Night Lights Classic Jazz
In the 1950s and 60s the race for space loomed large in the cultural imagination, and jazz artists such as Duke Ellington and Sun Ra picked up on the theme.
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.
We'll hear a clip from trumpeter Shorty Rogers' appearance on the too-hip-to-last early-1960s TV show, Jazz Scene USA.
In the early 1950s musicians Roy Harte and Harry Babasin, eager to document the ascending West Coast jazz scene, started a Los Angeles label called Nocturne Records. Babasin and Harte said they wanted to “broaden the nation’s views of our activities out here in Hollywood…
In 1949 former Stan Kenton bassist Howard Rumsey began a series of Sunday afternoon performances at the Lighthouse Cafe in Hermosa Beach, California, a club that had formerly catered mostly to merchant marines and other sailors. These jam sessions eventually spawned the collective known as the Lighthouse All-Stars, featuring many…
Peter Gunn was a hit TV crime show with jazz at its center, with Craig Stevens as the stylish, jazz-loving private detective title character.
In the early 1950s vibraphonist Teddy Charles made a series of records with Shorty Rogers, Jimmy Giuffre, and others, that still escapes easy definition today–was it Third Stream? Was it West Coast? Was it cool jazz? We’ll hear selections from his albums…
The Wild One, Marlon Brando’s 1953 motorcycle-gang movie, was based on a real-life 1947 incident in which thousands of bikers, many of them blue-collar World War II vets from Los Angeles, descended upon a northern California town and frightened its inhabitants…
David Brent Johnson hosts the weekly WFIU historical jazz program Night Lights and Afterglow as well. Learn more »
Johnny Hartman, Blossom Dearie, Dean Martin and others help us pay tribute to the Indiana songwriter.
Afterglow is WFIU's weekly program of jazz and American popular song hosted by David Brent Johnson.
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