Night Lights Classic Jazz
We'll hear music from Louis Jordan, Kitty Kallen with Jimmy Dorsey, Sam Donahue's Navy band, and much more.
In honor of the holiday weekend, we're posting both parts of last year's "American Popular Song and World War II".
(Note: an extended audio file version includes an interview with Ray Boomhower and clips of Robert Kennedy speaking during the 1968 campaign)
“Indiana can help choose a president.” Those words, which may have a surprising relevance this year, were used by Senator Robert Kennedy to open speeches when he launched his campaign for the presidency in Indiana. In his new book, Robert Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Primary, Ray Boomhower provides the inside stories of how the New York senator scored an unlikely victory in the heart of the Midwest.
Music inspired by the Brubeck Quartet's international tours during the height of the Cold War.
That church dedicated to the saxophonist in San Francisco? Not so weird, when you think about it.
Reading Norman Mailer while at sea--literally and existentially.
This week on Night Lights it’s “Jazz Goes to the Cold War,” a program about the U.S. State Department’s sponsorship of international jazz tours during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1956, as both the Cold War and the civil-rights movement heated up, the American government asked Dizzy Gillespie to assemble a new big band to promote the image of American freedom around the globe. Gillespie obliged, although he made it clear…
Working for decades as a broadcaster for the Voice of America, Willis Conover was perhaps the most influential and widely-heard jazz DJ of the 20th century.
Ross Lockridge Jr.'s 1948 novel had just topped the bestseller charts when the author committed suicide.
Media pundits a-twitter about deadpan satirist Stephen Colbert’s leap into the 2008 primaries need only look to the jazz world for a precedent: trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie’s historic 1964 challenge to incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson and Republican nominee Barry Goldwater. And while the jury is still out on whether…
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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