Night Lights Classic Jazz
The inspiration came from a late-night party, a convergence of Hollywood glamour and early civil-rights activism with one of America's greatest jazz orchestras.
Handy talks about his troubled relationship with his first record label, his move back to California in the early 1960s, and the formation of his quintet.
Handy discusses why his quintet broke up, his experiences as a jazz educator, and his memories of Monterey and the mid-1960s rock scene.
The inspiration came from a late-night party, a convergence of Hollywood glamour and early civil-rights activism with one of America's greatest jazz orchestras.
Our guest on this week’s Night Lights program Suite History is Michael McGerr, a historian and professor at Indiana University in Bloomington. Michael, author of the book A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920, frequently teaches a course at IU on American popular music in the 20th century. He has a particular passion and expertise for Duke Ellington, one of the three composers whose music is featured in Suite History, and he can be heard in two previous WFIU documentaries…
Historian and Indiana University professor Michael McGerr is a man whose scholarly knowledge and personal enthusiasms are infectiously wedded. In Part 2 of this Night Lights interview, Michael talks about the influence of Duke Ellington’s ambitious Black, Brown and Beige suite and the civil-rights movement on later composers who undertook extended black musical histories as well. Michael is a guest on this week’s show, Suite History: Duke Ellington, Oliver Nelson, John Carter, and the African-American Odyssey…
A couple of weeks ago Bernard Gordillo, who writes the WFIU early-music show Harmonia, mentioned a recent interest in Pannonica de Koenigswarter, also known as Nica, the Jazz Baroness, or simply the Baroness. The Baroness was a sort of jazz patron, a woman well-liked by the jazz musicians she befriended on the mid-20th-century New York bebop scene; she counted Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk among her closest companions from that community. As a wealthy white woman spending time…
Teo Macero, a saxophonist, composer, and record producer has passed away at the age of 82.
Last week JazzWax blogger Marc Myers mentioned getting an e-mail from Hannah Rothschild, producer of the BBC documentary about jazz patron Pannonica de Koenigswarter, aka Nica, that I recently posted about. Turns out that she’s making a television documentary about Pannonica as well–and there’s now a website devoted to the Baroness which includes the BBC radio program in non-expiration form…
Mosaic Records has reportedly long been trying to put together some kind of collection featuring pianist Ahmad Jamal's influential 1950s trio.
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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