Night Lights is a weekly one-hour radio program of classic jazz hosted by David Brent Johnson and produced by WFIU Public Radio. Night Lights airs on WFIU HD1 Saturday at 11:05 p.m.
Emily Remler was a brilliant guitarist, at ease in musical idioms ranging from Brazilian to bop, but she was cut down just as she was entering the prime of her career.
Night Lights comes to a jazz station with a legendary cinematic connection.
Wayne Shorter, one of the great tenor saxophonists and composers of the modern jazz era, is an enigmatic and searching musician and personality. He was once labeled by jazz critic Larry Kart as “one of the most dangerous players to ever pick up a horn.” This program features the music he wrote for Miles Davis, Art Blakey, and for his own dates as a leader in the 1960s.
For decades Harlem was the capital of African-American culture in the United States, and it inspired all sorts of musical tributes, from celebratory and sensationalistic swing songs to extended concert works by James P. Johnson, Benny Carter and Duke Ellington. “Portraits of Ellington” includes rare broadcast excerpts of Johnson’s “Harlem Symphony,” Ellington’s 1963 recording of his “Harlem” suite with the Paris Symphony Orchestra, an interview with jazz scholar John Howland, and much more.
In the late 1950s Thelonious Monk’s star finally began to rise, eventually culminating in a recording contract with Columbia Records and a 1964 Time Magazine cover story. But even as the pianist hit artistic and commercial peaks, other problems began to set in. Monk biographer Robin D.G. Kelley joins us this week for Part 2 of a look at the life and music of Thelonious Monk.
Thelonious Monk was an innovator deeply rooted in tradition, a stride-influenced pianist marketed as “the high priest of bebop,” a family man who became a bohemian icon, and one of the most significant composers of modern jazz. Biographer and jazz scholar Robin D.G. Kelley joins Night Lights for the first of a two-part look at Monk’s life and music.
Duke Ellington, Oliver Nelson, John Carter, and Wynton Marsalis all undertook a weighty artistic task–to represent the historical journey of African-Americans in music. Historian Michael McGerr joins the program as we play music from all four composers’ extended works and talk about their place in jazz history.
Kurt Elling won his first Grammy Sunday night, for his John Coltrane tribute CD “Dedicated to You.” Listen to music from the CD and an interview with the singer from a recent Afterglow program.
Chick Corea, Kurt Elling, and Dan Morgenstern are a few of the jazz winners from last night’s ceremony.
Chicago is a historic capital of early jazz and post-World War II blues, but in the 1950s and early 60s it also had a thriving hardbop scene. Musicians such as Ira Sullivan, Wilbur Ware and Von Freeman played with a bluesy, brawny edge, suffused with what Chicago native and jazz critic Larry Kart calls “an air of downhome experimentation.”
Copyright © 2009, The Trustees of Indiana University | Copyright Complaints
FCC-EEO Employment Report (PDF, 104K)
1229 East Seventh Street, Bloomington, Indiana 47405
WFIU HD1 
Subscribe to the
