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.
Claude Thornhill was a pianist, composer, and arranger whose 1940s big bands helped shape the sound of modern jazz, with orchestral bop and ethereal ballads tinged with classical influences that set the stage for later masterpieces by Miles Davis and Gil Evans.
This week marks the centennial of clarinetist Benny Goodman (born on May 30, 1909) and we’ll pay tribute on Night Lights with a program devoted to the so-called “King of Swing’s” late-1940s foray into the revolutionary sounds of bebop, featuring young modernist side musicians such as Wardell Gray, Mary Lou Williams, and Fats Navarro.
A friend writes to pass along news that Mosaic Records is still planning on doing a 1930s Duke Ellington Columbia big-band set. A Mosaic employee states that “We are looking to do the 1930s big band Columbia owned material sometime either late this year or next year.”
Gerald Wilson has been leading big bands and recording albums for more than 60 years now, and this week he celebrates his 90th birthday. “Last of the Lions: Gerald Wilson” features two of his most significant outfits: a modernistic 1940s powerhouse that included up-and-coming musicians such as trumpeter Snooky Young and trombonist Melba Liston, and an all-star 1960s West Coast unit that highlighted soloists such as tenor saxophonist Harold Land and guitarist Joe Pass.
At the end of World War II Duke Ellington was coming off one of the most commercially and artistically successful periods of his career–the so-called Blanton-Webster years of the early 1940s. But the cultural landscape was changing in ways that would challenge, provoke, and inspire Ellington as he continued to pursue his unique musical vision.
Jazzwax master blogger Marc Myers’ mention of the late arranger Bill Finegan yesterday reminded me that I did a show about Tommy Dorsey’s post-World War II orchestra a couple of years ago when I hosted WFIU’s The Big Bands. As Marc points out, Finegan crafted some fantastic arrangements for that particular Dorsey ensemble.
*Mosaic Records will release a three-CD Select set of mid-1970s RCA Toshiko Akiyoshi-Lew Tabackin big-band recordings later this year.Elsewhere around the jazz blogosphere this past week…
Gil Evans, a Canadian-born pianist and composer, “enormously expanded the vocabulary of the jazz orchestra,” as writer Gene Lees pointed out, reducing the standard big-band instrumentation, restraining its vibrato, and adding flutes, oboes, English and French horns, and tubas. Self-taught as an arranger, he created a quietly dramatic, dark-hued sound-world that drew on a multiplicity of influences ranging from Spanish music and the French Impressionists to Duke Ellington and…
Duke Ellington’s 1941 musical Jump for Joy was a cultural milestone, an assertive, satirical riposte to the servile depictions of African-Americans in both film and the theater, and a forerunner of later extended Ellington works such as Black, Brown and Beige. Though the show ran only in Los Angeles and never made Broadway, Ellington cited it as one of his proudest achievements, and in his lifetime it occasionally resurfaced in one way or another (Cannonball Adderley’s…
In part 2 of American Popular Song and World War II we’ll hear music from Louis Jordan (“You Can’t Get That No More”), Kitty Kallen with Jimmy Dorsey (“They’re Either Too Young or Too Old”), Sam Donahue’s Navy band (“Convoy”), a rare recording of Bing Crosby with Glenn Miller’s…
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
