Night Lights Classic Jazz
It was 1961, and America had a new, young president...the Cold War turned up a notch…and jazz continued to evolve in ear-opening ways.
The story and music of Dave Brubeck’s professional prelude as a young, experimental West Coast jazz musician.
The capital of African-American culture in the United States for decades, Harlem has inspired all sorts of musical tributes.
George Russell, the composer, theorist and pianist who passed away Monday night at the age of 86, helped shape the sound of jazz as we know it today.
Teo Macero, a saxophonist, composer, and record producer has passed away at the age of 82.
Trumpeter Don Ellis is best-known today for the big bands he led during the late 1960s and early 1970s and their use of odd time signatures.
This week on Night Lights it’s “Piano Noir: Ran Blake”. Pianist and composer Ran Blake has earned an international reputation with his recordings and with his work as a Third Stream educator at the New England Conservatory of Music. His music has been strongly influenced by the genre of film noir; in this…
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…
This week on Night Lights we feature the early music of Charles Mingus, taken from an Uptown Records CD entitled “Charles ‘Baron’ Mingus: West Coast Recordings, 1945-49.” Musicologist Stefano Zenni has an interesting website devoted to this little-heard period of Mingus’ music, which includes jump blues, Ellingtonian ballads…
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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