Night Lights Classic Jazz
Langston Hughes, songwriter? The celebrated African-American author wrote numerous songs, recorded by Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln, Gary Bartz, and others.
Night Lights' annual holiday tribute celebrates the season with plenty of cool-Yule jazz from Chet Baker, Bob Brookmeyer, John Coltrane, Shorty Rogers and more.
Ever since Louis Armstrong’s trumpet sound became a symbol of musical revolution and Bix Beiderbecke died tragically young in a New York City apartment, writers have been responding to jazz and the musicians who make it. In Ask Me Now, a new anthology of interviews conducted by poet and scholar Sascha Feinstein, the relationship between jazz and literature is explored at length in a series of conversations with artists who reflect on the profound emotional and aesthetic connections they’ve made through listening to, playing, and writing about the music…
Back in the early 1990s, when I was in the first throes of becoming a passionate jazzhead, a friend made me a mix tape called “Henry Grimes, Where Are You?” He knew of my obsession with the missing bassist, who appeared on many classic 1960s jazz recordings and worked with everybody from Benny Goodman and Gerry Mulligan to Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler before vanishing in the late 1960s–presumably dead, according…
On this edition of Night Lights it’s “Word From Mingus,” a program of Charles Mingus’ 1950s spoken-word collaborations with poet Langston Hughes, monologuist Jean Shepherd, and actor Melvin Stewart. We’ll also hear Mingus’ own performance of his piece “Chill of Death,” written when Mingus was…
The first-ever Night Lights Christmas program features music from Booker Ervin (“White Christmas” from his 1966 album Solid Structure), Ahmad Jamal (“Snowfall,” written by Terre Haute, Indiana native Claude Thornhill), Sonny Rollins (“Winter Wonderland”), Babs Gonzalez (“Bebop Santa Claus”), Bill Evans (a rare and amusing vocal take…
Billie Holiday died in New York City at 3 a.m. on Friday, July 17, 1959–45 years to the day of this broadcast. In addition to Holiday’s music–”Don’t Worry ‘Bout Me,” from her little-known last album BILLIE HOLIDAY (recorded after LADY IN SATIN), “This Year’s Kisses” (with Lester Young), the vibrant early side “Life Begins When You’re in Love,” a moodier & spookier alternate take of her Decca recording “No More,” and other…
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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