Night Lights Classic Jazz
Last Friday evening’s Afterglow program, featuring jazz and jazz-vocal interpretations of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s songs for the musical Show Boat, is now available for online listening…
The story of a husband-and-wife jazz duo who ran and performed in a Texas nightclub in the late 1950s. The two LPs they recorded have won them a cult following.
We'll hear an interview with Oscar Brown Jr, a pioneer of early 1960s vocal jazz.
"Betty Roche was an unforgettable singer," Duke Ellington wrote of his former vocalist in 1973. "She never sounded like anybody but Betty Roche."
It was a longstanding disappointment with Frank Sinatra’s fans that he didn’t do more small-group jazz recordings. This week on Night Lights we present some of the ones that he did do, including…
In late 1966 singer and pianist Nina Simone signed with RCA Records and continued her genre-bending explorations of jazz, blues, pop, folk, and soul.
Many listeners know Peggy Lee as a great jazz singer, but she was also a prolific writer of songs—composing or co-composing nearly 200 of them.
Dick and Kiz Harp were a husband-and-wife, piano-and-vocals duo who ran their own nightclub (converted from a warehouse and called “The 90th Floor,” after a lesser-known Cole Porter song they performed) in Dallas, Texas at the end of the 1950s. They’ve developed a cult following among jazz-vocal aficionados …
Goofin' on Disney: how movie songs for kids made their way into the jazz world.
Perennially-hip jazz singer Mark Murphy got his start recording for Decca in the mid-1950s, with albums that featured arrangements by Ralph Burns. Decca producer Milt Gabler, who signed Murphy, said he thought the vocalist “every bit as good as…
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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