Memphis is renowned for its remarkable contributions to 20th-century popular music. But the city also has an outstanding jazz legacy--"The Memphis Mafia."
Jazz critic and radio host Neil Tesser has written an account of Sonny Rollins’ mid-1950s sojourn in Chicago, during which the tenor saxophonist overcame his addiction to heroin and eventually rejoined the jazz scene.
Booker Little was a talented young trumpeter and composer who’d already begun to fulfill his promise when illness struck him down at the age of 23.
Max Roach was a revolutionary bebop drummer, a leader of the classic Clifford Brown-Sonny Rollins hardbop quintet, a social activist, jazz educator and intellectual, a forerunner of Do-It-Yourself recording, and an explorer of the avant-garde…among other things. Max Roach contained multitudes, and his death in August of 2007 reverberated across the jazz world as if it were a long solo being played on a cosmic drumset. This program, an audio snapshot of his career on record, features his work with pianists Herbie Nichols and Bud Powell, his hardbop configurations with Clifford Brown and Sonny Rollins…
On “Slide at 75″ we celebrate a landmark birthday of trombonist, composer, and arranger Slide Hampton. Hampton, like fellow trombonists J.J. Johnson and David Baker, emerged from the Indianapolis jazz scene of the 1940s and early 1950s, playing with his prolifically talented family’s band before going on the road with Buddy Johnson, Lionel Hampton, and Maynard Ferguson…