Night Lights Classic Jazz
The swing era may have been the age of the big bands, but bandleaders often found it worth their while to break small groups out of their larger orchestras.
Jazz and the night: moody, evocative music for the evening.
The New York Times reports that the reissue label is in talks with the National Jazz Museum to release music from the William Savory collection on CD.
In the late 1940s the "King of Swing" briefly embraced the new sounds of bebop.
*Columbia University’s Center for Jazz Studies has put up a Jazz Studies Online site, which I’m adding to the Night Lights blogroll page. Looks like a cool site–for starters, they’ve put up the entire first issue of the legendary but short-lived late-1950s journal Jazz Review.
*Speaking of cultural studies of a sort, check out this 1964 Playboy symposium on jazz, posted by Detroit Free Press music critic (and Bloomington native) Mark Stryker over at Organissimo. Participants included Cannonball Adderley, Dave Brubeck, Ralph Gleason, Charles Mingus, Stan Kenton, Dizzy Gillespie, and Gunther Schuller.
Jazz lovers with a yen for vinyl, take note: Mosaic Records is getting back into the LP business. The limited-edition, jazz-specialty company stopped releasing vinyl versions of their sets years ago, but they’ve taken note of vinyl’s resurgence and decided to return to this particular corner of the marketplace, albeit on a somewhat different scale. In an e-mail sent out today, Mosaic chief Michael Cuscuna highlights the label’s new online vinyl site ( complete with blog) and cites the 2005 LP release of the Thelonious Monk-John Coltrane Carnegie Hall concert as a signal moment for Mosaic’s renewed direction.
Mosaic Records has posted information, including discographies, about new sets featuring Dave Liebman’s Pendelum group and some Helen Merrill jazz-vocal sides on their upcoming releases page, along with more details about the forthcoming early-1950s Oscar Peterson collection.
Scott Wenzel at Mosaic Records says that the long-rumored Benny Goodman Mosaic set will be out in time for Father's Day 2008.
As the swing era gave way to new and challenging sounds, a generation of bandleaders was forced to take notice.
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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