Night Lights Classic Jazz
A so-called “biopic” of the blues composer W.C. Handy’s life, St. Louis Blues was Nat King Cole’s only role as a leading man.
He’s been called “the godfather of acid jazz” and modern-day hiphoppers refer to him as “The Icon Man,” but before his R & B success in the 1970s vibraphonist Roy Ayers was renowned by his colleagues for his 1960s jazz performances…
Jazz artists have occasionally revisited albums years or decades after their original release, sometimes re-recording them in their entirety.
George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess met with only middling success when it debuted in 1935, but stagings in the 1940s and 1950s ensured its place in musical history. With Hollywood poised to make…
Pianist Cecil Taylor is one of the most influential pioneers of late-20th-century improvised music; as author John Litweiler says in his book The Freedom Principle, “One of the running threads in the story of today’s jazz is that so many of the advances first appeared in Cecil Taylor’s music.” Taylor’s musical universe, often perceived…
David Brent Johnson hosts the weekly WFIU historical jazz program Night Lights and Afterglow as well. Learn more »
Major Glenn Miller went missing over the English Channel in December 1944. For decades afterwards, much of his wartime orchestra's music went missing as well.
Afterglow is WFIU's weekly program of jazz and American popular song hosted by David Brent Johnson.
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