Night Lights Classic Jazz
The week's jazz news, including Willis Conover, Creed Taylor and pianloless quartets.
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.
Terence Ripmaster has published a new biography of longtime Voice of America jazz DJ Willis Conover. Conover’s broadcasts were heard around the world (though not in America, due to Congressional restrictions) and brought jazz into Eastern bloc countries where…
In the 1940s and 50s the colorful, laidback radio personalities who helped introduce bebop and other new music to audiences inspired tributes from musicians.
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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