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.
Thelonious Monk was an innovator deeply rooted in tradition, a stride-influenced pianist marketed as “the high priest of bebop,” a family man who became a bohemian icon, and one of the most significant composers of modern jazz. Biographer and jazz scholar Robin D.G. Kelley joins Night Lights for the first of a two-part look at Monk’s life and music.
Jazz and recovery meet on two unique early-1960s albums made by guitarist Joe Pass and pianist Elmo Hope. Pass’ 1961 Pacific Jazz LP Sounds of Synanon was his debut as a leader; although he’d begun to play professionally as a teenager in the late 1940s, stays in prison and rehabilitation centers for drug addiction had hampered his career throughout the 1950s.
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.
Composer Johnny Green wrote the music for several songs that went on to become staples of the jazz-and-popular-song canon, including “Body and Soul,” “Out of Nowhere,” and “I Cover the Waterfront.” Born in New York City on October 10, 1908, he went to Harvard at the age of 15, did some early arranging work for Guy Lombardo, and notched his first hit with “Coquette.” After an unhappy turn as a stockbroker, Green abandoned Wall Street…
Last year Night Lights began an annual Bastille Day-week salute to the convergence of all things French and jazz with Paris Noir, a program about post-World War II expatriate African-American musicians in France. This year our tribute show focuses on jazz interpretations of the many songs that have been written about the City of Light.
Some jazz news of note from the past week or so…*The widely-syndicated, Siskel-and-Ebert-style radio jazz program Listen Here! will cease distribution at the end of this month. Word is that NPR’s long-running…
A couple of weeks ago Bernard Gordillo, who writes the WFIU early-music show Harmonia, mentioned a recent interest in Pannonica de Koenigswarter, also known as Nica, the Jazz Baroness, or simply the Baroness. The Baroness was a sort of jazz patron, a woman well-liked by the jazz musicians she befriended on the mid-20th-century New York bebop scene; she counted Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk among her closest companions from that community. As a wealthy white woman spending time…
“Willis Conover did more to crumble the Berlin wall and bring about collapse of the Soviet empire than all the Cold War presidents put together,” jazz writer Gene Lees once said. Working for decades as a broadcaster for the Voice of America, Conover was perhaps the most influential jazz DJ of the 20th century. He brought the music into eastern Europe and other areas of the world where jazz was either repressed or commercially unavailable, helping to bridge the cultural gap between Western and Communist-bloc countries. In addition to the many fans he garnered around the globe, he…
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…
This weekend’s upcoming program, The Connection, takes a look at the music and movie version of Jack Gelber’s award-winning play about heroin addicts, a number of whom are jazz musicians. As a companion Night Lights program from our archives, check out Resolution: Jazz From Rehab, which features two early-1960s albums made by jazz musicians either in recovery or emphasizing…
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