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.
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.
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.”
At the end of 1938 a former shoe salesman named Barney Josephson opened what would become one of the most legendary nightspots in jazz history. Cafe Society was New York City’s first integrated nightclub, and it quickly became a gathering place for artists, intellectuals, leftwing political figures, jazz lovers, and–perhaps inevitably–the very Manhattan sophisticates it meant to mock with its satirical murals and ill-dressed doormen. It was also the place where Billie Holiday debuted her version of the harrowing anti-lynching anthem Strange Fruit, which Time Magazine would declare 60 years later “the Song of the Century.”
Sonny Clark was a young pianist with an already-impressive jazz legacy when he began a year-long string of classic hardbop recordings that ended suddenly with his death at the age of 31.
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At the end of 1938 a former shoe salesman named Barney Josephson opened what would become one of the most legendary nightspots in jazz history. Cafe Society was New York City’s first integrated nightclub, and it quickly became a gathering place for artists, intellectuals, leftwing political figures, jazz lovers, and–perhaps inevitably–the very Manhattan sophisticates it meant to mock with its satirical murals and ill-dressed doormen. It was also the place where 
Sonny Clark was a young pianist with an already-impressive jazz legacy when he began a year-long string of classic hardbop recordings that ended suddenly with his death at the age of 31.
