entertainers.
...April 6th, 2011
Impromptu Blues
The bass player was out of synch
tonight while the singer was on fire.
But she had to wait while he shuffled
through page after page of music;
the drummer tap tap tapped his drum
...March 29th, 2011
MYSTIC
Jam on
she said, and
I played until night suffocated my trees
the garden was weary
and the sun had just died
March 29th, 2011
Morning’s Song
Sleepy summer eyes
wake, greeting crimson rays,
while swaying stalks waltz silently
on gentle rolling waves.
Tranquil, faded paths
weathered, beaten barn
both eagerly awaiting
March 29th, 2011
Everyone is afraid to knock on the door when they hear the trumpet behind it. A closed door is like an On Air sign or a red light outside a dark room. Still, they have to talk to him. Sonny is nowhere to be found. And Thibodeau is too busy eye-fucking the women at the hotel bar to practice. And Baldwin is just tired.
They wait for a lull, a break. Three minutes waiting outside the door, and it comes. They knock soft, one of those we didn’t want to have to bother you but didn’t see any other recourse knocks; a musician has a way of using sound, its timbre, its breadth, to say everything. Knocking is no different.
...March 4th, 2011
¡Oh, Put On Another Record And Bring Me A Drink!
I like The Jazz
We listened to Roland Kirk
and Eric Burdon sing of
Roland Kirk
March 2nd, 2011
Mist Past:
put tears of sun into glass of tears
raining impoverished soliloquies
balance falling curious symbols
slice the sea into
symmetrical colors
while you rip apart elastic
February 28th, 2011
BLUES AT SUNRISE
Sunrise Thinking of you
Slowly rising from sleep
All my thoughts irrational
Waking dreams
Farewell
To daft wishing
And hopes of one true love
All I’ve known and seen before
Fades away
February 22nd, 2011
ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE: THE APOTHEOSIS OF MARY LOU WILLIAMS
It’s light on silver-black and white,
Grainy footage of a smoky room,
A woman at the keys. A spotlight
As perfectly round as the moon
...January 15th, 2011
Drunk
She was whiskey to him.
Swirling around him.
Curving over his tongue
and into him.
The wicked spiciness burned his throat.
January 15th, 2011
PLANTATION TOUR
“They had so many slaves to take care of”
the matronly guide reverently explained
imploring our understanding of hardship and pain
Faced by gentlemen owners in those early days
We paid admission to be moved from our time
...December 29th, 2010
I Am Late at My Singing
As I was waiting,
flowered buds shriveled.
Tangerine daylilies burst.
Too late, too late the music.
December 23rd, 2010
Melancholy Rare
Exhorting remedies of suave chameleon song, by the
Tabby’s table in hypnotic grins and memorizing
Heartbeats in pause, in silent calm broken only by
...November 19th, 2010
A trumpet squealed in the hospital halls. The note, like a brass rabbit, zipped past room 334. Moments later Mr. Fahrenheit watched two orderlies jog past the open door: not too fast, not real slow. It appeared to be the speed of indicated hurry. A few more notes from the trumpet whizzed down the hall before they too slowed to a jog, and then drew themselves out into expressions of gold, blue, green then stopped before Mr. Fahrenheit could call the name of the song to mind. The next few notes he tapped out on the back of the hand he held in his own. His wife did not respond. Even he had begun to forget to expect a response. She inhaled. She exhaled. The eyes beneath her blue lids quivered and shimmered.
...November 1st, 2010
Memories
Meema’s singing in the kitchen
Chicken frying
Greens simmering
Pies smelling
Chitlins boiling
October 29th, 2010
Feel It
You have to FEEL the music rush through your veins
And STEAL their hearts away as you dance off the chains
You have to FEEL the rhythm dance through your feet
As you STEAL the stage with your rhythm and beat
October 8th, 2010
FULL MOON OVER BENSONHURST
Ralph Kramden pushes through his day
Like the Madison Avenue bus
At the height of evening rush,
Impeded by vehicles
Of lesser size, strength
And importance.
August 4th, 2010
When I was ten, I was in a movie. It was a very famous movie. It ran in theaters for over a month, bringing in more and more revenue for the production company. When it finally came out on VHS (it was old enough that it was a tape, with reels inside it), the film grossed in the millions. The director was hailed as “visionary”, the actors as “superb”. The film itself became famous for having been one of the best horror movies of the year (1992). Critics said that it had “truly ushered in a new era of horror, one in which the innocent and benign murder recklessly”. The review that held these words was taped to my wall, for I’d been mentioned by name, praised, and it was a very well known newspaper, indeed. “Sharon Ellis, a real child actor who will no doubt amount to something great, gives a phenomenal debut performance. Her emotion and sensual expression are truly remarkable for such a young girl so new to the scene.” I used to read those words, over and over again, and imagine the critic who had written them watching me on the big screen before them.
...July 10th, 2010
Music
Does god play the ribs of a starving infant
In the Sudan like the kalimbe you
Can buy in the gift shop in the airport
Where tourists, doctors, murderers come and go
And we know nothing of their destinations or their
Motivations? Does god play on the bald head
July 4th, 2010
Giddins has been a frequent contributor to Jerry Jazz Musician. This is the 15th interview in our “Conversations with Gary Giddins” series. He joins us in a June 1, 2010 discussion about his two new books.
...June 1st, 2010
At the Mission
Yeah…
It was just another day at the mission.
The bums, smelling like the seats of their pants
Were stacked like a roll of wooden nickels
Under a sky with mixed feelings.
...May 13th, 2010
VINTAGE GRAY
The morning glory —
another thing
that will never be my friend.
— Basho
Rain has a way of darkening the bark on trees,
...April 9th, 2010
Terry on Bass, 1974
Tall
slim straight
long red hair
that cops and rednecks hated
he’d stride to his deep honey bass
feel its pleasure in his big hands
urge out music that turned souls to listen
his freedom plucking up down strings
April 2nd, 2010
One black leather pump hides under the sofa; the other skidded behind the front door, keeled over in shock. Stockings lie limp on the carpet, slim legs broken, and shrunken feet awry at the heels, pale rungs shred up the thigh, as jagged and useless as fear. A gold chain lies coiled like a snake, broken beyond repair, not sparkling, just stunned.
In the bathroom, water gushes wild and wide from the metal spigot, creeps up the sides of steep white porcelain an inch at a time, swirls with thick steam and current from the source, a dank basement room, a mystery pumping system, a light hum in the pipes and a bill at the end of the month. She squeezes her lashes then twists the tap shut. Leg poised, she dips a foot
...March 10th, 2010
Blizzard
Baffled sound distinguishes each instrument.
Oblational as bread and wine, the symphony is offered up
Daliance with obligatory matters has no place here.
Abiotic as a stone, the tone still is lively:
cabaret saxophone and trumpet indiscretion.
February 2nd, 2010
Moon Ode (for Congressman Sam Farr)
Shall I trust the moon?
She flirts behind purple clouds
Veiling her luminous face
Like a naughty trickster
January 22nd, 2010
Something You Can Count On
I had, once, a Captain Midnight ring
that told the weather, or so they said.
Frankly, I don’t remember Captain Midnight,
didn’t listen to him much.
Don’t know what made him special,
what made him Captain Midnight, for that matter.
But I didn’t need to, knew in my 1947 heart of hearts
December 27th, 2009
TRIMMING THE UNKNOWN
I open the door to the jetsam of black curls
Cast into a linoleum sea
As fluorescent light glints off scissors and smiles.
Smelling the shaving cream and my own fear,
I sit in a distant chair and pick up a magazine,
Glance up from time to time
December 22nd, 2009
Thanksgiving, 1968. I can’t remember what I ate for dinner last night, but I see that day as clearly as if I’m watching it on an old Magnavox. My mother Rose buzzes around our cramped two-bedroom apartment in Queens, New York, her hair in rollers, no makeup. She’s beautiful though, anyone would agree. It’s early in the day. She retrieves the tablecloth my grandmother embroidered when a teenager herself from the back of the hall closet, and sets the dining table in the foyer with her best dishes (black and white Noritake), silver plate from Fortunoff’s, and real cloth napkins in a tasty shade of pumpkin. She’s been up since five cooking; pies were baked the night before. But although her culinary plans are running smoothly, my mother’s mood is lethal.
...November 10th, 2009
Lena Horne biographer James Gavin discusses the challenging yet inspiring life of one of the 20th century’s most revered entertainers
...September 18th, 2009
Before there was Elvis, there was W.C. Handy, the man who made the blues. Here is the first major biography in decades of the man who gave us such iconic songs as St. Louis Blues, The Memphis Blues, and Beale Street Blues, and who was responsible, more than any other musician, for bringing the blues into the American mainstream.
David Robertson charts W.C. Handys rise from a rural Alabama childhood in the last decades of the nineteenth century to become one of the most celebrated songwriters of the twentieth century. The child of former slaves, Handy was first inspired by spirituals and folk songs, and his passion for music pushed him to leave home as a teenager, despite opposition from his preacher father.
...September 4th, 2009
Leroy Satchel Paige was the most sensational pitcher ever to throw a baseball. During his years in the Negro Leagues he fine-tuned a pitch so scorching that catchers tried to soften the sting by cushioning their gloves with beefsteaks. His career stats 2,000 wins, 250 shutouts, three victories on the same day are so eye-popping they seem like misprints. But bigotry kept big league teams from signing him until he was forty-two, at which point he helped propel the Cleveland Indians to the World Series. Over a career that spanned four decades, Satchel pitched more baseballs, for more fans, in more ballparks, for more teams, than any player in history.
...August 29th, 2009
“Reminiscing in Tempo” is part of a continuing effort to provide Jerry Jazz Musician readers with unique forms of “edu-tainment.” As often as possible, Jerry Jazz Musician poses one question via e mail to a small number of prominent and diverse people. The question is designed to provoke a lively response that will potentially include the memories and/or opinion of those solicited.
If you could have dinner with three people, who would they be?
Featuring Gary Bartz, Esperanza Spalding, Billy Cobham, John Scofield and others…
...August 26th, 2009
The widespread presence of jazz and blues in African American visual art has long been overlooked. The Hearing Eye makes the case for recognizing the music’s importance, both as formal template and as explicit subject matter. Moving on from the use of iconic musical figures and motifs in Harlem Renaissance art, this groundbreaking collection explores the more allusive — and elusive — references to jazz and blues in a wide range of mostly contemporary visual artists.
...August 14th, 2009
Excerpted from W.C. Handy: The Life and Times of the Man Who Made the Blues, by David Robertson
Harry Pace, even at his distance at Atlanta, always had been more innovative in marketing their firm’s songs in newer ways than Handy, and, as his career later reveals, he was interested in the possibilities of owning his own phonographic business. While on a trip for his insurance company to New York City
...August 12th, 2009
In the fall of 1991 I believed I would be the next Charlie Parker. Few of the bands on campus had even heard of Bird, and the few that had did not want a flute player. This did not deter me. I was out on the commons at UCLA riffing on “Confirmation” when Nadine found me.
“That makes my nipples hard.” She smiled.
I lowered my flute and stared. She was wearing a man’s dress shirt, as if she’d spent the night away. The shirt did little to hide the truth of her statement. But that wasn’t what got my attention. It was her face. She had the knack of smiling with her whole face – eyes, cheeks, lips, nose. Everything got into the act.
...July 15th, 2009
Letters
Sometimes the shy miss
with cat eyes
put feather to paper
scratched and restored
worlds of politics
June 1st, 2009
A big mind
Think of One with rare flat-fingered technique,
Hat and Beard gave you a distinct mystique;
Evidence early of genius unique,
Let’s Cool One while your sweet glissandos peak.
April 20th, 2009
Flash Cards
Someone’s gonna be in trouble.
Some kid’s Spanish flash cards
strewn along Maple Avenue
blown down the sidewalk,
lodged in ivy ground cover,
stuck under decrepit concrete
April 12th, 2009
Crazy old man walks up to me
I said, a crazy old man walks up to me
Tells me what to see
He calls to me
Makes me an offer I can’t refuse
Washes out the flames in my eyes
Burns a hole through the fabric in my clothes
April 7th, 2009
McCoy Tyner: When I was growing up, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk were basically the people who inspired me on the piano. Later on, I found out about Art Tatum and others. Bud and Thelonious were the main people who inspired me.
...April 5th, 2009
Ishmael Reed: I admired boxers and cowboys when I was young, so I would say my heroes at the time were Roy Rogers and Sugar Ray Robinson.
...April 5th, 2009
Albert Murray: There was a piano player, a guitar player who seemed like a legend to me, and there was the great Satchel Paige, who lived on the outskirts of Mobile. Baseball was a big thing there, and he was the greatest baseball player in the world.
...April 5th, 2009
Pantoum: Carson McCullers and Misanthropy at Yaddo
An odd child, I sprawled in bed, conjured her square pale face,
Propelled myself into her enormous dark eyes
And imagined, for years, that I curled inside her mind.
At Yaddo I drank sherry from a thermos, strode lank-legged
March 22nd, 2009
There’s this painting she keeps staring at.
She imbibes it, absorbs everything it has to offer. A lilting shade of lavender, it features fourteen flawless flowers arranged with a meandering dissonance that flies in the face of the frame’s four square corners. They make its math seem maddening, symmetry superfluous.
“I like it,” she says quietly, tucking long brown strands of slightly curly hair behind her ears. She turns towards me slowly then, notes the slight adversarial something in my eyes. Intimately familiar with my proclivity for irreverent mocking, she now offers a slight smirk that seems just one shade shy of sly. Aware of my antagonism,
...March 15th, 2009
jazz jam
so this is what no lessons gets me –
a melancholy jazz blues progression,
transgressions and mistakes.
the melody hidden in the missing bass line.
the absent drums beating paradiddles to variation.
a theme within a theme.
March 8th, 2009
What’s Ours
it may be that a long time ago, as a baby,
we chose the way we tasted sugar
felt cotton and heard Bessie Smith
at 3 a.m. in the back of a dream
February 25th, 2009
THE BUNKER
An overgrown trail is abruptly halted by a set of rusting metal gates,
Secured to a crooked post by a battered padlock and feeble chain.
A grey guard tower lies out of sight, studying the unfolding scene intently,
From the dense undergrowth where fresh raindrops glisten in the new-born sunlight.
January 22nd, 2009
Pondering the Musical Style of Thelonious Monk
The-
lon- i-
us-
Monk- plunk!
makes- one-
think-
plink!
his-
next-
note-is-
sunk-
January 4th, 2009
If Mom and Dad had heard about my friend Benny and all that jazz from me, they’d have handled it. But when my fifth grade teacher ratted on us, it became a big, fat deal. Mom had to meet me in the front office after school and we silently trudged back to my classroom, both taking refuge in our own mental world.
Mrs. Drake motioned us to identical chairs in front of her desk. “I don’t want to alarm you. This isn’t an emergency, Mrs. McKenzie.” She forced her goosy face into a sympathetic mask. “Cathy’s not a problem child by any means.”
Mom’s shoulders relaxed under her starched cotton housedress, but her hands clutched the white gloves and tooled leather pocketbook positioned mid-lap.
...November 7th, 2008
Jazz Climax
for Sony Holland
The room hauntingly still
with mosaic tiles staring down
upon the audience.
Pink and red lights glare
like the eye of a storm
August 25th, 2008
My father was a Catholic jazz musician
Say one Our Father, two Hail Marys,
and listen to twelve recordings of John Coltrane.
Dip your fingers in the font of holy water,
cross yourself,
make your way to a pew,
genuflect, take your seat,
and meditate on the perfection of Thelonious chords.
August 6th, 2008
The first of my notes read I’M IN A STATE OF DISBELIEF. I left this one on top of a counter at a place where many of the thousands of people who worked in the same building as I did went to get their coffees and pastries in the morning.
The second note went AN ANGEL GOT IN BED WITH ME LAST NIGHT — OR MAYBE IT WASN’T AN ANGEL. I taped this one to the inside of the door of one of the stalls in the public bathroom of the same building.
...July 10th, 2008
November 14
I have to admit. this
is a new one. playing baby-sitter
to a girl, barely
reaching my hip holster. when
she comes to the door, toast
May 27th, 2008
Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, Charley Patton — we are all familiar with the story of the Delta blues. Fierce, raw voices; tormented drifters; deals with the devil at the crossroads at midnight.
In an extraordinary reconstruction of the origins of the Delta blues, historian Marybeth Hamilton demonstrates that the story as we know it is largely a myth. The idea of something called Delta blues only emerged in the mid-twentieth century, the culmination of a longstanding white fascination with the exotic mysteries of black music.
...May 23rd, 2008
LIPS OF ORPHEUS
Orpheus-
that bony black Jazz player
inhales slowly, his aged, tarred lungs
sip the pre-melodic air,
he fingers the cold brass scythe,
prolonging the moment
for his lips to buzz;
and they will, Emily,
they will.
April 19th, 2008
Piano Rain
Cut-crystal 16th notes
scamper and dangle
drop
splink
twinkly-plink
splank
...April 15th, 2008
“Ms. Cynthia Jazz”
Obese peacock clouds
Waltzing free from oil paintings
Summer flamboyance bristles
Under skies of no particular color
...March 30th, 2008
Hip Hop Flavored Preachin’
Ya’ll better check your roots
You bunch of brutes
Cause you ain’t got no soul
Respect and you don’t roll
This is rhythm and blues?
Man, I don’t know
Back when we had dancin’ shoes
And things to lose
March 22nd, 2008
Beat
Mad jazz singers blaring,
the gathered dance and bop
Tossing ladies between their legs,
hair slicked back and eyes shimmering
March 9th, 2008
I can’t fight. I’m not made for it. When I’m backed into a corner I can run, and that’s what I’m good at. I can’t gather myself to put up an opposition. I begin to quake and crumble and the parts of myself split into ever-smaller parts that want to get away as fast as possible. I’m an explosion, a spectacle to momentarily confuse the enemy. Also a physical wreck. The only movement that suits me is flight. My parts will converge into a fluid line of energy, but only in movement. It’s the way I’m made. If I held my hand out, lengthened my fingers for you and attempted to keep as still as possible, you would marvel at the trembling. But then give me a guitar and this same hand will produce a line no less marvelous in fluid grace.
...March 5th, 2008
“Reminiscing in Tempo” is part of a continuing effort to provide Jerry Jazz Musician readers with unique forms of “edu-tainment.” As often as possible, we pose one question via e mail to a small number of prominent and diverse people. The question is designed to provoke a lively response that will potentially include the memories and/or opinion of those solicited.
What were five of your favorite record albums (or CDs) when you were twenty years old, and what are five of your favorite CDs today?
Featuring Peter Erskine, Rufus Reid, Terri Lynne Carrington, Ben Ratliff, Steve Khan and others…
...March 5th, 2008
Upon being traded to the Philadelphia Phillies in 1969, Curt Flood, an All-Star center fielder for the St. Louis Cardinals, wanted nothing more than to stay with St. Louis. But his only options were to report to Philadelphia or retire. Instead, Flood sued Major League Baseball for his freedom, hoping to invalidate the reserve clause in his contract, which bound a player to his team for life.
...February 25th, 2008
The Crossroads
The Mississippi midnight sky was clear
As one determined man had journeyed far
With nothing but his clothes and a guitar,
To speak the incantation all men fear;
February 14th, 2008
The road to Giverny,
winter, 1885, by Claude
Monet, looks sad.
It looks like the
twisted road to San
Quentin, where an
execution is planned
before Christmas 2005.
January 29th, 2008
Listening to Trane
Madman rages burst
from his golden horn-
Through John’s mouthpiece
galaxies of enlightened energy
were born-
Trane’s band wailed
in dissonant bawling
January 19th, 2008
BLACK SONG FOR BILLIE HOLIDAY
The night the blue saxophones died
You still remain in the spotlight’s ivory heat
A riddle that puzzles the heart
Snatching from the soil of catastrophe
A nugget of perfect sound
Glowing like an iridescent candle
January 5th, 2008
Zach Ferguson, a junior at Battleground High School in Battleground, WA, was the winner of the 2007 Accent on Youth Essay Contest. His passion for jazz and the challenges he faces as a youthful fan of it is the focus of the column.
...January 1st, 2008
“Reminiscing in Tempo” is part of a continuing effort to provide Jerry Jazz Musician readers with unique forms of “edu-tainment.” As often as possible, we pose one question via e mail to a small number of prominent and diverse people. The question is designed to provoke a lively response that will potentially include the memories and/or opinion of those solicited.
What three or four songs best epitomize the era of the Civil Rights Movement?
Featuring Bruce Lundvall, Chico Hamilton, Gerald Early, Juan Williams, Arthur Kempton and others…
...December 29th, 2007
It had been warm all day, the type of day where the heavy air presses into you and makes it hard to move. It didn’t help that her shift had been spent calling customers and listening to endless streams of why they couldn’t make their hydro payments. And they would yell, swear at her as if she had caused their loss of job, their alcoholism, their way of life. She absorbed it all, the words sinking through the membrane in her ear and resonating within the membrane of her mind long after the calls had stopped.
If there’d been a breeze, or a slight coolness to the air, then those words could have lifted from her. They heated her, churning and boiling within so that by the time she got the apartment door open her flesh looked glossy with the sweat.
...November 1st, 2007
War as a playmate
Look at the pretty girls, pouting
and coloring their pink lips with a reddish hue.
Embellishing their glossy gossamer hair
Saturating themselves with perfume.
October 29th, 2007
The gift
The day my mother dropped a net
of oranges on the kitchen table
and the net broke and the oranges
rolled and we snatched them,
my brother and I,
peeled back the skin and bit deep
October 18th, 2007
COUTURE
stained
this is
pale
yellow brown
along
the hem
but
too nice
August 30th, 2007
CONVERSATION ON ROUTE 23 NORTH, NOVEMBER 1987
He leans on me like a rusted bicycle,
Tires flat against the weathered south wall
Of a lonesome, abandoned barn
Slumps into the rear seat of his old Ford
Station wagon, no longer capable of riding
August 23rd, 2007
Ralph Ellison is justly celebrated for his epochal novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953 and has become a classic of American literature. But Ellisons strange inability to finish a second novel, despite his dogged efforts and soaring prestige, made him a supremely enigmatic figure. In Ralph Ellison: A Biography, Arnold Rampersad skillfully tells the story of a writer whose thunderous novel and astute, courageous essays on race, literature, and culture assure him of a permanent place in our literary heritage.
...August 20th, 2007
Ted Bryan is an eighteen-year-old Portland, Oregon resident who was co-winner of the 2006 Accent on Youth Essay Contest, as judged by jazz critic Gary Giddins, vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater, and the publisher of Jerry Jazz Musician. His passion for and perspectives on jazz is the focus of the column.
...July 26th, 2007
Stories burst out of her as a magician’s trick pulls out scarves; multi-colored patterns, solids and conservative checks spilled out of her mouth and hands when she least expected it. In the end, of course, she recognized it as it was. These were the stories of all our lives, every human soul’s experience could produce that knotted, impossibly long scarf string that sprung out of the local magician.
Yet, most people did not have a new story to tell very often at all. At first, this was a wonder to her — why did all the interesting things happen only to her? But of course, this was self-centered, she realized. These things do happen to all of us on this earth. It was just that few people noticed the stories as they blossomed. It’s in the observation of it, she discovered, that one finds a good story.
...July 15th, 2007
Long recognized as America’s most brilliant jazz writer, the winner of many major awards — including the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award — and author of a highly popular biography of Bing Crosby, Gary Giddins has also produced a wide range of stimulating and original cultural criticism in other fields. With Natural Selection, he brings together the best of these previously uncollected essays, including a few written expressly for this volume.
...June 22nd, 2007
MATCHBOOK: The Spinnaker (Sausalito)
in memory of Bill Evans
by Michael Harper
Adrift in your own spittle
(eyebrows on vibrato knuckles)
we are across the bay
from reality;
but reality hits in waves
...May 22nd, 2007
Morning
From the center of our body
Come the bright flowers.
Draw open the curtain
...April 29th, 2007
“To a Flower”
Garden rose
My perfumed lover
Porcelain daughter of the summer
Your blossom is my red maiden
April 27th, 2007
TATTOO
featuring Dexter Gordon
by Michael Harper
Though a simple rose under your skin
I look up the bugle ritual of recall
for sailors to regroup — soldiers at parade rest
and your sister who could not read as a child
April 25th, 2007
Excerpted from Playing the Changes: Milt Hinton’s Life in Stories and Photographs, by Milt Hinton, David G. Berger, and Holly Maxson
In 1939, Doc Cheatham, who’d been with Cab for years, was feeling ill and decided to give notice. By this time, when it came to finding replacements, Cab would go to Chu [Berry] first. He knew everybody and was really on top of the music scene. Chu spent about a week looking around and then recommended a young kid named John Birks Gillespie, who everyone called Dizzy. Cab hired him.
We were at the Cotton Club when Diz joined us. He’d been playing with Teddy Hill’s band and really had no reputation to speak of. Even back in those days, he was hanging out with Lorraine, who was in the chorus at the Apollo and later became his wife.
...March 29th, 2007
An Online Story of Jazz in New Orleans With an introduction by Nat Hentoff __________ Featuring the complete text of chapters 1 – 5 from Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya: The Story of Jazz As Told By the Men Who Made It, a 1955 book by Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff (Published with the consent … Continue reading “An Online Story of Jazz in New Orleans – Chapter 5”
...March 26th, 2007
Featuring the complete text of chapter 4 rom “Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya: The Story of Jazz As Told By the Men Who Made It”, a 1955 book by Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff
...March 26th, 2007
An Online Story of Jazz in New Orleans With an introduction by Nat Hentoff __________ Featuring the complete text of chapters 1 – 5 from Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya: The Story of Jazz As Told By the Men Who Made It, a 1955 book by Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff (Published with the consent … Continue reading “An Online Story of Jazz in New Orleans – Chapter 3”
...March 26th, 2007
Featuring the complete text of chapters 2 from “Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya: The Story of Jazz As Told By the Men Who Made It,” a 1955 book by Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff
...March 26th, 2007
Featuring the complete text of chapter 1 from “Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya: The Story of Jazz As Told By the Men Who Made It,” a 1955 book by Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff
...March 26th, 2007
I have a problem, Father.
No, no “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” and the rest. Not this time.
And that’s it, really: I’m here again, in confession with you, as I have been for a long time, but I don’t think I’ve sinned.
Yes, of course, Father, I understand about confession. Penance, really, because that’s a sacrament, that’s how a person gets forgiveness of sins. There is absolution by a priest, but you I, because I am sitting here now have to have true sorrow and confess your sins, and do something about your behavior. You really have to mean it, not just want a pass for what you’ve done and may do again, unless you’re genuine in your confession and really want to change.
...March 15th, 2007
FOR COUNT BASIE
On this day, your birthday, I want
to celebrate, although you passed last
century. I crave some birthday cake,
so I put on “One O’clock Jump”
one more time to soothe my soul, allow
your fingers to loosen my tight, sore
muscles that have taken hold, the ones
February 22nd, 2007
10’S & THINGS
in memory of Carmen McRae
by Michael Harper
Fingerings,” she says, a nobody,
intermission pianist
February 22nd, 2007
“Reminiscing in Tempo” is part of a continuing effort to provide Jerry Jazz Musician readers with unique forms of “edu-tainment.” As often as possible, we pose one question via e mail to a small number of prominent and diverse people. The question is designed to provoke a lively response that will potentially include the memories and/or opinion of those solicited.
What are four or five of the the most romantic tunes ever recorded?
Featuring, Famoudou Don Moye, Geri Allen, Delfeayo Marsalis, Bennie Maupin and others…
...February 4th, 2007
9 23 99: Coltrane Notes on the Millenium
by Michael Harper
“Alabama”
no protection still
that is not churchdriven
James Weldon Johnson’s alternate tune
January 22nd, 2007
Blues for Red
I’m looking in crowds
where you won’t be
looking for you
strolling with Raphael
...December 29th, 2006
Excerpted from The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music, by Dunstan Prial
On a cold, clear night in February, 1933, Hammond went on the town alone in search of music. Heading up Broadway toward Harlem in a Hudson convertible (he kept the top up in the winter), he fought traffic, but as he passed Columbia University, he was flying. At 133rd Street, he took a right and headed east toward Lenox Avenue. He pulled over after a few blocks and parked in a space a few doors up from a new speakeasy run by Monette Moore, the singer who had appeared with Ellington and Carter at the fund-raiser for the Scottsboro boys he had helped organize the previous fall.
...December 29th, 2006
The 1951 regular season was as good as over. The Brooklyn Dodgers led the New York Giants by three runs with just three outs to go in their third and final playoff game. And not once in major league baseballs 278 preceding playoff and World Series games had a team overcome a three-run deficit in the ninth inning. But New York rallied, and at 3:58 p.m. on October 3, 1951, Bobby Thomson hit a home run off Ralph Branca. The Giants won the pennant.
...November 29th, 2006
Excerpted from FEVER: The Life and Music of Miss Peggy Lee, by Peter Richmond
In CHICAGO in August 1941, preparing for an engagement at the College Inn, Benny Goodman was staying at Frank Bering’s Ambassador East. One night, Benny’s fiancee, Lady Alice Duckworth, suggested that he come next door to the Buttery and catch the new girl singer. The imperious, handsome granddaughter of Commodore Vanderbilt – founder of the New York Central Railroad – Lady Duckworth was also John Hammond’s sister.
...November 29th, 2006
John Hammond is one of the most charismatic figures in American music, a man who put on record much of the music we cherish today. A pioneering producer and talent spotter, Hammond discovered and championed some of the most gifted musicians of early jazz — Billie Holliday, Count Basie, Charlie Christian, Benny Goodman — and staged the legendary “From Spirituals to Swing” concert at Carnegie Hall in 1939, which established jazz as America’s indigenous music. Then as jazz gave way to pop and rock Hammond repeated the trick, discovering Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Bruce Springsteen, and Stevie Ray Vaughan in his life’s extraordinary second act.
...November 20th, 2006
“Reminiscing in Tempo” is part of a continuing effort to provide Jerry Jazz Musician readers with unique forms of “edu-tainment.” As often as possible, we pose one question via e mail to a small number of prominent and diverse people. The question is designed to provoke a lively response that will potentially include the memories and/or opinion of those solicited.
When you were growing up, what were three or four of your parents’ favorite recordings?
Featuring Dee Dee Bridgewater, Hubert Laws, Jacky Terrasson, Jimmy Owens, Kurt Elling and others…
...November 14th, 2006
January 30, 1946 — Allied Headquarters, Paris, France
“What is it, Captain? I’m very busy.”
“Sorry to disturb you, Colonel, but you said you wanted a report as soon as I completed my investigation.”
Colonel Washburn searched his desk muttering, “Yes, yes. I’ll read your report as soon as you’ve filed it.”
...November 10th, 2006
In a wide-ranging conversation, Gary Giddins — for many years the country’s most eminent jazz critic whose most recent collection of cultural criticism is titled Natural Selection — talks about his recent trip to Brazil’s Ouro Preto International Jazz Festival, the business of jazz festivals and touring, jazz education, and the debate concerning where today’s cutting-edge of jazz resides.
...October 30th, 2006
While many think of Elvis Presley as rock n rolls driving force, the truth is that Fats Domino, whose records have sold more than 100 million copies, was the first to put it on the map with such hits as Aint That a Shame and Blueberry Hill.
In Blue Monday, acclaimed R&B scholar Rick Coleman draws on a multitude of new interviews with Fats Domino and many other early musical legends to create a definitive biography of not just an extraordinary man but also a unique time and place: New Orleans at the birth of rock n roll.
...October 20th, 2006
“Reminiscing in Tempo” is part of a continuing effort to provide Jerry Jazz Musician readers with unique forms of “edu-tainment.” As often as possible, we pose one question via e mail to a small number of prominent and diverse people. The question is designed to provoke a lively response that will potentially include the memories and/or opinion of those solicited.
What do you recall about the first live music performance you ever attended?
Featuring Alan Broadbent, Cyrus Chestnut, Dave Frishberg, David Evanier, and others…
...September 12th, 2006
Stanley Crouch — MacArthur “genius” award recipient, co-founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center, National Book Award nominee, and perennial bull in the china shop of black intelligentsia — has been writing about jazz and jazz artists for over thirty years. His reputation for controversy is exceeded only by a universal respect for his intellect and passion. As Gary Giddins notes: “Stanley may be the only jazz writer out there with the kind of rhinoceros hide necessary to provoke and outrage and then withstand the fulminations that come back.”
...September 10th, 2006
Scarecrow Gardens
Late-summer squash put out to sea
in coastal storms. All day, wet
leaves let go. I cut down three
...August 31st, 2006
Kansas City Jazz: A Pictorial Tour _____ In cooperation with Frank Driggs and Chuck Haddix, authors of Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop — a look at the fascinating history of Kansas City’s golden age through book excerpts, photos and music * All photos and book excerpts used with the permission of Frank Driggs, … Continue reading “Kansas City Jazz: A Pictorial Tour”
...August 29th, 2006
Rhythms Of Life
The ferment of storm to seas
The seas’ mad tides
Our savage hearts to spawn
In the wild shoals of swollen rivers
Druid fires – spiraling discs
Raspy winds and blind/blue passions
August 22nd, 2006
In the illustrious and richly documented history of American jazz, no figure has been more controversial than the jazz critic. Jazz critics can be revered or reviled often both but they should not be ignored. And while the tradition of jazz has been covered from seemingly every angle, until now, nobody has ever turned the pen back on itself to chronicle the many writers who have helped define how we listen to and how we understand jazz. In Blowin Hot and Cool: Jazz and its Critics, John Gennari provides a definitive history of jazz criticism from the 1920s to the present.
...August 21st, 2006
Billie Holiday singing at the New Orleans Swing Club. Dexter Gordon hanging out at Bop City. Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane all swinging through town for gigs. Sound like a nostalgic snapshot from the New York jazz scene, or perhaps New Orleans? Nope. This particular sentimental journey describes San Francisco’s Fillmore District in its heyday.
...August 16th, 2006
“Reminiscing in Tempo” is part of a continuing effort to provide Jerry Jazz Musician readers with unique forms of “edu-tainment.” As often as possible, we pose one question via e mail to a small number of prominent and diverse people. The question is designed to provoke a lively response that will potentially include the memories and/or opinion of those solicited.
What are the five greatest albums (LP or CD) of all time?
Featuring Ahmad Jamal, Ashley Kahn, John Pizzarelli, John Szwed, Nancy Wilson and others…
...August 9th, 2006
The Life of Jackie Mclean
by Michael Harper
A critic trying to pass writes me about crossover played some
couldn’t make it got his Ph. D
(he’s onto new changes an advance man now active in grants
from corporations)
August 8th, 2006
Following the path of its star musician John Coltrane, Impulse Records cut a creative swath through the 1960s and 1970s with the politically charged avant-garde jazz that defined the labels musical and spiritual identity. Ashley Kahn’s The House That Trane Built tells the story of the label, balancing tales of individual passion, artistic vision, and commercial motivation.
...July 29th, 2006
Megan Watson pushes open the front door of the old house, escaping the cold. On the left, a welcome mat, wet from snow, rests before the entrance to a vegetarian restaurant. Shes not hungry. Turning to the dry stairwell with the faded violin painted on the wall, she begins her ascent to the shop upstairs.
Paper taped at the top stair reads, “Press Doorbell.” When the door draws open, an older gentleman with a full, white mustache, smiles down at her. Running his palm over the top of his head, he looks tired, but curious.
...July 18th, 2006
“Reminiscing in Tempo” is part of a continuing effort to provide Jerry Jazz Musician readers with unique forms of “edu-tainment.” As often as possible, we pose one question via e mail to a small number of prominent and diverse people. The question is designed to provoke a lively response that will potentially include the memories and/or opinion of those solicited.
What are five books that mean a lot to you?
Featuring Ben Ratliff, David Maraniss, Diane McWhorter, Don Byron, Gary Giddins, James Gavin, Kevin Boyle and others…
...June 29th, 2006
New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century was a complicated city, a rough and beautiful place bursting with energy and excitement. It was a city marked by racial tensions, where the volatile interactions between blacks and whites were further confounded by a substantial Creole population. Yet it was also a city of fervent religious beliefs, where salvation manifested itself in a number of ways. Perhaps abolve all else, New Orleans was a city of music: funeral bands marched through the streets; professional musicians played the popular tunes of the day in dance halls and cabarets; sanctified parishioners raised church roofs with their impassioned voices; and early blues musicians moaned their troubles on street corners and in honky-tonks, late into the night.
...June 12th, 2006
TATUM
by Michael Harper
I have recovered from your blindness
so fast your arpeggios
the world of Toledo is in slow motion
for you are holding back
May 22nd, 2006
Election Day, 1984
Did you ever see someone coldcock a blind nun?
Well, I did. Two helpful idiots
Steered her across the tarmac to her plane
May 21st, 2006
Kind of Blue
New York
&
cross
the
Lincoln
tunnel
expose a city
through
fish eye lens
May 2nd, 2006
“Reminiscing in Tempo” is part of a continuing effort to provide Jerry Jazz Musician readers with unique forms of “edu-tainment.” As often as possible, we pose one question via e mail to a small number of prominent and diverse people. The question is designed to provoke a lively response that will potentially include the memories and/or opinion of those solicited.
What do you remember about your first experience buying a record album or CD?
Featuring David “Fathead” Newman, Eddie Daniels, Phil Woods, Sheila Jordan and others…
...April 21st, 2006
On New Year’s Eve 1972, following eighteen magnificent seasons in the major leagues, Roberto Clemente died a hero’s death, killed in a plane crash as he attempted to deliver food and medical supplies to Nicaragua after a devastating earthquake. Author David Maraniss now brings the great baseball player brilliantly back to life in
April 4th, 2006
ON MEETING ERIC DOLPHY
Between sets at the Five Spot,
She and Dolphy would
walk and talk
April 1st, 2006
dear jesse helms
something is happening.
something obscene.
in the night sky
the stars are bursting
March 15th, 2006
The whole stalking thing started with the footprints. They were so large that his size twelve’s fit easily into the indents in the snow, and the space between them was so wide that following them forced him into an awkward little step-jump. Large paw prints ran parallel to the human prints. He assumed that they belonged to a dog. What else could they be? Yet, what did he know about the customs or recreational habits of these Northern Maine people? For all he knew they strutted through the pines chatting with bears.
...March 8th, 2006
Excerpted from Chasin’ The Bird : The Life and Legacy of Charlie Parker, by by Brian Priestley.
Early in 1945, Parker had begun his first live small-band gigs with Gillespie, after he too left Eckstine the previous December, working briefly with Boyd Radburn and then being booked on the Street. In the meantime, Charlie himself had played some Monday nights at the Spotlite (run by Clark Monroe of the Uptown House) and deputised in the Cootie Williams band, narrowly missing the young pianist Bud Powell, who had been invalided out of the band by a vicious beating from the police in Philadelphia. But, when Dizzy hired Charlie to complete the frontline of his new quintet at the Three Deuces in March,
...February 9th, 2006
“I’m always wondering,” Louis Armstrong wrote in 1966, “if it would have been best in my life if I’d stayed like I was in New Orleans, having a ball.”
In 1922, Armstrong left his city of New Orleans by choice, boarding a Chicago-bound train in his long underwear, carrying a “little” suitcase with a “few” clothes in it, his cornet, and a trout sandwich packed by mother Mayann.
In late August of 2005, an unimaginable number of New Orleans residents in the path of an oncoming Hurricane Katrina were left with little choice but to flee the city. One can only assume that few had the luxury of leisurely packing a suitcase, let alone a trout sandwich
...February 7th, 2006
Charlie Parker has been idolized by generations of jazz musicians and fans. Indeed, his spectacular musical abilities — his blinding speed and brilliant improvisational style — made Parker a legend even before his tragic death at age thirty-four.
In Chasin’ The Bird, Brian Priestley tells Parker’s life story, from his Kansas City childhood to his final harrowing days in New York. Priestley offers new insight into Parker’s career, beginning as a teenager single-mindedly devoted to mastering the saxophone, to his first trip to New York, where he washed dishes for $9.00 a week at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack, a favorite hangout of the great pianist Art Tatum, whose stunning speed and ingenuity were an influence on the young musician.
...February 6th, 2006
“Reminiscing in Tempo” is part of a continuing effort to provide Jerry Jazz Musician readers with unique forms of “edu-tainment.” As often as possible, we pose one question via e mail to a small number of prominent and diverse people. The question is designed to provoke a lively response that will potentially include the memories and/or opinion of those solicited.
What recording session do you wish you could have witnessed?
Featuring Herman Leonard, Jane Ira Bloom, Lalo Schifrin, Buddy Bregman, Ingrid Jensen, Dave Liebman and others…
...February 4th, 2006
The Poet’s Heart
Think of the buddhist monks
who sat in the road
at the start of the war,
saffron robes soaked in gasoline,
and set themselves on fire
January 29th, 2006
. . Peter Guralnick, author of Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke . He was the biggest star in gospel music before he ever crossed over into pop. His first single under his own name, “You Send Me,” was an historic success, going to number one on the charts and selling two … Continue reading “Peter Guralnick, author of Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke“
...December 12th, 2005
“Reminiscing in Tempo” is part of a continuing effort to provide Jerry Jazz Musician readers with unique forms of “edu-tainment.” As often as possible, we pose one question via e mail to a small number of prominent and diverse people. The question is designed to provoke a lively response that will potentially include the memories and/or opinion of those solicited.
What musical recording(s) changed your life?
Featuring Dianne Reeves, Francis Davis, Fred Hersch, Jim Hall, Joshua Redman, Nat Hentoff and others…
...December 3rd, 2005
“Reminiscing in Tempo” is part of a continuing effort to provide Jerry Jazz Musician readers with unique forms of “edu-tainment.” As often as possible, we pose one question via e mail to a small number of prominent and diverse people. The question is designed to provoke a lively response that will potentially include the memories and/or opinion of those solicited.
What is the greatest saxophone solo in the history of jazz?
Featuring Dan Morgenstern, Ishmael Reed, James Carter, Jason Moran, Martha Bayles, Terry Teachout, Kitty Margolis and others…
...November 11th, 2005
No musician evokes the time of the Big Band era more strikingly than Tommy Dorsey (1905 – 1956), whose towering trombone style and smash hits created legions of fans and influenced popular music for decades. Peter Levinson, the author of criticially acclaimed biographies of Harry James and Nelson Riddle, has now written the definitive account of this icon of jazz, drawing on exhaustive new research and scores of interviews with the musicians and others who knew him best.
...November 5th, 2005
My father died quickly and cleanly in the waning days of autumn, just two months before the arrival of the millennium. A massive neural hemorrhage took him — his brain, drowned in blood, was gone within hours. It was ironic that his own blood finally accomplished what years of alcoholism had not: heavy as his drinking was, he remained utterly lucid and sharp until the early morning hours of a late October Tuesday, when a tiny blood vessel in his head gave way, loosening the flood of fluid that killed him. Until then, his memory, both short and long-term, remained unimpaired. True, his body was falling apart; his liver and heart were bad, he suffered from diabetes, gout, macular degeneration — you name it, he had it — but his mind remained as sharp as the day he graduated with a PhD from Harvard.
...November 1st, 2005
This edition of “Conversation with Gary Giddins” is the first of three Jerry Jazz Musician features devoted to the importance of New Orleans culture. In an enlightening, passionate conversation, Giddins — for many years the country’s most eminent jazz critic — discusses the beginnings of jazz in the city of New Orleans, its prominent figures, and what needs to be done to properly market jazz in a city that has contributed so much toward shaping the soul of America.
...October 31st, 2005
The world of jazz criticism is enriched every time Gary Giddins brings out a new book, and Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of its Second Century, bulges with riches. The collection is mostly drawn from his recently-ended Village Voice column (also called “Weather Bird”), with the addition of significant essays published elsewhere. Even faithful readers of the Voice will find ample new Giddins material here.
...October 29th, 2005
Excerpted from Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, by Peter Guralnick
Jerry Brandt got them all tickets for the Clay-Liston fight in Miami on February 25. Allen brought his wife, Betty, Sam took Barbara, and J.W. came by himself, with Allen arranging for accommodations at Miami’s resplendent Fountainebleau Hotel. Allen had already registered and was in his room when Sam arrived, only to be told that there had been a mix-up about the reservations. It was not as blatant as Shreveport,
...October 29th, 2005
at Hentoff, a prolific author and journalist whose work has been published for many years in, among other publications, the Village Voice, the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, the Wall Street Journal, and Jazz Times, has been described by one of his publishers, DaCapo Press, as “a man of passion and insight, of streetwise wit and polished eloquence — a true American original.” This “passion of insight” is particularly apparent in his lifelong devotion to the chronicling of jazz music — a pursuit that began even before he became editor of Downbeat in 1953 — and in his steadfast defense of the Constitution.
...October 6th, 2005
There were but four major galaxies in the early jazz universe, and three of them — New Orleans, Chicago, and New York — have been well documented in print. But there has never been a serious history of the fourth, Kansas City, until the recent publication of Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop — A History, by Frank Driggs and Chuck Haddix.
...September 30th, 2005
From “Back to the Valley”
I guess mebbe you better be getting me home
now, it’s getting pretty late
and I’m getting pretty drunk
and tired
I got to get back on that swaker tomorrow
September 29th, 2005
Excerpted from Tommy Dorsey: Livin’ in a Great Big Way, by Peter Levinson.
With young men being drafted in profusion and some even volunteering for military service, big bands found new venues to work: Army and Air Force bases and Naval stations. With the pre-war and war period having nothing but a favorable effect on the band business, by 1940, dance bands were still big business. Altogether, big bands of every stripe earned one hundred ten million dollars that year.
...September 29th, 2005
Before Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Julius Erving, or Michael Jordan — before Magic Johnson and Showtime — the Harlem Globetrotters revolutionized basketball and spread the game around the world. In Spinning the Globe: The Rise, Fall, and Return to Greatness of the Harlem Globetrotters, author Ben Green tells the story of this extraordinary franchise and iconic American institution.
...September 26th, 2005
S’monka Tetes
These sounds forever
begin with a few off key
notes. A funny dance
and like Joseph’s coat many
September 22nd, 2005
Excerpted from Spinning the Globe: The Rise, Fall, and Return to Greatness of the Harlem Globetrotters, by Ben Green
In 1948, George Mikan, the six-foot-ten center of the Minneapolis Lakers, was dominating the sport like no other big man ever had. When Mikan had first arrived at DePaul University in 1942, he was a clumsy, slow-footed freshman who was so blind (with 20/300 vision) that, even wearing Mr. Magoo glasses, he had to ask teammates to read the game clock. But first-year DePaul coach Ray Meyer recognized the youngster’s fierce competitiveness, and put him through a rigorous, unorthodox, training program: he made him shoot thousands of hook shots with either hand, hired a female dance instructor to improve his footwork,
...August 30th, 2005
At the height of the ideological antagonism of the Cold War, the U.S. State Department unleashed an unexpected tool in its battle against Communism: jazz. From 1956 through the late 1970s, America dispatched its finest jazz musicians to the far corners of the earth, from Iraq to India, from the Congo to the Soviet Union, in order to win the hearts and minds of the Third World and to counter perceptions of American racism.
In Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War, Penny Von Eschen escorts readers across the globe, backstage and onstage, as Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and other jazz luminaries spread their music and their ideas further than the State Department anticipated.
...August 22nd, 2005
“Born Into a World Knowing”
This will happen
Oh god we say just give
me a few more
breaths
and don’t let it be
August 1st, 2005
Just after World War I, the musical style called jazz began a waterborne journey outward from that quintessential haven of romance and decadence, New Orleans. For the first time in any organized way, steam-driven boats left town during the summer months to tramp the Mississippi River, bringing an exotic new music to the rest of the nation. For entrepreneurs promoting jazz, this seemed a promising way to spread northward the exciting sounds of the Crescent City. And the musicians no longer had to wait for folks upriver to make their way down to New Orleans to hear the vibrant rhythms, astonishing improvisations, and new harmonic idioms being created.
...July 15th, 2005
(One)
She has begun to daydream about having an affair.
She imagines herself with the men she sits next to at dinner parties, their wives across the table pulling down their mouths as she engages their husbands intensely in conversation, as she lays her hand on their arms and smiles over her wine glass. Then she looks away, smiles at her own husband seated two or three or four people away from her, nods and smiles, raises an eyebrow.
...July 1st, 2005
Because I Am
In mem. Sidney Bechet, 1897-1959
Because I am a memorious old man
I’ve been asked to write about you, Papa Sidney,
Improvising in standard meter on a well-known
Motif, as you did all those nights in Paris
And the world. I remember once in Chicago
June 29th, 2005
“I suppose you could say that the seeds of my next book, a full-length biography of Louis Armstrong, were planted three years ago, when I was writing an essay for the New York Times about Armstrongs centenary in which I called him “jazz’s most eminent Victorian,” Terry Teachout wrote in his August 17, 2004 Arts Journal blog.
Three years after the Times piece was published, he took a tour of the Louis Armstrong House in Queens and came away with the enthusiasm required of such an endeavor.
...June 27th, 2005
As a performer, Bobby Darin rivaled Frank Sinatra. Energizing the early rock-and-roll scene with his rollicking classic “Splish Splash,” Darin then became a top-draw nightclub act. Chronic illness dogged him from childhood, setting the tone of urgency that inspired a career full of dizzying twists and turns: from teen idol to Vegas song-and-dance man, and from hipster to folkie and back.
...June 20th, 2005
Excerpted from Roman Candle: The Life of Bobby Darin, by David Evanier.
AFTER CONCLUDING HIS TRIUMPHANT DEBUT at the Copa, Bobby was cast in his first major movie role in the summer of 1960. He was signed to appear with Rock Hudson, Gina Lollobrigida, and Sandra Dee in Come September. He would be playing the role of an American student vacationing in Rome who falls in love with another tourist, Sandra Dee.
When he arrived in Portofino, Bobby first became involved with an older woman: Sandra’s mother, Mary
...May 29th, 2005
There are few American lives more powerful or more moving than that of C. L. Franklin. Born in rural Mississippi, he would go on to become the most famous African American preacher in America. His style of preaching revolutionized the art, and his call for his fellow African Americans to proclaim both their faith and their rights helped usher in the civil rights movement. Booming, soaring, flashy, and intense, C.L. was one of a kind. And yet Franklin was, like many great public figures, immensely complicated. A beacon of faith and light, he also knew the shadows. He knew the power of the Lord, yet he was no saint. In Singing in a Strange Land, Bancroft Prize-winning historian Nick Salvatore tells Franklin’s story for the first time.
...May 23rd, 2005
In the final column of his thirty year career as jazz critic of the Village Voice, Gary Giddins wrote, “I’m as besotted with jazz as ever, and expect to write about it till last call, albeit in other formats. Indeed, much in the way being hanged is said to focus the mind, this finale has made me conscious of the columns I never wrote.”
...May 10th, 2005
Excerpted from Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond by Doug Ramsey
By the fall of 1956, Joe Dodge was worn down by the travel and the intense schedule and wanted to be with his family. He told Brubeck it was time to look for another drummer. In the Quartet’s New York stays, Desmond had heard Marian McPartland’s trio and was impressed with Joe Morello, the drummer who had been working with her since 1953. Morello, born in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1928, played there with alto saxophonist Phil Woods and guitarist Sal Salvador before he moved to New York
...April 29th, 2005
The rigid wooden slats of the park bench press relentlessly against the length of my goose-pimpled back. A stocking cap rides low over my ears and most of my forehead, and a wool blanket — cocooned around my prone body — laps over my chin and tucks snugly around the sides of my face. Only my eyes, nose, and weather-cracked lips brave the raw chill. I gaze skyward as the frozen minutes slowly pass. I wouldn’t normally choose to rest here in the dead of winter, but tonight I didn’t have a choice. In life you are either a have or a have-not. Mike and I are have-not’s.
...March 15th, 2005
Django Reinhardt was arguably the greatest guitarist who ever lived, an important influence on Les Paul, Charlie Christian, B.B. King, Jerry Garcia, Chet Atkins, and many others. Handsome, charismatic, childlike, and unpredictable, Reinhardt was a character out of a picaresque novel. Born in a gypsy caravan at a crossroads in Belgium, he was almost killed in a freak fire that burned half of his body and left his left hand twisted into a claw. But with this maimed left hand flying over the frets and his right hand plucking at dizzying speed, Django became Europe’s most famous jazz musician, commanding exorbitant fees — and spending the money as fast as he made it.
...March 9th, 2005
SO WHAT
Baptized by vodka cleansing my throat
Baptized by sweat dripping from Tony Williams’ sticks
Thick  Summer Sunday Afternoons
at the Vanguard
February 4th, 2005
Buying a vinyl long playing jazz album in the format’s heyday — from the 1950s through the 1980s — was a three-step sensual process that stirred an almost irrational enthusiasm for the entire culture the music ignited. The record industry’s flair for creating passionate cover art seduced the imagination, the sounds etched into the grooves promised diversion and surprise, and the densely-typed liner notes on the back cover fired up an eagerness for enlightenment. The process continued at the turntable, where the cut of a stylus transformed the listener into an aural witness to the performer’s character and improvisational skills. It was, quite simply, a bonding experience.
...February 4th, 2005
. . Kevin Boyle, author of Arc of Justice . ___ . In 1925, Detroit was a smoky swirl of jazz and speakeasies, assembly lines and fistfights. The advent of automobiles had brought workers from around the globe to compete for manufacturing jobs, and tensions often flared with the KKK in ascendance and violence … Continue reading “Interview with Kevin Boyle, author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age“
...February 4th, 2005
Excerpted from Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend, by Michael Dregni.
Early on the foggy morning of December 27, 1934, Stephane, Chaput, and Vola climbed into Volas small car along with their violin, guitar, and string bass and made their way to the ensembles first commercial recording session. For the group to have gasoline for the journey, Delaunay had to lend Vola one hundred sous.
Ultraphone had scheduled the recording session for nine, running until midday; the studio was reserved for the labels stars in the afternoon.
...February 1st, 2005
If Benny Goodman was the “King of Swing,” then Fletcher Henderson was the power behind the throne. Not only did Henderson arrange the music that powered Goodman’s meteoric rise, he also helped launch the careers of Louis Armstrong and Coleman Hawkins, among others. In Fletcher Henderson and Big Band Jazz: The Uncrowned King of Swing, Jeffrey Magee offers a fascinating account of this pivotal bandleader, throwing new light on the emergence of modern jazz and the world that created it.
...January 29th, 2005
Excerpted from The Uncrowned King of Swing: Fletcher Henderson and Big Band Jazz by Jeffrey Magee.
By the fall of 1925, then, the musical synergy in Henderson’s band had reached unprecedented intensity. Henderson continued to hold court for dancers at the Roseland, reaching thousands of other listeners through its radio wire, and recording for a variety of record labels both with his full orchestra and with selected members of the band as accompanists for blues singers. And there were also continuous bookings in the summer between seasons at the Roseland, large crowds in venues up and down the East Coast, and consistently hyperbolic press coverage.
...January 29th, 2005
John Leland’s Hip: The History is the story of an American obsession. Derived from the Wolof word hepi or hipi (“to see,” or “to open one’s eyes”), which came to America with West African Slaves, hip is the dance between black and white — or insider and outsider — that gives America its unique flavor and rhythm. It has created fortunes, destroyed lives and shaped the way millions of us talk, dress, dance, make love or see ourselves in the mirror. Everyone knows what hip is.
...January 3rd, 2005
Excerpted from Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson by Geoffrey Ward
Johnson was back in Chicago in the summer of 1934, appearing in Dave Barry’s Garden of Champions, a sort of sideshow at the Century of Progress International Exposition organized by a veteran referee to compete with such attractions as the Midget Village, Sally Rand’s Balloon Dance, and the Aunt Jemima Cabin. For a dollar, children could throw punches at Jack Johnson while he ducked and laughed and popped his eyes. One evening, he fought an exhibition there against Tom Sharkey, whose sparring partner he had briefly been back in 1901. It was supposed to be a nonviolent sparring session,
...December 29th, 2004
Tommy Webber is nine years old when his father, a founding minister of the East Harlem Protestant Parish, moves the family of six from a spacious apartment in an ivy-covered Gothic-style seminary on New York City’s Upper West Side to a small one in a massive public-housing project on East 102nd Street. But it isn’t the size of the apartment, the architecture of the building, or the unfamiliar streets that make the new surroundings feel so strange. While Tommy’s old neighborhood was overwhelmingly middle class and white, El Barrio is poor and predominantly black and Puerto Rican. In Washington Houses, a complex of over 1,500 apartments, the Webbers are now one of only a small handful of white familes.
...December 16th, 2004
Beginning in 1899, a burst of construction on the mid-Manhattan block of West 42nd Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue created the greatest concentration of theaters America had ever seen, giving birth to today’s Broadway theater district. When the New York Times built a slender twenty-five-story tower on an odd, triangular site formed by the convergence of 42nd Street, Broadway, and Seventh Avenue, the city named the square facing the tower Times Square, which quickly became New York’s gathering place for all important civic events.
...December 3rd, 2004
Excerpted from Myself Among Others: A Life in Music by George Wein
Nineteen fifty-six was the Newport debut of the Duke Ellington Orchestra. I had struck an agreement with Irving Townsend, Columbia Records’s A&R man, earlier in the year. It would be good publicity to have some recordings from Newport. Our arrangement seemed like a good deal: for each artist recorded, the record company was to pay us an amount equal to that artist’s performance fee. As it turned out, it was a terrible deal, because the record company got exclusive rights and all of the royalties.
Columbia recorded the equivalent of four LPs during the 1956 festival:
...November 29th, 2004
Although it has had its share of detractors, critical acclaim for Stanley Crouch’s first novel, Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome, is quite impressive — particularly among scholars and fellow writers. For example, Susan di Sesa, former Executive Editor of The Modern Library called it “one of the most profound novels in the English language,” while Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Alan McPherson wrote, “In attempting to employ ‘riffs’ to explore the emotional and psychological dimensions of his characters, Stanley Crouch has evolved a new narrative technique.”
Crouch — known primarily as an outspoken New York cultural critic — clearly understands that a serious writer’s role is to provoke his audience with potentially new avenues of thought
...November 23rd, 2004
Jack Johnson was the first black heavyweight champion in history, the celebrated — and most reviled — African American of his age. Prizewinning biographer Geoffrey Ward tells Johnson’s story in Unforgivable Blackness, which reveals a far more complex and compelling life than the newspaper headlines he inspired could ever convey.
...November 15th, 2004
The workers at Jackson’s favorite record store wear bumble-bee striped tights, black plastic glasses, leather boots that lace straight up their thighs. Jackson’s wearing the purple beret he always wears, with his blond hair sticking out in back, and his cords, and his corduroy jacket that smells like him. It’s April, too warm for corduroy, but Jackson always wears corduroy, along with T-shirts that tell the world he’s been to every blues concert and jazz festival you could think of.
To me, it all sounds the same — jazz, the blues, whatever — it’s all horns, but Jackson’s got two hundred seventeen records — vinyl, he calls them — and a saxophone, too. Clearly, he’s got music in his blood. His dad also plays the saxophone, at bars in Harvard Square, and they kind of look alike, only Jackson’s dad has eyes like power drills that would tear your clothes clean-open if you didn’t look away in time.
...November 1st, 2004
Excerpted from Queen : The Life and Music of Dinah Washington by Nadine Cohodas
As Ruth was settling into the Garrick, Lionel Hampton and his sixteen-piece band were getting ready for a weeklong stay at the Regal that would include a gala Christmas and New Year’s performance with Billie Holiday. It was a heady time for a group that was barely two years old and was riding a wave of ecstatic reviews and sold-out houses. The band had recently made its first recording for Decca.
“Hamp,” as he was universally known, was a consummate showman, a fireplug of energy who inspired his bandmates and thrilled his audiences.
...October 29th, 2004
In the final column of his thirty year career as jazz critic of the Village Voice, Gary Giddins wrote, “I’m as besotted with jazz as ever, and expect to write about it till last call, albeit in other formats. Indeed, much in the way being hanged is said to focus the mind, this finale has made me conscious of the columns I never wrote.”
...October 25th, 2004
Soul Make a Path Through Shouting
for Elizabeth Eckford
Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957
Thick at the schoolgate are the ones
Rage has twisted
Into minotaurs, harpies
Relentlessly swift;
So you must walk past the pincers,
October 17th, 2004
“Moon River,” “Laura,” “Skylark,” “That Old Black Magic,” “One For My Baby,” “Accentuate the Positive,” “Satin Doll,” “Days of Wine and Roses,” “Something’s Gotta Give,” — the honor roll of Johnny Mercer’s songs is endless. Both Oscar Hammerstein II and Alan Jay Lerner called him the greatest lyricist in the English language, and he was perhaps the best-loved and certainly the best-known songwriter of his generation. But Mercer was also a complicated and private man.
...October 6th, 2004
Joshua Berrett’s Louis Armstrong and Paul Whiteman: Two Kings of Jazz is a dual biography of two great innovators in the history of jazz. One was black, one was white — one is now legendary, the other nearly forgotten. Berrett offers a provocative revision of the history of early jazz by focusing on two of its most notable practioners — Whiteman, legendary in his day, and Armstrong, a legend ever since.
...October 4th, 2004
Excerpted from Lush Life : A Biography of Billy Strayhorn by David Hajdu
Shortly after midnight on December 1, 1938, George Greenlee nodded and back-patted his way through the ground-floor Rumpus Room of Crawford Grill One (running from Townsend Street to Fullerton Avenue on Wylie Avenue, the place was nearly a block long) and headed up the stairs at the center of the club. He passed the second floor, which was the main floor, where bands played on a revolving stage facing an elongated glass-topped bar and Ray Wood, now a hustling photographer, offered to take pictures of the patrons for fifty cents. Greenlee hit the third floor, the Club Crawford (insiders only), and spotted his uncle with Duke Ellington, who was engaged to begin a week-long run at the Stanley Theatre the following day.
...September 29th, 2004
Nadine Cohodas’s Queen: The Life and Music of Dinah Washington, is the landmark biography of the brief, intensely lived life and soulful music of the great Dinah Washington. A gospel star at fifteen, she was discovered by jazz great Lionel Hampton at eighteen, and for the rest of her life was on the road, playing clubs, or singing in the studio — making music one way or another. Dinah’s tart and heartfelt voice quickly became her trademark; she was a distinctive stylist, crossing over from the “race” music category to the pop and jazz charts.
...September 13th, 2004
Excerpted from Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker by James Gavin
On August 12, the (Baker) quartet made its earliest known live appearance in a concert at LA’s Carlton Theater. But not everybody trusted Baker to stand on his own. With (Gerry) Mulligan in jail, John Bennett had paired Baker with Stan Getz, another baby-faced wunderkind whose feathery, cascading solos, even more detached than Baker’s, had made him a fellow prince of West Coast cool. Getz had won the 1952 tenor polls in Down Beat and Metronome by a landslide, while Baker still ranked low in the trumpet categories. The two addressed each other politely enough, but they loathed each other almost on sight, as their live duo recordings suggest:
...August 31st, 2004
Illicit drugs have transfigured the American cultural landscape in the past half-century, leaving their mark on everything from art, music, literature, sexuality, spirituality, pop culture, the economy, and politics, to crime, public health, and national law enforcement policy. In Can’t Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945 – 2000, documentary filmmaker and writer Martin Torgoff traces the tangled trajectory of illegal drug use in America, as it spread post-World War II from the Beats and bebop musicians, all the way to the Ecstasy-fueled rave culture.
...August 27th, 2004
Excerpted from Roy Eldridge: Little Jazz Giant by John Chilton
The booking at the Capitol was extended into 1941, but Roy’s long term prospects looked no better than they had a year earlier. However, Roy’s old friend drummer Gene Krupa was about to offer him a life-changing opportunity. Krupa had finished his stint with Benny Godman almost three years earlier and was now one of the foremost bandleaders of the era. Krupa’s Band played at the Hotel Sherman in Chicago during late 1940 and Gene often visited the Capitol (with his wife Ethel and manager Frank Verniere) after he’d finished his sets. Sometimes Roy went off with Gene to find a nightspot on the South Side where they could jam and eat ribs. During this Chicago stay Roy, as ever, was always game for an “after-work” blow,
...July 29th, 2004
Today, Celina is going tolive up to the promise she made to him fifteen years ago, that November dayin the neurologist’s parking lot, when he told her, “When my voice goes,I go.”
Ray can still hear the pitter-patter of raindrops onthe umbrella they’d shared that day, drumming out the minutes that passedas they stood, emotionally and physically immobile, terrified at the thoughtof taking another step. And he can still recall the wet wool smell of hersweater when he tucked his face into the hollow of her neck to hide his tears.But he thought Celina had chosen to forget that day and her vow, until twomonths ago when she asked him if he’d changed his mind. “Squeeze my arm ifyou still want to,” she’d told him.
...July 1st, 2004
Emily Yellin’s Our Mothers’ War: American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II is a stunning and unprecedented portrait of women during World War II, a war that forever transformed the way women participate in American society. It is a long overdue examination that re-creates what American women from all walks of life were doing and thinking, on the home front and abroad.
...June 29th, 2004
Excerpted from Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams by Gary Giddins
To hip musicians in Chicago, scat had been the rage for months. Bing and some of the other adventurous musicians in Whiteman’s band heard it that very week from the master himself, Louis Armstrong. If mobster Al Capone ruled the city, Armstrong ruled its music. Whatever he played was instantly picked up by other musicians. The previous spring Okeh issued his Hot Five recording of “Heebie Jeebies,” and it caused a sensation, selling some 40,000 copies thanks to his inspired vocal chorus – a torrent of bristling grunts and groans in no known language.
...June 22nd, 2004
The story of black professional baseball provides remarkable perspective on several major themes in modern African American history: the initial black response to segregation, the subsequent struggle to establish successful separate enterprises, and the later movement toward integration. Baseball functioned as a critical component in the separate economy catering to black consumers in the urban centers of the North and South. While most black businesses struggled to survive from year to year, professional baseball teams and leagues operated for decades, representing a major achievement in black enterprise and institution building.
...June 6th, 2004
Excerpted from Lorenz Hart: A Poet on Broadway, by Frederick Nolan
A few days later, (Philip) Leavitt took young Richard Rodgers around to the Hart house. Larry Hart met them at the door. They were a study in opposites. Dick was fresh, tanned, athletic, handsome, a high school champion swimmer and tennis player. Larry was unshaven — according to Rodgers, Hart invariably looked like he needed a shave every five minutes after he’d had one — and wearing a bathrobe over an evening shirt and trousers, with carpet slippers on his feet. He was already talking — and doubtless puffing a cigar and rubbing his hands together as he invariably did — as his visitors climbed the steps,
...May 21st, 2004
Lost Sounds is the first in-depth history of the involvement of African Americans in the earliest years of recording. It examines the first three decades of sound recording in the United States, charting the surprising role black artists played in the period leading up to the Jazz Age.
Applying more than thirty years of scholarship, Tim Brooks identifies key black artists who recorded commercially in a wide range of genres and provides revealing biographies of some forty of these audio pioneers. Brooks assesses the careers and recordings of George W. Johnson, Bert Williams, George Walker, Noble Sissle, Eubie Blake, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, W.C. Handy, James Reese Europe, Wilbur Sweatman, boxing champion Jack Johnson, as well as a host of lesser-known voices.
...May 10th, 2004
In the final column of his thirty year career as jazz critic of the Village Voice, Gary Giddins wrote, “I’m as besotted with jazz as ever, and expect to write about it till last call, albeit in other formats. Indeed, much in the way being hanged is said to focus the mind, this finale has made me conscious of the columns I never wrote.”
...April 30th, 2004
Excerpted from Bright Moments: The Life and Legacy of Rahsaan Roland Kirk, by John Kruth
(Mark) Davis then sent the Ed Sullivan show a letter warning them that they were next. With its live audience and numerous commercials, the Jazz & People’s Movement would surely throw the show off its tight schedule. Sullivan’s people thought it over and decided it was best to make peace with the J&PM rather than risk a disruption of their show. “I brought the talent coordinator of The Ed Sullivan Show to see Rahsaan and he really dug his version of “My Cherie Amour,'” Mark continued.
...April 20th, 2004
Excerpted from Lester Leaps In: The Life and Times of Lester “Pres” Young, by Douglas Henry Daniels
(Lester) Young earned recognition for being not only a stylist but a saxophone “freak” – not a pejorative term at all but rather a comment on his unparalleled virtuosity. He “could make a note anywhere” on his instrument. Certain notes were usually produced by depressing specific keys or combinations of keys on the saxophone (or valves on the trumpet and cornet), but “freaks” found ways to defy convention and orthodoxy by means of “false fingerings” and adjustments of the mouth and lips, or embouchure. The trombonist-guitarist Eddie Durham explained that “Coleman Hawkins and Chu Berry and those guys, they fingered it correctly with what they were doing.
...March 29th, 2004
Saxophonist James Moody, whose significant achievements include employment in a variety of Gillespie’s best groups, and journalist Nat Hentoff, whose chronicles on jazz during Gillespie’s era were the benchmarks of his craft, remember Dizzy and his remarkable life in a March 19, 2004 Jerry Jazz Musician hosted conversation.
...March 19th, 2004
Born Sarah Breedlove on December 23, 1867 on a Delta, Louisiana plantation, Madam C.J. Walker — the daughter of former slaves — transformed herself from an uneducated farm laborer and laundress into of the twentieth century’s most successful, self-made female entrepreneur. Orphaned at age seven, she often said, “I got my start by giving myself a start.”
During the 1890s, Sarah began to suffer from a scalp ailment that caused her to lose most of her hair. She experimented with many homemade remedies and store-bought products, including those made by Annie Malone, another black woman entrepreneur.
...March 11th, 2004
There are coyote in The Balcones Canyonlands Preserve in West Travis County, Texas. One family; with three cubs. As always, the alpha female is the only one to breed, her two sisters will help her rear the cubs to maturity. She is a young female, less than two years old, and her sisters are her littermates: this family, barely more than striplings themselves, have fought hard to establish themselves in this reserve, managed for deer and birds, but not for coyote. Most Texans still shoot first, and ask themselves only afterwards if the beautiful golden corpse in front of them could possibly have posed a risk to livestock or pets.
...March 5th, 2004
Often overshadowed by San Francisco, its twinkling sister city across the Bay, Oakland is itself an American wonder. The city is surrounded by and filled with natural beauty — mountains and hills and lakes and a bay — and architecture that mirrors its history as a Spanish mission, Gold Rush outpost, and home of the West’s most devious robber barons.
Oakland is also a city of artists and blue-collar workers, the birthplace of the Black Panthers, neighbor to Berkeley, and home to a vibrant and volatile stew of immigrants and refugees.
...February 28th, 2004
Excerpted from A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album, by Ashley Kahn
Miles Davis was desperate. He was in the midst of preparing for his first national tour arranged by a high-powered booking agent, and Columbia Records — the most prestigious and financially generous record company around — was looking over his shoulder, checking on him. “If you can get and keep a group together, I will record that group,” George Avakian, Columbia’s top jazz man, had promised. To Miles, an alumnus of Charlie Parker’s groundbreaking bebop quintet, “group” still meant a rhythm trio plus two horn players, but he still had only one: himself.
...February 22nd, 2004
Ralph David Abernathy and Martin Luther King Jr. were inseperable and together helped to establish what would become the modern American Civil Rights Movement. They preached, marched, and were frequently jailed together. Donzaleigh Abernathy, Ralph’s youngest daughter, has written Partners to History as a testament to the courage, strength, and endurance of these men who stirred a nation with their moral fortitude.
...February 19th, 2004
Excerpted from Jazz Modernism, by Alfred Appel
Charlie Parker enthusiasts circa 1950 often declared him the jazz equivalent of Stravinsky and Bartok, and asserted that he’d absorbed their music, though skeptics countered that there was no evidence he was even familiar with it. Parker himself clarified the issue for me one night in the winter of 1951, at New York’s premier modern jazz club, Birdland, at Broadway and Fifty-second Street. It was Saturday night, Parker’s quintet was the featured attraction, and he was in his prime, it seemed. I had a good table near the front, on the left side of the bandstand, below the piano. The house was almost full, even before the opening set
...January 29th, 2004
Roy Eldridge’s style is universally recognized as the all-important link between the playing of Louis Armstrong and the achievements of modernist Dizzy Gillespie. Roy’s daring harmonic approach and his technically awesome improvisations provided guidance and inspiration for countless jazz musicians, but he was also a star performer in his own right, whose recordings as a bandleader, and with Gene Krupa and Artie Shaw, gained him a durable international reputation. The indignities he experienced and overcame during the 1940’s while working in otherwise all-white ensembles proved he was as bold a social pioneer as he was a performer.
...January 19th, 2004
In the final column of his thirty year career as jazz critic of the Village Voice, Gary Giddins wrote, “I’m as besotted with jazz as ever, and expect to write about it till last call, albeit in other formats. Indeed, much in the way being hanged is said to focus the mind, this finale has made me conscious of the columns I never wrote.”
...January 5th, 2004
Bayard Rustin is one of the important figures in the history of the American civil rights movement. Before Martin Luther King, before Malcolm X, Rustin was working to bring the cause to the forefront of America’s consciousness. A teacher to King, an international apostle of peace, and the organizer of the famous 1963 March on Washington, he brought Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence to America and helped launch the civil rights movement.
Nonetheless, Rustin has been largely erased by history, in part because he was an African American homosexual.
...December 6th, 2003
For those living during the sixties, personal perspectives on the era’s tumultuous world routinely changed instantly. For some, images of civil rights and Vietnam war protestors being beaten brought new meaning to the idea of justice and provoked active participation, while for others a numbered ball picked out of a lottery barrel would alter an entire life’s journey. Morley Safer’s television reporting from the front lines of Vietnam and Walter Cronkite’s nightly reading of the body count stimulated hope and pride in some, fear and rage in others — and often a little of both in everyone.
In They Marched Into Sunlight, Washington Post reporter David Maraniss draws together in one interwoven story the disparate worlds of soldiers in Vietnam, student protesters in the United States, and government officials in Washington.
...November 17th, 2003
With just forty-one recordings to his credit, Robert Johnson (1911-38) is a giant in the history of blues music. Johnson’s vast influence on twentieth-century American music, combined with his mysterious death at the age of twenty-seven, has allowed speculation and myths to obscure the facts of his life. The most famous of these legends depicts a young Johnson meeting the Devil at a dusty Mississippi crossroads at midnight and selling his soul in exchange for prodigious guitar skills.
...November 12th, 2003
Look up pianist Joe Albany in the All Music Guide to Jazz and you will discover that during his career he associated with the likes of Benny Carter, Lester Young, Joe Venuti, Warne Marsh, and even Charlie Parker, and that eight of the albums recorded under his name in the United States and Europe between 1957 and 1982 are still in print. In the short biography accompanying Albany’s critical discography, the writer Scott Yanow touches briefly on his troubled life, his drug abuse, and his many wives, and concludes that given these circumstances, “…it is miraculous that he lived to almost reach 64.”
...November 11th, 2003
One. Anacostia lay there. Two. Three. Counting gunshots. Four. Five. He imagined the bullets cutting the sky, wondered how this tradition had begun. Six. The first time he held a gun, fired his first shot, he was six years old. It was on this same night — New Year’s Eve — thirteen years ago, just after midnight. Seven.
* * *
His father’s yellowy, roach-burnt fingertips stretched and folded his hand, his small fingers, barely skilled using a pencil, around the handle and trigger. I’m gonna make you a man. A chill shook his small body. He had never felt anything so cold, not a popsicle fresh from the ice cream truck, not the cold air gushing from inside the fridge onto his face in summer. Not even snow was this cold. When he had finished molding the boy’s hand to the gun, he let go. It fell immediately to Anacostia’s knees. A flat, open palm, smacked the back of his head. You ain’t no bitch. Lift that gun up, boy!
...October 15th, 2003
What are the boundaries of the jazz idiom? What is the role of jazz in today’s world? To download or not to download? What is the future of retailing and how does that affect the art of making music? What is the value of recorded music?
As ever, jazz faces an array of questions, certainly more than three people can address in an hour. The hour spent in this particular discussion among men at the top of their respective fields focuses on confronting the challenge of marketing a music filled with nuance and passion to a modern audience conditioned by technology for instant gratification, and the issue of competing with its own historic past.
In a Roundtable hosted by Jerry Jazz Musician publisher Joe Maita, Blue Note Records president Bruce Lundvall, saxophonist Joshua Redman, and New York Times critic Ben Ratliff lend their perspectives.
...October 2nd, 2003
Considered by many to be the greatest blues singer of all time, Bessie Smith was also a successful vaudeville entertainer who became the highest paid African-American performer of the roaring twenties.
First published in 1971, author Chris Albertson ‘s Bessie was described at the time by critic Leonard Feather as the most devastating, provocative, and enlightening work of its kind ever contributed to the annals of jazz literature. New Yorker critic Whitney Balliett called it the first estimable full-length biography not only of Bessie Smith, but of any black musician.
...September 22nd, 2003
“Fire in a Canebrake” is a phrase Walton County, Georgians used to describe the sound of fatal gunshots, and the title of Laura Wexler’s critically acclaimed book on the Moore’s Ford lynching of 1946, the last mass lynching in America.
While the book is a moving and frightening tale of violence, sex and lies, it is also a disturbing snapshot of a divided nation on the brink of the civil rights movement and a haunting meditation on race, history, and the struggle for truth.
...September 8th, 2003
“Boogaloo” is a term author Arthur Kempton suggests as an alternative to what was conventionally described as soul music, and a word to distinguish black popular music from jazz. Boogaloo encompassed three generations of signal personalities, from Thomas A. Dorsey, the so-called Father of Gospel Music, to Sam Cooke, Motown’s Berry Gordy, Stax Record’s Al Bell, and to the ascendency of hip-hop entrepreneurs Shug Knight and Russell Simmons. Their interconnections and influence on the art and commerce of black American popular music is the theme of his book, Boogaloo: The Quintessance of American Popular Music.
...August 27th, 2003
The comedians of the 1950’s and 1960’s were a totally different breed of relevant, revolutionary performer from any that came before or after, comics whose humor did much more than pry guffaws out of audiences.
“The new post-Korean War comedy poked and prodded and observed, demolishing fond shibboleths left and right; it didn’t just pulverize with a volley of joke-book gags,” critic Gerald Nachman writes in Seriously Funny; The Rebel Comedians of the 1950’s and 1960’s.
August 21st, 2003
Village Voice writer Gary Giddins, who was prominently featured in Ken Burns’ documentary Jazz, and who is the country’s preeminent jazz critic, joins us in a conversation recorded on June 20, 2003 — and then slightly revised in October — about the profession of jazz criticism.
The conversation is an autobiographical look at the writer’s ascension in his field, and includes candid observations of other prominent critics. It concludes with a unique “Blindfold Test” that asks Giddins to name the jazz writer responsible for the essay excerpt he is spontaneously shown.
...June 20th, 2003
Kenneth Rexroth was a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and influenced generations of readers with his essays and consummate translations of Japanese and Chinese poetry.
Born in 1905, Rexroth’s career spans almost the entire century. Although forty of his seventy-seven years as poet, translator, essayist, playwright, and revolutionary activist were spent in San Francisco, his intellectual and artistic formative years occurred in the Midwest, mainly in Chicago, where he associated with artists, writers, and theorists of radical politics and philosophies.
...June 20th, 2003
No one has had a better seat in the house than George Wein. The legendary impresario has known some of the most celebrated figures of jazz — from Duke Ellington to Count Basie, and from Thelonious Monk to Miles Davis. As a founder of the Newport Jazz Festival and countless other festivals around the world, Wein has brought a broad spectrum of musical artists to millions, forever changing the country’s cultural landscape.
...June 18th, 2003
Though she sat alone, Mira wasn’t lonely. Woman, chair, patio, trees and sky merged in her nightly meditation. Mira finished her prayer, touching the crown of her head, forehead and heart center with folded hands, crossed herself, and opened her eyes to the East, observing in one smooth movement her indigenous heritage, Catholic upbringing, and conversion to Buddhism.
Gathering and tossing her long raven-wing hair over one shoulder, Mira shifted her weight from one hip to the other, rubbing her ample belly. She turned over mental stones from the last few months, examining the process of shock, resignation, and acceptance that marked this pregnancy. The youngest of five daughters, she ruefully watched her older sisters succumb one by one to the entanglements of family life. She vowed while still a teenager to never clip her wings.
...June 15th, 2003
How does the jazz of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, and Charlie Parker fit into the great tradition of the modern arts between 1920 and 1950? In his book Jazz Modernism, cultural historian Alfred Appel compares the layering of sex, vitality, and the vernacular in jazz with the paper collages of Picasso, and the vital mix of high and low culture found in Joyce.
...June 2nd, 2003
When liberal Republican John Lindsay was elected mayor of New York in 1965, political observers described him as a White Knight, the best hope for a stagnant and troubled city. A reformer with movie-star looks, Lindsay brought glamour and hope to City Hall. At the height of his appeal, leading politicians from both parties, including Nelson Rockefeller and Robert Kennedy, feared Lindsay’s growing popularity. Some even pegged him for the White House.
...May 10th, 2003
The fact that writer Stanley Crouch is willing to speak his mind has been known to readers of cultural criticism for three decades. Depending on one’s outlook, his views on jazz, politics, and race often spark outrage, applause, or provoke debate. In April, 2003, Jazz Times magazine, host to Crouch’s monthly column “Jazz Alone,” published “Putting the White Man in Charge,” a provocative essay covering topics familiar to Crouch readers, most notably his aggressive defense of the jazz idiom and its African American heritage. In the essay he wrote that critics like respected Atlantic Monthly writer Francis Davis see “jazz that is based on swing and blues as the enemy and, therefore, lifts up someone like, say, Dave Douglas as an antidote to too much authority from the dark side of the tracks.”
...May 4th, 2003
Prior to the closing months of World War II, American military doctrine had long held that blacks were inferior fighters who fled under fire and lacked the intelligence, reliability, and courage of white fighters. That changed in early March 1945, when, for the first time, more than two thousand African-American infantrymen entered the front lines in Germany to fight alongside white soldiers in infantry and armored divisions engaged in the final battles of World War II in Europe.
...March 30th, 2003
Village Voice writer Gary Giddins, who was prominently featured in Ken Burns’ documentary Jazz, and who is the countrys preeminent jazz critic, joins us in a March 13, 2003 conversation about pianist Cecil Taylor.
...March 13th, 2003
From the Jim Crow world of 1920s Greenville, South Carolina, to Greenwich Village’s Café Society in the ’40s, to their 1974 Grammy-winning collaboration on “Loves Me Like a Rock,” the Dixie Hummingbirds have been one of gospel’s most durable and inspiring groups.
...March 10th, 2003
Rosa Parks, an African American seamstress in 1955 Alabama, had no idea she was changing history when, work-weary, she refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus. Now she is immortalized for the defiance that sent her to jail and triggered a bus boycott that catapulted Martin Luther King, Jr., into the national spotlight. Who was she, before and after her historic act?* Douglas Brinkley, a familiar and respected television commentator on a wide range of historical, documentary, and news programs
...February 18th, 2003
Donna walked into the student union on the evening of the Kent State shootings while thunderheads roiled over the Toledo River. They invoked little-girl notions that God brought storms until she checked herself with the atheism sweeping the Milestone College campus that semester. In the foyer mirror she stroked long chestnut hair and nodded terse approval of her denim mini-skirt, leotards, and khaki jacket.
Descending the circular staircase to the basement, Donna replayed the scene in the dining commons–Chris, flanked by his entourage, requesting that she report after dinner; how girl friends had flashed wide-eyed grins that heightened her excitement–“God, Donna! No freshman poly-sci’s ever been invited to work with him before!”
...February 10th, 2003
In the preface to his book Jazz: A Critics Guide to the 100 Most Important Recordings, New York Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff writes, “You oughtn’t look at jazz only by its corners, its Hot Fives and Seven’s, its Kind of Blue’s and Love Supreme’s. You have to look at what the corners surround.”
In this spirit, his book is an exploration of jazz in its many varied forms, and opens the reader’s ears to quite surprising recordings comfortably overlooked by other guides.
...January 27th, 2003
More than half a century after his bebop debut, and more than eleven years after his death, Miles Davis lives on. His music is used to pitch jeans, shape films, and personify an era. To this day, he is revered as the archetype of cool.
While several books have been written about Davis, including his own autobiography, due to his passion for reinvention and his extreme reticence the real story of Miles Davis has been obscured by the legend and widely misunderstood.
...January 27th, 2003
The charismatic Buck O’Neil is truly an American hero. His eloquence, grace and genuine love for people have captured the hearts and imaginations of kindred spirits worldwide. His illustrious baseball career spans seven decades and has helped make him a foremost authority and the game’s greatest ambassador.
...January 23rd, 2003
Village Voice writer Gary Giddins, who was prominently featured in Ken Burns’ documentary Jazz, and who is the country’s preeminent jazz critic, joins us in a December 23, 2002 conversation about jazz legend Thelonious Monk.
...December 23rd, 2002
The integration of baseball in 1947 had undeniable significance for the civil rights movement and American history. Thanks to Jackie Robinson, a barrier that had once been believed to be permanent was shattered — paving the way for scores of African Americans who wanted nothing more than to be granted the same rights as any other human being.*
In an interview with Jerry Jazz Musician publisher Joe Maita, NPR Weekend Edition host Scott Simon, author of Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball, discusses how Robinson’s heroism — and that of Dodger general manager Branch Rickey — got America to face the question of racial equality.
...December 18th, 2002
Alice Walker’s 1975 Ms. magazine article “Looking for Zora” and Robert Hemenway’s 1977 biography reintroduced Zora Neale Hurston to the American landscape and ushered in a renaissance for a writer who was a bestselling author at her peak in the 1930’s, but died penniless and in obscurity some three decades later.
Since that rediscovery of novelist, anthropologist, playwright, folklorist, essayist and poet Hurston, her books — from the classic love story Their Eyes Were Watching God to her controversial autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road — have sold millions of copies. Hurston is now taught in American, African American, and Women’s Studies courses in high schools and universities from coast to coast.
...December 10th, 2002
Village Voice writer Gary Giddins, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and who is the country’s preeminent jazz critic, joins us in an October 21, 2002 conversation about jazz legend Sonny Rollins.
...October 21st, 2002
I like the jazz because it plays in different colors: deep green and blue, translucent purple, ivory black; city storefronts, magenta sunsets; watercolor splashes here and there like a yellow crocus on snow or an orange goldfish tail — sudden, surprising, but always carefully placed.
Like the way people come in different colors — they just don’t know it. People walk along in darkness daily, ignorant of the color that’s surrounding them or the beat their music plays. That’s what I’m lying here thinking about, in my dark bedroom between the folds of cotton sheets. Africans, Asians, Seminoles they all come in different colors — not their skins, but their insides.
...October 4th, 2002
Lenny Bruce’s words had the power to provoke laughter and debate — as well as shock and outrage. It was the force of his voice that would place him on the wrong side of the law in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York.
Lenny committed his life to telling the truth. But the truth he told infuriated those in power, and authorities in the largest, most progressive cities in the country worked effortlessy to put him in jail. To them, Lenny’s words were filthy and depraved. But to his friends — the hip, the discontented, the fringe — his words were not only sharp and hilarious, they were a light in the dark to the repressed society of the early 1960’s.
...October 4th, 2002
“Berkeley in the sixties.” Depending on your point of view, that phrase may recall thoughts of a place and time to run toward with enthusiasm, or flee from in fear. It was a place where the traditional university curriculum gave way to the students’ pursuit of the free exchange of ideas, and was the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement of 1964.
The Movement was the event that ignited the first clash of generations in a turbulent, historic decade. Its values shaped who many in America are today, its actions the genesis of the new left and new right.
...September 23rd, 2002
A successful recording generally entertains and communicates passion on an earthly, mortal level. We typically respond to an effective performance by humming the melody, tapping our feet, and sharing it with friends. It might even “stomp the blues,” as the critic Albert Murray suggests.
Few recordings, however, actually challenge a listener to address one’s personal essence.
...September 16th, 2002
Loren Schoenberg is a noted conductor, saxophonist and author who has appeared internationally and won the 1994 Grammy Award for Best Album Notes. He has recorded several albums with his own big band, and also with Benny Goodman, Benny Carter and Bobby Short. He is on the faculties of the Juilliard School, the Manhattan School of Music, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Essentially Ellington Band Director’s Academy, and is program director of the Jazz Aspen Snowmass Jazz Colony and is Executive Director of The Jazz Museum In Harlem.
He is the author of The NPR Curious Listener’s Guide to Jazz, a book Wynton Marsalis describes as a “thorough guide to the music from a few basic perspectives: what it is and how it’s made, its history, the people who made and continue to make it, some suggestions on how to approach it — and a whole pile of ideas.”
...September 9th, 2002
While Ralph Ellison will forever be best remembered as author of the classic American novel of identity, Invisible Man, he also contributed significant essays on jazz that stand as compelling testaments to his era. His work included an homage to Duke Ellington, stinging critiques of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, and recognition of the changing-of-the-guard taking place at Harlem’s Minton’s in the 1940’s. He wrote on musical topics from flamenco to Charlie Christian, and from Jimmy Rushing to Mahalia Jackson.
...August 20th, 2002
In Stardust Melodies: A Biography of Twelve of America’s Most Popular Songs, author Will Friedwald takes these legendary songs apart and puts them together again, with unprecedented detail and understanding. Each song’s history is explored — the circumstances under which it was written and first performed — and then its musical and lyric content.
...August 2nd, 2002
Lee Tanner began using a camera as a teenager in New York City. An avid jazz fan from the age of eight and inspired by the jazz photography of Gjon Mili, Bill Claxton, Herb Snitzer, and Herman Leonard, he turned to documenting the jazz scene with a love for the music comparable only to his creative drive for visual expression. Photography, however, was only an avocation.
...July 29th, 2002
For Birmingham, Alabama native Diane McWhorter, growing up in the city Edward R. Murrow described as the “Johannesburg of America” was “pleasant, because we were the privileged people.” While privilege has its rewards, even as a young girl McWhorter sensed the segregated society that supported this privilege was anything but normal.
...July 29th, 2002
In Tonight at Noon, Sue Graham Mingus gives us an elegant and unsparingly honest memoir of a romance between American opposites: she, a product of privilege, a former midwestern WASP debutante and Smith College graduate who worked as a journalist in Europe and in New York; he (Charles Mingus), an authentic jazz titan, a brilliant, eccentric, difficult artist, a scion of Watts, Los Angeles, who would become one of America’s foremost composers.*
...July 24th, 2002
Hoagy Carmichael remains, for millions, the enduring voice of heartland America, a beloved counterpoint to the urban sensibility of Cole Porter and George Gershwin. The author William Zinsser said of Carmichael ,”Play me a Hoagy Carmichael song and I hear the banging of a screen door and the whine of an outboard motor on a lake — sounds of summer in a small-town America that is long gone but still longed for.”
...July 23rd, 2002
The composer David Amram has been hailed by the Washington Post as “one of the most versatile and skilled musicians America has ever produced.” Since Leonard Bernstein appointed Amram as first composer-in-residence with the New York Philharmonic in 1966-67, he has become one of the most acclaimed composers of his generation, listed by BMI as one of the Twenty Most Performed Composers of Concert Music in the United States since 1974.
Amram is also known as the musical collaborator of the great mid-century American author Jack Kerouac, whose book On the Road is considered to be the artistic soul of the 1950’s.
...July 17th, 2002
Author, intellectual and social critic, Ralph Ellison was a pivotal figure in American literature and history, and arguably the father of African-American modernism. Universally acclaimed for Invisible Man, a masterpiece of modern fiction, and more recently for the posthumously edited and published Juneteenth, Ellison was recognized with a succession of honors, including the 1953 National Book Award.
Lawrence Jackson’s Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius is the first thoroughly researched biography of Ellison.
...July 8th, 2002
Bill Evans (1929 – 1980) played a major role in the history of modern jazz. The New Jersey-born pianist’s groundbreaking ideas were so widely absorbed by his peers and subsequently by every new generation of musicians that he can be classed among the most influential figures in post-war jazz, ranking alongside Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.
...June 24th, 2002
More than four decades after her death, Billie Holiday remains one of the most gifted artists of our time, and also one of the most elusive. Because of who she was and how she chose to live her life, Holiday has been the subject of both intense adoration and wildly distorted legends.
...June 24th, 2002
Village Voice writer Gary Giddins, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and who is the country’s eminent jazz critic, joins us in a June 21, 2002 conversation about jazz great John Coltrane.
...June 21st, 2002
Village Voice writer Gary Giddins, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and who is the country’s preeminent jazz critic, joins us in a June 21, 2002 conversation about Invisible Man author Ralph Ellison.
...June 21st, 2002
That trumpeter Chet Baker was a sensitive musician whose sound is a cherished part of the jazz landscape is well known. That he led a hard life is also pretty well known, perhaps even to the most casual music fan. His 1988 death from a fall out an Amsterdam window only added to the sad mystery surrounding his persona.
What was not known by most of us is the haunting depth of Baker’s self-destructive life; that he was an arsonist, a thief, a second-story man, a drug addict, an abusive husband and lover, a philanderer, a liar…need we go on? We could, you know.
...June 12th, 2002
American Popular Standards have become a vital part of our cultural heritage. They are the show tunes of Broadway and Hollywood, which – taken up by swing bands, jazz singers, and countless other performers of every description – were for decades the sound of popular music.
...June 5th, 2002
The child of the fundamentalist South with an eighth-grade education, a self-taught intellectual in the working-class Communist Party of the 1930s, a black man married to a white woman, and an expatriate in France after World War II, Richard Wright was always an outsider. He went well beyond the limits of the times in which he lived, and sought to reconcile opposing cultures in his work.
“How the hell did you happen?” the Chicago sociologist Robert Park once asked Wright. In Richard Wright: His Life and Times, biographer Hazel Rowley shows how, chronicling with the dramatic drive of a novel Wright’s extraordinary journey from a sharecropper’s shack in Mississippi to international renown as a writer, fiercely independent thinker, and outspoken critic of racism.
...May 28th, 2002
In the spring of 1959, seven musicians got together in a converted church on 30th Street in Manhattan and made jazz history. Over forty years have passed since Miles Davis assembled his famed sextet to record Kind of Blue, and in that time the album has risen to the level of masterpiece.
In Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece, Ashley Kahn gives readers the unprecedented opportunity to enter the 30th Street studio and witness the creation of this remarkable album
...April 29th, 2002
Nelson Riddle will forever be linked with the music and recordings of such unforgettable vocalists as Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Rosemary Clooney, Linda Ronstadt, and dozens of others. Riddle not only helped to establish Nat “King” Cole’s career in the 1950s, but was also a major participant in reviving Sinatra’s career. He served as arranger of many classic Sinatra albums, including Only the Lonely and In the Wee Small Hours.
September in the Rain is the first biography of the most highly-respected arranger in the history of American popular music.
...April 19th, 2002
The first book to reassess Ralph Ellison after his death and the posthumous publication of Juneteenth, his second novel, Jazz Country: Ralph Ellison in America explores Ellison’s writings and views on American culture through the lens of jazz music.
In Jazz Country, Porter addresses Ellison’s jazz background, including his essays and comments about jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Parker. Porter further examines the influences of Ellington and Armstrong as sources of the writer’s personal and artistic inspiration and highlights the significance of Ellison’s camaraderie with two African American friends and fellow jazz fans — the writer Albert Murray and the painter Romare Bearden.
...April 15th, 2002
On the morning of June 1, 1921, a white mob numbering in the thousands marched across the railroad tracks dividing black from white in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and obliterated a black community then celebrated as one of America’s most prosperous. Thirty-four square blocks of Tulsa’s Greenwood community, known then as the “Negro Wall Street of America,” were reduced to smoldering rubble.
...April 12th, 2002
Bill Moody’s background as a musician and his talents as a writer have made the Evan Horne Mysteries a favorite of jazz aficionados and crime-fiction fans alike. Investigating the death of Chet Baker, a major cult figure in the world of music, brings out the best in both the author and his pianist sleuth, Evan Horne. Looking for Chet Baker is his fifth Evan Horne mystery.
...April 10th, 2002
Gary Mex Glazner makes his living as a poet. He is a graduate of Sonoma State University’s Expressive Arts program with an emphasis in poetry. In 1990, Glazner produced the first National Poetry Slam in San Francisco. His poetry has appeared in anthologies, periodicals, on CD, radio, television, and underwater on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. His poems have been translated into Chinese, Moldavian, Nepali, and Vietnamese. In 1997, Poets and Writers Inc. awarded him a grant to work with Alzheimer patients using poetry. Glazner is the Minister of Fun for Poetry Slam Incorporated.
...April 3rd, 2002
Time has been an essential ingredient in the Smothers Brothers’ success. They have been considered ahead of their time, masters of timing and practitioners of timeless comedy. Now as they mark over 42 years in show business, the Smothers Brothers are being saluted as time-honored legends whose lengthy career has surpassed all other comedy teams in history.
...February 20th, 2002
Filmmaker Avon Kirkland’s career as a chemist was cut short by his desire to create social change. The path he chose led to filmmaking, and along the way he has profiled great men, among them Booker T. Washington and Thurgood Marshall.
His latest film is on Ralph Ellison, the great American writer whose classic book of identity, Invisible Man, stands as a monument in literature. Ellison’s wide range of intellectual breadth and profundity surprised even Kirkland, and is documented in Ralph Ellison: An American Journey, the Sundance Film Festival nominated film that has found an audience via PBS.
...February 15th, 2002
ester Young was jazz music’s first hipster. He performed onstage in sunglasses and coined and popularized the enigmatic slang “that’s cool” and “you dig?” He was a snazzy dresser who always wore a suit and his trademark porkpie hat. He influenced everyone from B. B. King to Stan Getz to Allen Ginsberg. When he died, he was the subject of musical tributes by Charles Mingus (“Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”) and Wayne Shorter (“Lester Left Town”), and incidents from his life were featured in the movie ‘Round Midnight.
...February 14th, 2002
Gene Lees is a well-known jazz chronicler. He is also a song lyricist, composer, singer, and author of more than a dozen volumes of jazz history and criticism, including the highly acclaimed Cats of Any Color: Jazz Black and White.
In You Can’t Steal a Gift, Lees writes of his encounters with four great black musicians: Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, Milt Hinton, and Nat King Cole. Equal parts memoir, oral history, and commentary, each of the main chapters is a minibiography weaving together conversations Lees had with the musicians and their families, friends and associates over several decades.
...February 6th, 2002
Brown University professor Michael Harper, the first Poet Laureate of the State of Rhode Island, shares his personal perspectives on Ralph Ellison.
...January 24th, 2002
Brown University professor Michael Harper, the first Poet Laureate of the State of Rhode Island, and author of the National Book Award nominated collection, Dear John, Dear Coltrane, discusses John Coltrane and reads his poems.
...January 24th, 2002
On December 12, 2001, Jazz At Lincoln Center, the world’s largest not-for-profit arts organization dedicated to jazz, announced their Board of Directors had unanimously elected longtime member Lisa Schiff as the organizations new Chairman of the Board. Jazz at Lincoln Center Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis said, We are all excited about Lisa Schiff becoming … Continue reading “Jazz at Lincoln Center Board Chairman Lisa Schiff”
...January 15th, 2002
For an entire generation, when Cafe Society was at its pinnacle, New York’s Stork Club was the world’s most storied night spot. It’s walls housed glamour and celebrities waited in line for the chance to be seen. Americans from all over the country, and soldiers fighting overseas, dreamed of visiting New York and being among the witnesses to the Stork Club’s elegant culture.
From its inception in the Roaring Twenties as a speakeasy for Jazz Age gangsters to its heyday in the 50’s when Jack wooed Jackie there, and headwaiters reaped $20,000 tips, everyone from Marilyn Monroe to J. Edgar Hoover gathered at the Stork Club.
...January 14th, 2002
When Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton sat at the piano in the Library of Congress in May of 1938 to begin his monumental series of interviews with Alan Lomax, he spoke of his years on the West Coast with the nostalgia of a man recalling a golden age, a lost Eden. He had arrived in Los Angeles more than twenty years earlier, but he recounted his losses as vividly as though they had occurred just recently. The greatest loss was his separation from Anita Gonzales, by his own account “the only woman I ever loved,” to whom he left almost all of his royalties in his will.
...January 7th, 2002
When Stephanie Stein Crease was a child, and her older brother started bringing home records by Gil Evans and Miles Davis, her world turned. Fascinated by the colorful orchestrations found on Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess and Sketches of Spain, recorded between 1957 and 1960, Crease began a life long affair with the music of Evans, a man noted critic Gary Giddins has called “one of the great figures in American music.” Gil Evans, Out of the Cool, is a culmination of her fascination of and appreciation for the work of Gil Evans.
...December 17th, 2001
Joshua Redman entered the jazz world with tons of expectation and perhaps an unreasonable amount of hope. Pat Metheny went so far as to suggest Redman is “the most important new musician in twenty years.”
While Methenys point can be argued, Redman has created some of the most consistently compelling jazz during the last ten years. His music borrows from a storied past and experiments with an elegant future.”
While Methenys point can be argued, Redman has created some of the most consistently compelling jazz during the last ten years. His music borrows from a storied past and experiments with an elegant future.
...December 12th, 2001
Philadelphian Francis Davis is the author of several books, including The History of the Blues, Bebop and Nothingness and a forthcoming biography of John Coltrane. A contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly, he also writes regularly about music for the New York Times, among others.
...December 10th, 2001
Author Eric Nisenson has devoted much of his adult life to reporting jazz. The genesis of his passion for jazz was his introduction to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue at an early age – a passion so strong it eventually led to a friendship with Miles. The subjects for his three biographies are no less than Miles, John Coltrane, and now, Sonny Rollins, all key musicians and all strong, unique personalities worthy of icon status in the world of music. Nisenson discusses his friendship with Miles and his new book, Open Sky : Sonny Rollins and His World of Improvisation
...November 29th, 2001
Nat Hentoff was born in Boston in 1925 and lived there until he moved to New York City at the age of twenty-eight. For many years he has written a weekly column for the Village Voice. His column for the Washington Times is syndicated nationally, and he writes regularly about music for the Wall Street Journal. His numerous books cover subjects ranging from jazz to civil rights and civil liberties to First Amendment issues.
...November 20th, 2001
Few musicians have had the impact on the world of music that McCoy Tyner has. His sound has influenced pianists in each of his six decades as a performer. Noted jazz critic Scott Yanow says, “Along with Bill Evans, Tyner has been the most influential pianist in jazz of the past 40 years with his chord voicings being adopted and utilized by virtually every younger pianist.”
While his career continues to move ahead, he will forever be best known as the pianist in John Coltrane’s famed Quartet of the early 1960’s, a group long since recognized as the ultimate jazz combo, whose eclectic, spirited work constantly demanded listeners to reach well beyond their safest star. A Love Supreme, recorded in 1964, is a landmark in music, and to this day the centerpiece to the Quartet’s vast, unparalled universe.
...November 8th, 2001
Gerald Early is Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters at Washington University in St. Louis, and is one of Americas most respected essayists. His work on American and African American culture is collected in Tuxedo Junction, The Culture of Bruising (National Book Award), and One Nation Under a Groove, a book on Motown.
He has edited collections on African American rhetoric, black consciousness, sports, Muhammad Ali, and African American writing about St. Louis.
...October 10th, 2001
Stanley Crouch is an essayist, poet, former musician, jazz critic and author of the novel Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome. He is outspoken, controversial, clever, and right more often than many seem willing to admit. He is also a very thoughtful admirer of Invisible Man author Ralph Ellison, whose work and friendship touched Crouch enough that, when asked if he considered Ellison a mentor, without hesitation answered “Yes!” Crouch takes part in a very lively conversation about Ellison and a variety of associated topics, including Charlie Parker, and music’s place in American ritual.
...September 14th, 2001
The Tony Award winning play Side Man dramatizes the emotional elements of a dying jazz culture and its effects on an American family whose very soul depended on it. Playwright Warren Leight’s fascinating dark comedy chronicles three decades of living through the lives of jazz sidemen, and is filled with humor, honor, passion and pain.
...August 29th, 2001
When Albert Murray arrived at Tuskeegee Institute in 1935, Ralph Ellison was an upperclassman who was, in Murray’s words, “dressed like a ‘Joe College’ right out of Esquire magazine.” According to Murray, Ellison “represented the type of aspirations that I had been expecting for myself.”
While their paths split geographically, the two kindled an emotional and intellectual friendship that gained momentum during the era of Ellison’s creative peak, when his timeless novel of identity Invisible Man was being written, distributed, reviewed, and rewards reaped upon. They honored successes, encouraged intellectual growth, and shared a deep love of music. They were best friends.
...August 29th, 2001
Being named literary executor of any writer’s estate would be quite an honor, let alone if the writer whose works you now caretake is Ralph Ellison, author of one of the 20th century’s greatest novels, Invisible Man. For long time Ellison friend John Callahan, “It was a challenge, and it was intimidating, exhilirating…”
Among the work left for Callahan was editing Ellison’s long awaited second novel, released as Juneteenth in 1999.
...July 18th, 2001
As jazz critic for the New Yorker magazine since 1957, and author of fifteen books, Whitney Balliett has spent a lifetime listening to and writing about jazz. Generations of readers have learned to listen to the music with his graceful guidance.
In our interview with Balliett, he discusses his latest book, Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz, 1954-2000 (St. Martin’s Press), which collects a bounty of his reviews, reporting and portraits.
...May 24th, 2001
Few observers of cultural history articulate their viewpoints quite like Martha Bayles. Her opinions on popular culture are intelligent, controversial, and in demand. Her essay on Miles Davis recently appeared in the New York Times, and for years she was the television and arts critic for the Wall Street Journal, where her work still appears. Her book, Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music, was hailed by the Chicago Tribune as an “important book.” The New York Times said, “Ms. Bayles tells a morality tale of how culture lost its way by adopting attitudes that undermine its finest achievements.”
...April 7th, 2001
Chet Baker was a star at 23 years old, winner of the Critics as well as Readers Poll in Down Beat. But much of his later life was shadowed by his drug use and problems with the law.
Chet Baker: His Life and Music gives an account of the famous trumpeter – famous as much for his tragic life as his beautiful music. In our interview, conducted via e-mail, author Jeroen de Valk talks about Baker, the life he led, the people he touched, and the legacy he left.
...March 29th, 2001
When Gary Giddins, the jazz critic and columnist for the Village Voice, began work on an in-depth biography of Bing Crosby, many asked him, “Why?” He has explained that Crosby, perhaps the most famous entertainer in America between 1927 and 1956, has been unjustly forgotten since his death in 1977.
...March 22nd, 2001
The effervescent smile of Josephine Baker is easily recognizable. The mellifluous tone of her voice is legendary. Epitomizing the adage “all that glitters is not gold,” her life was plagued with broken marriages, discrimination, poverty, and eventually illness.
In his book, The Josephine Baker Story, author Ean Wood, who previously wrote of George Gershwin’s life, presents us with a portrait of a truly remarkable woman whose charm, vivacity and captivating personality live on long after her death.
...September 2nd, 2000
Since 1955, Dwike Mitchell and Willie Ruff have been performing, teaching, and sharing jazz with the country and the world. William Zinsser, best-selling author of On Writing Well, follows the duo to China, to the American Midwest, to New York City, and to Venice (where Ruff travels back to the roots of Western music in order to explore jazz’s heritage).
Zinsser tells how these two men, raised in small towns in the South in the 1930s and 40s, struggled and persevered to become masters of their craft–and how they came to embrace the tradition of jazz as it is handed down from one generation to the next.
...August 30th, 2000
Fifteen years ago, Cherie Nutting returned to Morocco. She had first visited it as a child with her mother, and the images of mystery and the desert had stayed with her, fueled over the years by accounts of expatriate life and by the literature created there. In Tangier again, she met the most famous of the expatriates and author of the classic The Sheltering Sky. Cherie became a friend of Paul Bowles and part of his circle. Over the years, the friendship deepened and widened.
Yesterday’s Perfume is a memoir of that friendship and of Cherie’s love of Morocco. Cherie discusses her friendship with this extraordinary artist in an interview with Jerry Jazz Musician publisher Joe Maita.
...August 23rd, 2000
Few enthusiasts and scholars would argue the place trumpeter Clifford Brown holds in jazz history. His work, sadly cut short by his death in 1956, is dramatic, creative, revered. Until now, there has not been a body of work on his life to better acquaint us with his play, his life in and out of jazz, and his enthusiasm for life. Author Nick Catalano, whose love for Brownie had its beginnings at age 14 when he briefly shared a bandstand with him, has given us Clifford Brown : The Life and Art of the Legendary Jazz Trumpeter, a critically-acclaimed, newly released biography
...August 22nd, 2000
Jazz and poetry seem intertwined somehow, not just because of its historical union, but because of their immense opportunity for self-expression. Sascha Feinstein has written extensively about jazz poetry, and most recently he has published Misterioso , a collection of his own work which won the Hayden Carruth Award. Sascha was kind enough to share his thoughts with Jerry Jazz Musician during a July, 2000 interview.
...July 6th, 2000
Bright Moments, the first biography of the legendary jazz musician Rahsaan Roland Kirk, establishes once and for all the brilliant multi-instrumentalist’s place in the pantheon of jazz giants alongside Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. Culled from three years of in-depth interviews and research, Bright Moments chronicles the tumultuous life of the neglected genius through enlightening observations and hilarious anecdotes by Kirk’s friends and family, as well as by famous contemporaries such as Quincy Jones, Allen Ginsberg, Yusef Lateef, Eric Burdon, Ken Kesey and Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson.
...May 29th, 2000
What music would you take to a remote island? It would be wise to consider taking the catalog of Mark Isham. Not only would you have a Grammy and Emmy Award winning film composer of over 50 films, there is a solo career that spans from New Age Windham Hill recordings such as 1983’s VAPOR DRAWINGS to the decidedly cool acoustic jazz of 1995’s BLUE SUN featuring Charles Lloyd. Not to mention all Isham’s recorded guest appearances. Now add to that, the often raucous MILES REMEMBERED: THE SILENT WAY PROJECT, a live album culled from some 30 hours of recorded performance.
...April 29th, 2000
For many of us, the photography of Herman Leonard is our first link to jazz culture. Ellington in Paris, Dexter with a Chesterfield, a youthful Miles, Satchmo in Birdland…These images, in some cases more so than the music, are responsible for our devotion to preserving and protecting the art the musicians of mid 20th Century America created, and Herman Leonard reported on.
...March 6th, 2000
If you looked up the word ubiquitous in some cosmic jazz dictionary, you’re likely to find “Kenny Barron” as its definition. Long considered one of the finest jazz pianists of his generation, Barron has forged celebrated collaborations as a sideman with such luminaries as Dizzy Gillespie, Freddie Hubbard, Yusef Lateef, Ron Carter, Stan Getz, to name but a few.
...November 28th, 1999
Author John Fraim is a very interesting man. Taking on a subject like John Coltrane is not a left-brain experience. He knew wisdom and historical perspective were required before writing about a complex, musical prophet, and wrote this biography the way Coltrane lived his life In his award-winning book, Spirit Catcher, The Life and Art of John Coltrane, he presents Coltrane’s life as spiritual quest, and in it creates a piece of art not often found in biographical form.
...October 29th, 1999
Bassist Leroy Vinegar talks about his life in jazz music…
...August 29th, 1999
“I just wish I could pitch for one year!”, former Major League pitcher Larry Jansen says when asked about today’s salaries. But you get the sense he wouldn’t trade today’s money for a single memory of his life long career in baseball. Jansen was a 1950 All-Star pitcher (he induced Joe Dimaggio to hit a fly ball), a two time 20 game winner, and the winning pitcher in perhaps the greatest baseball game ever played, Game 3 of the 1951 playoff between the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers.
...April 9th, 1999
Matt Glaser is the only tenured professor of violin in the United States who specializes in jazz, folk and swing instead of classical music. Matt has appeared on over thirty recordings, is the head of the string department at Bostons Berklee College of Music, and co-authored the book “Jazz Violin” with legendary jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli.
A close friend of Ken Burns, Glaser has played on numerous Burns documentaries. He was a Senior Advisor to Burns during the filming of Jazz – A Film by Ken Burns. Glaser’s colorful interviews throughout the film are a dynamic part of the experience.
...February 12th, 1999
My name is Joe Maita, Sr. I am 81 years old and was a musician formany years. This is about my experience meeting and knowing the greattrumpet player Roy Eldridge.
...June 15th, 1998
T.S. Monk has done what few children of cultural genius’ have done before him….forge a successful, highly respected career of his own. His current release, the enhanced CD “Monk on Monk”, is not only one of the best Monk tribute albums ever recorded, critics have mentioned it as among the best jazz releases of 1997.
...February 9th, 1998
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