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.
Wayne Shorter, one of the great tenor saxophonists and composers of the modern jazz era, is an enigmatic and searching musician and personality. He was once labeled by jazz critic Larry Kart as “one of the most dangerous players to ever pick up a horn.” This program features the music he wrote for Miles Davis, Art Blakey, and for his own dates as a leader in the 1960s.
Chicago is a historic capital of early jazz and post-World War II blues, but in the 1950s and early 60s it also had a thriving hardbop scene. Musicians such as Ira Sullivan, Wilbur Ware and Von Freeman played with a bluesy, brawny edge, suffused with what Chicago native and jazz critic Larry Kart calls “an air of downhome experimentation.”
Sonny Clark was a young pianist with an already-impressive jazz legacy when he began a year-long string of classic hardbop recordings that ended suddenly with his death at the age of 31.
A sampling of some favorite reissues from the past year, including Stan Getz, Denny Zeitlin, Freddie Hubbard, Jackie McLean, and Tony Williams.
After 25-year-old trumpet great Clifford Brown died unexpectedly in a 1956 automobile accident, some critics and fans looked to a recent Manhattan arrival from Detroit as a possible successor: Donald Byrd. This week we’ll celebrate the trumpeter’s upcoming 77th birthday (he was born on December 9, 1932) with a program devoted to his hardbop recordings from the late 1950s and 1960s, drawing on albums that he made with saxophonists Gigi Gryce, Jackie McLean, Pepper Adams, and Sonny Red.
Tom Wilson produced rock albums by Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, and the Velvet Underground that were some of the most influential records of the 1960s, but he got his start in the 1950s running his own adventurous jazz label, recording artists such as John Coltrane, Donald Byrd, Cecil Taylor, and Sun Ra.
Saxophonist John Zorn is a modern avant-garde icon, but in the late 1980s he recorded several tributes to heroes of the 1950s and 60s hardbop era such as Hank Mobley and Sonny Clark, honoring them with an edgy passion that also revealed Zorn’s skills in a straightahead jazz setting.
In 1957 tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins was at the peak of his first great period, playing with a confident, swinging, and radical abandon both as a leader and with Max Roach and Miles Davis.
In the mid-1950s Cafe Bohemia was one of the most happening jazz clubs in New York City—a Greenwich Village club that caught the vibe of Manhattan’s thriving art and intellectual scene. Those who checked it out might find Charles Mingus, Art Blakey, or Miles Davis either playing or sitting in the crowd.
Drummer Art Blakey led the Jazz Messengers, one of jazz history’s most noted and longest-running collectives, for four decades. The lesser-known 1957 edition included saxophonist Jackie McLean and trumpeter Bill Hardman, whose chemistry one writer described as “beautiful, tart…their brash, peppery tones created a distinctive front-line sound.”
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