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.
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.”
Louis Armstrong was a legendary innovative trumpeter, a vocalist who had a profound impact on jazz singing, and a dynamic entertainer–and he got a chance to showcase all these aspects of his talent in 28 full-length films and several short features in which he appeared between 1931 and 1969.
You can now become a fan of Night Lights on Facebook. If you’re just discovering the program through Facebook, here are some shows you might want to check out.
When Harry Smith, creator of The Anthology of American Folk Music and dean of American bohemians, received a Grammy just a few months before his death in 1991, he said, “I’m glad to say that my dreams came true–that I saw America changed through music.” In the book Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Cafe Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights, David Margolick proposes that racism–a bedrock element of Americanism–was challenged and ultimately changed by a single song, a song sung by Holiday titled “Strange Fruit.”
Johnny Green may not have been the most prolific of composers, but some of the songs he wrote music for turned into significant standards, including “Body and Soul,” “Out of Nowhere,” and “I Wanna Be Loved.” Although Green is best remembered for these compositions, he actually spent the bulk of his career working in the movie industry.
Novelist Nelson Algren and singer Billie Holiday are two iconic figures of mid-20th-century American culture, though Holiday’s name and visage–not to mention her voice–is surely better-known and remembered than Algren’s is today. (At least Starbucks hasn’t taken to hawking copies of The Man With the Golden Arm at the coffee counter yet.) Algren, perhaps, made the mistake of living too long and fading into relative obscurity before his death in 1981.
I listen to a lot of Billie Holiday. This, given the fact that she’s ubiquitous (as a friend once said a few years ago, explaining why he liked her but rarely sought out her recordings, “She’s kind of like the Beatles”), part of the coffee-chain soundtrack for the 21st century (not sayin’ that that’s necessarily a bad thing either). It’s partly that Holiday was one of the first jazz singers I fell in love with; I used to bicycle miles and miles to an LP store in Indianapolis to buy the Columbia Quintessential volumes as they were being released, and those early sides are forever associated…
In January of 1950, beleagured by the business woes that had afflicted so many other big bands around this time, Count Basie broke up the orchestra that he had been leading for 14 years. The small group that he formed in its wake featured younger, bop-oriented musicians such as…
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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 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.”
When Harry Smith, creator of 
Novelist 
I listen to a lot of Billie Holiday. This, given the fact that she’s ubiquitous (as a friend once said a few years ago, explaining why he liked her but rarely sought out her recordings, “She’s kind of like the Beatles”), part of the coffee-chain soundtrack for the 21st century (not sayin’ that that’s necessarily a bad thing either). It’s partly that Holiday was one of the first jazz singers I fell in love with; I used to bicycle miles and miles to an LP store in Indianapolis to buy the Columbia Quintessential volumes as they were being released, and those early sides are forever associated…
In January of 1950, beleagured by the business woes that had afflicted so many other big bands around this time, Count Basie broke up the orchestra that he had been leading for 14 years. The small group that he formed in its wake featured younger, bop-oriented musicians such as…
