Night Lights Classic Jazz
There was a strong relationship between jazz and civil rights in 20th-century America, and artists sometimes addressed the cause explicitly in their music.
J.R. Monterose is a saxophonist rarely heard even by jazz fans, and his most well-known recording, Charles Mingus’ Pithecanthropus Erectus, is one that Monterose himself later all but disowned. He recorded only sporadically as a leader and withdrew from the jazz world several times, woodshedding or playing in towns distant from the music’s metropolitan centers. His sound, although influenced by other tenor horns such as…
We'll hear music from The French Connection's soundtrack, composed and recorded by trumpeter Don Ellis.
In the autumn of 1962 three jazz giants–Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach–met for an album session that has become legendary. (So legendary, in fact, that it’s inspired an audio storyboard). Years later, Roach observed…
On this edition of Night Lights it’s “Word From Mingus,” a program of Charles Mingus’ 1950s spoken-word collaborations with poet Langston Hughes, monologuist Jean Shepherd, and actor Melvin Stewart. We’ll also hear Mingus’ own performance of his piece “Chill of Death,” written when Mingus was…
“The Jazz Workshops Part 2″ is another in an ongoing series of occasional Night Lights episodes about progressive/collective jazz recordings in the 1950s. This program features music from Charles Mingus’ 1954 Savoy LP The Jazz Composers Workshop, a recording…
This week on Night Lights we feature the early music of Charles Mingus, taken from an Uptown Records CD entitled “Charles ‘Baron’ Mingus: West Coast Recordings, 1945-49.” Musicologist Stefano Zenni has an interesting website devoted to this little-heard period of Mingus’ music, which includes jump blues, Ellingtonian ballads…
As the messiah of modern bop, Charlie Parker was one of the first jazz musicians to be recorded widely in live settings. On this program, in honor of the 84th anniversary of his birth, we’ll feature music from Bird’s performances with Bud Powell, Fats Navarro, Charles Mingus, Roy Haynes, and other leading lights of late-1940s and early-1950s jazz, including an impromptu “Well You Needn’t” with Thelonious…
Jackie Paris, who died last month at the age of 79, was a favorite of Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker, and Lenny Bruce, but he remained in semi-obscurity for most of his career. He recorded the first-ever vocal version of Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight” in 1949, collaborated several times with Mingus, and made LPs for Brunswick (Skylark) and Impulse (The Song Is Paris) that became…
Night Lights‘ pilot program that aired on the eve of 2004′s July 4th holiday, featuring music from Jackie McLean, Charles Mingus, Avery Parrish, Nina Simone…
David Brent Johnson hosts the weekly WFIU historical jazz program Night Lights and Afterglow as well. Learn more »
Major Glenn Miller went missing over the English Channel in December 1944. For decades afterwards, much of his wartime orchestra's music went missing as well.
Afterglow is WFIU's weekly program of jazz and American popular song hosted by David Brent Johnson.
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