Night Lights Classic Jazz
Jam sessions, bebop, r and b, big bands, visits from Hollywood celebrities--as the center of African-American culture in L.A., Central Avenue had it all.
How a 1950s British jazz star ended up as a West Coast leader and sideman, playing with Cannonball Adderley, Miles Davis and others.
Based on the true story of accused murderess Barbara Graham, the 1958 movie I Want to Live! employed a jazz soundtrack written by Johnny Mandel and performed by such jazz stalwarts as Gerry Mulligan, Bud Shank and Art Farmer (who appeared in the movie’s opening scenes), along with Frank Rosolino, Jack Sheldon, and Shelly Manne. Susan Hayward
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…
This 1960 movie is the only film adaptation of a Jack Kerouac novel to date, employing a jazz score and Gerry Mulligan as a hip, saxophone-playing priest.
Baritone singer Johnny Holiday performed with some big bands in the 1940s (including a brief stint filling in for Johnny Desmond in the 1945 edition of the Glenn Miller Orchestra) and went on to release several albums in the 1950s, two of them made with West Coast jazz musicians, that received good notices but failed to sell well. Holiday spent the next few…
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.
This week on Night Lights we’ll feature the fifth and sixth volumes of Decca’s 1950s Jazz Studio series–the label’s West Coast-influenced answer to Norman Granz’s Verve jam session releases. V. 5, led by pianist and arranger Ralph Burns, includes trumpeter Joe Newman and little-known alto saxophonist Dave Schildkraut, who was once mistaken…
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 it’s “Jazz Studio 3 & 4: John Graas and Jack Millman,” two more entries in Decca’s mid-1950s Jazz Studio series. John Graas was a classically-trained French horn player who worked with several famous big bands in the 1940s and who studied with both Lennie Tristano and West Coast music guru Wesley La Violette. In the 1950s he…
David Brent Johnson hosts the weekly WFIU historical jazz program Night Lights and Afterglow as well. Learn more »
In 1964 Dean Martin recorded a laidback martini-at-the-fireside album that included the original version of a song that would soon become his signature tune.
Afterglow is WFIU's weekly program of jazz and American popular song hosted by David Brent Johnson.
Copyright © 2013, The Trustees of Indiana University | Copyright Complaints
1229 East Seventh Street, Bloomington, Indiana 47405
