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.
For decades Harlem was the capital of African-American culture in the United States, and it inspired all sorts of musical tributes, from celebratory and sensationalistic swing songs to extended concert works by James P. Johnson, Benny Carter and Duke Ellington. “Portraits of Ellington” includes rare broadcast excerpts of Johnson’s “Harlem Symphony,” Ellington’s 1963 recording of his “Harlem” suite with the Paris Symphony Orchestra, an interview with jazz scholar John Howland, and much more.
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. If there was a “birth of the cool” at the end of the 1940s, Russell pointed the way to the “birth of the modal” that came at the end of the 1950s.
Teo Macero, a saxophonist, composer, and record producer who helped craft many of Miles Davis’ late-1960s and early-1970s electric-jazz records, has passed away at the age of 82. Though he was best-known for the meticulous editing work that he did on Davis LPs such as Bitches Brew, Macero was an interesting musician himself–check out…
Trumpeter Don Ellis is best-known today for the big bands he led during the late 1960s and early 1970s that made use of odd time signatures, but he made his first impact on the jazz world at the beginning of the 1960s, leading several progressive small-group dates that drew both praise and criticism from the jazz media.
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…
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This week on Night Lights it’s “Piano Noir: Ran Blake”. Pianist and composer 
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 
