Night Lights Classic Jazz
In the 1960s cornetist Don Cherry, who had to come to fame as a member of Ornette Coleman’s quartet, began to forge his own musical path.
John Coltrane revolutionized the sound of modern jazz and wrote a number of compositions that have become jazz standards.
This Memorial Day weekend Night Lights pays tribute to departed musicians with another program of jazz elegies.
Ornette Coleman's music shook up a generation of jazz artists, but some of them almost immediately began to play it.
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…
Slave spirituals were often improvisations upon older hymns that became entirely new songs, and in some ways they foreshadow the birth of American jazz.
Trumpeter Cal Massey was an African-American jazz composer, little-known now and in his lifetime, but whose work was recorded by musicians such as John Coltrane, Freddie Hubbard, Charlie Parker, Lee Morgan, Jackie McLean, McCoy Tyner, and Archie Shepp. In the 1960s Massey made his Brooklyn home into a kind of community center for jazz artists and produced…
Takes on the standards from Eric Dolphy, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman and more.
David Brent Johnson hosts the weekly WFIU historical jazz program Night Lights and Afterglow as well. Learn more »
In 1964 Dean Martin recorded a laidback martini-at-the-fireside album that included the original version of a song that would soon become his signature tune.
Afterglow is WFIU's weekly program of jazz and American popular song hosted by David Brent Johnson.
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