Night Lights Classic Jazz
After 25-year-old trumpet great Clifford Brown died unexpectedly in a 1956 car accident, some critics and fans looked to Donald Byrd as a possible successor.
Our annual invocation of holiday jazz this year calls upon the talents of Fats Navarro (”A Bebop Carol”), hipster vocalist Babs Gonzales, tenor saxophonist Gene Ammons, trumpeter Donald Byrd, guitarist Joe Pass, and many other propagators of classic jazz, blowing joyous tidings unto you all. Happy holidays from all of us at Night Lights and WFIU–may you find many great books, movies, CDs, and other “items of interest” under your holiday tree.
Art Blakey led the much-noted Jazz Messengers for four decades, and the lesser-known 1957 edition gave him one of his most diverse years on record.
On this edition of Night Lights it's "Moodsville 2," a followup to the Moodsville 1 program about the Prestige Records early-1960s series.
Previously on Night Lights: Don Ellis and The French Connection. It offers more than a taste of later, larger-ensemble Ellis, heard at the dawn of the 1970s…
Scott Wenzel at Mosaic Records says that the long-rumored Benny Goodman Mosaic set will be out in time for Father's Day 2008.
First a Pulitzer, then a Grammy and a presentation on the Grammy TV show (somewhat akin to seeing a holy man appear in the temple of Babylon), now a feature in Rolling Stone…at the age of 77, Ornette Coleman has finally received the…
Despite online speculation about what grim things EMI might have in mind for the Blue Note jazz program, it appears there will be another round of RVG and Connoisseur reissues, as reported at the Organissimo board:Ike Quebec – Blue And Sentimental…
After 25-year-old trumpet great Clifford Brown died unexpectedly in a 1956 car accident, some critics and fans looked to Donald Byrd as a possible successor.
We'll hear a clip from trumpeter Shorty Rogers' appearance on the too-hip-to-last early-1960s TV show, Jazz Scene USA.
Word from the Jazz Programmer Listserv that alto saxophonist Frank Morgan has passed away:his 74th, birthday, December 23.…
“Jazz is not a what, it is a how. If it were a what, it would be static, never growing. The how is that the music comes from the moment, it is spontaneous, it exists at the time it is created. And anyone who makes music according to this method conveys to me an element that makes his music jazz.”–Bill Evans
One of the albums featured in this week’s show, After the Vanguard: the Return of Bill Evans, is the 1962 Riverside LP Moonbeams. Can you name the model who posed for the cover? (Hint: she went on to greater fame in the mid-1960s with a certain artistic entrepreneur. And no fair Googling.)
Our annual invocation of holiday jazz this year calls upon the talents of Fats Navarro (”A Bebop Carol”), hipster vocalist Babs Gonzales, tenor saxophonist Gene Ammons, trumpeter Donald Byrd, guitarist Joe Pass, and many other propagators of classic jazz, blowing joyous tidings unto you all. Happy holidays from all of us at Night Lights and WFIU–may you find many great books, movies, CDs, and other “items of interest” under your holiday tree.
Ever since Louis Armstrong’s trumpet sound became a symbol of musical revolution and Bix Beiderbecke died tragically young in a New York City apartment, writers have been responding to jazz and the musicians who make it. In Ask Me Now, a new anthology of interviews conducted by poet and scholar Sascha Feinstein, the relationship between jazz and literature is explored at length in a series of conversations with artists who reflect on the profound emotional and aesthetic connections they’ve made through listening to, playing, and writing about the music…
Canadian pianist Oscar Peterson has passed away at the age of 82.
As expected, many more Oscar Peterson articles and tributes have appeared in the past two days. Here are a few of them:Lots of love and spirited dissension in this Organissimo discussion…
On December 27, 1927, the Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein musical Show Boat made its Broadway debut at the Ziegfield Theater.
Take with the usual grain/caveat of subjectivity–that said, here are some titles from a year-for-the-ear in review…
David Brent Johnson hosts the weekly WFIU historical jazz program Night Lights and Afterglow as well. Learn more »
Johnny Hartman, Blossom Dearie, Dean Martin and others help us pay tribute to the Indiana songwriter.
Afterglow is WFIU's weekly program of jazz and American popular song hosted by David Brent Johnson.
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