Night Lights Classic Jazz
Carter wrote jazz standards, mastered two instruments, opened doors for black composers in Hollywood, and served as a mentor to many young jazz musicians.
Duke Pearson was a pianist, composer, and arranger who helped craft the sound of many of the Blue Note label's classic mid-1960s releases.
Based on the true story of accused murderess Barbara Graham, the 1958 movie I Want to Live! employed a jazz soundtrack written by Johnny Mandel.
I’ve drifted away from reading the satirical newsweekly The Onion in recent years, but there’s a good piece making the Internet rounds this week. Laughing to keep from crying, no doubt:
My jazz-DJ colleague Joe Bourne noted yesterday that it was the 65th anniversary of the American Federation of Musicians recording ban, which began on Aug. 1, 1942 and didn’t completely end until major labels Columbia and Victor came to terms with the union in late 1944. (Decca, the other of the “Big Three” during…
Night Lights recently marked its third year on the air, and the third anniversary of the website's launch is just around the corner...
Inspired by a recent thread at Organissimo, here’s a list of jazz biographies and books that are in various stages of completion, nearing completion, or nearing publication:Peter Pullman’s book on Bud Powell. Pullman has been at work on this ever since overseeing the impressive booklet for the great jazz pianist’s Complete Verve Recordings…
Reports have been circulating on the Internet for the past several days that bassist Art Davis had passed away–confirmation now from the Los Angeles Times. Some good discussion ongoing over at Organissimo about Davis’ work with Max Roach, John Coltrane…
Release of Miles Davis’ On the Corner box is imminent, as Howard Mandel notes at his new blog. Has a domestic label ever covered an artist’s career so exhaustively? Put together, the Davis Sony sets equal roughly double the amount of music in the Duke Ellington RCA Victor box. Street date: Sept. 25. In the meantime, you can tap our archives…
A few days ago I posted a list of jazz biographies and books that some fans are eagerly awaiting. (Right now I’ll add another–as well as the appended Bob Porter book on soul-jazz–volume two of Gary Giddins’ Bing Crosby bio.) Well, here’s some background on why it’s rough going these days…
Last week I was working on the Night Lights schedule for the rest of the year and ran into what I thought might be a bit of a snag. Show topics are usually plotted well into the future (right now we have programs slated through the end of February 2008), but I’d realized that a certain sequence was going to bring a lot of Thelonious Monk listeners’ way for several weeks in a row. Well, far worse things could happen, right?…
Remembrances for trumpeter, bandleader, educator and Boston jazz mainstay Herb Pomeroy are beginning to appear around the Internet as news of his death this past Saturday spreads. Marc Myers ruminates on Pomeroy’s musical legacy over at Jazzwax, and there’s an obituary in today’s edition of…
The Monterey Jazz Festival is coming up on its 50th anniversary, and I’m assuming that’s why a series of CDs featuring performances by Thelonious Monk, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Joe Henderson, Sarah Vaughan, and others is coming out next week. I’m listening today to a highlights promo…
RIP posts are a drag, for obvious reasons, and this one is a major bummer–Max Roach has left us. Another giant gone. The New York Times has an obituary up, and WKCR has begun a memorial broadcast that will continue through August 22. (Also check out the tribute at Who Walk in Brooklyn.) Word is that he passed away in his sleep early this morning, that his family was…
I brought in a stack of Max Roach CDs today, everything from the early sides with Parker and the civil-rights thematic works to Birth and Rebirth .
The new batch of Live at Monterey jazz titles, featuring Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Sarah Vaughan, and others, is due out this Tuesday.
…gotcher Brooklyn right here. My colleague Joe Bourne received a box full of ESP disks the other day, including gems from Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, Don Cherry, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, and much, much more. Evidently he’s been living right, and I’ve been… well, erm, coming up short in the jazz karma department or something. But it’s good news…
Released at the end of 1953, The Wild One is a key entry in the cinematic annals of jazz-as-the-soundtrack-of-rebellion.
Nuns, teen idols, and the Velvet Fog as a rather mature-looking juvenile delinquent.
Alto saxophonist Frank Morgan, born in 1933, is one of the last great bop storytellers and living connections to that age of music. He’s also one of the last musicians left from the glory days of Los Angeles’ Central Avenue scene, a school-of-the-streets from which Dexter Gordon, Charles Mingus, Art Farmer, and many others graduated…
Do the Math reports that jazz writer Richard Cook, co-author of The Penguin Guide to Jazz and author of books about Blue Note Records and Miles Davis, has passed away at the age of 50. Cook was a fine and interesting writer, and I’ve turned to the Penguins many times for insight and information about various artists and albums; it’s the best of the jazz CD guides around. His efforts will be missed.There’s a good article in the August 27 issue of the New Yorker by Alex Ross, discussing Aaron Copland’s political difficulties during the Cold War…
A few weeks ago I interviewed jazz composer, educator, and musician David Baker, who played in George Russell’searly-1960s progressive-bop group (featured in the Night Lights program When Russell Met Baker). For the past 40 years David has run the jazz studies program at Indiana University while continuing to compose and perform, and he also leads the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra. A new CD of his big band compositions performed by the Buselli-Wallarab Orchestra, Basically Baker, garnered four and a half stars in a recent Downbeat review. Here’s Part 1 of the interview, which originally…
Let us now praise famous avises: Charlie Parker, born August 29, 1920. Parker’s been in the air a lot lately, what with the death of his bebop compatriot Max Roach. Like Billie Holiday, his art is still somehow strong enough to defy all of the categorization and commodification that’s been heaped onto it. A hipster saint he may be, but burn your candles for the hard grace of his music. Suggested Night Lights listening: our August 2005 At the Birth of Bop program…
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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