Night Lights Classic Jazz
On the Road, like many of Kerouac's other writings, celebrated and invoked the music of Charlie Parker, Lester Young, and many other jazz greats.
Trumpeter Sonny Berman died at the age of 21 in 1947, leaving behind only a few brilliant solos, most of them recorded with Woody Herman's big band.
The Connection was a groundbreaking 1959 off-Broadway play that cast jazz musicians as heroin addicts waiting for a score.
Bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik helped forge a path for the fusion of jazz with world music.
“Jazz and Jack Kerouac” is now archived…apologies for the one-day holiday delay. For more jazz-and-Jack-Kerouac, check out our previous show, The Subterraneans, which explores the jazz score for the only film to be adapted from a Kerouac novel to date, as well as the story behind the movie and some dialogue clips from it. (The film itself…
Papa of the Beats? A study of downtown Manhattan hip circa 1948.
Jazz history is full of hidden heroes and lost legends, players who made significant, influential or interesting contributions, but who, for one reason or another, didn’t get their due–bad luck, music industry issues, personal problems, and/or early deaths resulting from any combination of the preceding. There’s undoubtedly a certain romantic streak to jazz fans’ interest in such musicians, a forgotten-poet mythology at work, in which the very obscurity of the artist’s legacy provides some of the attraction. Often, however, the attention we now pay is justified; and sometimes, as in the case of Herbie Nichols, the hidden hero eventually…
In honor of tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins’ 77th birthday–and his upcoming Carnegie Hall concert–SonnyRollins.com is putting up a track every day from a previously unreleased June 1956 performance of the Max Roach-Clifford Brown Quintet, featuring Sonny in the tenor spot…
One of my favorite Billie Holiday records is Solitude. Released in 1952, in my mind it's one of the singer's best efforts for Verve, curiously overlooked.
The Incomplete Sonny Berman, last weekend’s show about Woody Herman’s young trumpet star from the First Herd, is now available for online listening, along with many more previous programs in the Night Lights archives.
The AP and Reuters are reporting that keyboardist, composer, and Weather Report co-founder Joe Zawinul has passed away:
Reaction to the death of keyboardist and composer Joe Zawinul will undoubtedly be pouring in today from around the jazz blogosphere for the man who wrote “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” “In a Silent Way,” and “Birdland.” Zawinul’s European and conservatory background, his key role in the great Cannonball Adderley soul-jazz groups of the 1960s, his time with Miles Davis, and, of course, his legacy as co-architect of Weather Report make him an important figure in post-1960 jazz–especially in the realm of electric piano, a still oft-disparaged instrument.Zawinul had been enjoying a resurgence of attention in the past year, what with…
This weekend’s upcoming program, The Connection, takes a look at the music and movie version of Jack Gelber’s award-winning play about heroin addicts, a number of whom are jazz musicians. As a companion Night Lights program from our archives, check out Resolution: Jazz From Rehab, which features two early-1960s albums made by jazz musicians either in recovery or emphasizing…
Ignore the terrrible headline (boy, that’s dignity for ya, after playing certain parts of your southern anatomy off for the past 60 years): Sonny Rollins is back in trio form tomorrow night at Carnegie Hall. The performance will be coupled on CD with Rollins’ debut at Carnegie 50 years ago for a Voice of America concert. In the meantime, a previously…
Street of dreams: Indiana Avenue was a world unto itself that sent out artists such as J.J. Johnson and Freddie Hubbard to the wider world.
The Bad Plus, who are performing at Indianapolis’ Jazz Kitchen Saturday night, have posted a collective statement in response to some of the reviews they got during their recent swing through the UK. Said reviews often hit upon the Plus’ choice of songbook (Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man,” Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” Nirvana’s “All Apologies,” etc.) as tired irony, a joke being run into the ground, etc. BP’s sincere and spirited defense is…
The day Louis Armstrong told the U.S. government to go to a very choice place: David Margolick’s article in the New York Times yesterday provides some historical elaboration. (Margolick is the author of Strange Fruit: the Biography of a Song.) There’s also an online NPR story, Remembering Louis Armstrong’s Little Rock Protest. For more about Armstrong and how the politics of the era mixed with jazz, check out our previous program Jazz Goes to the Cold War.
A Los Angeles City Beat article sings the praises of Jefferson High, the school that gave us alto saxophonist Marshall and trumpeter Ernie Royal, drummer Chico Hamilton, saxophonist Jackie Kelso, drummer Bill Douglass, tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon, trumpeter Lamar Wright, singer Ernie Andrews, violinist Ginger Smock, alto saxophonist Sonny Criss…
The remarkable Marc Myers on whether or not the Prince of Darkness was…
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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