Night Lights Classic Jazz
Women instrumentalists thrived in the upside-down jazz world of wartime America.
If you’re searching jazz history for important women instrumentalists, then stop and take note any time you come across the name of guitarist Mary Osborne.
As cultural changes gained momentum in the 1960s, a generation of women artists made their way through a jazz world that had long been resistant to their aims.
Williams' career ranged from swing and bebop to expatriate and sacred jazz, a stint as a jazz educator, and a 1977 encounter with avant-garde icon Cecil Taylor.
A renowned female organist, Scott recorded a number of soul-jazz classics in the late 1950s and 1960s.
This week on Night Lights we pay tribute to the pianist and singer who passed away in 2007 at the age of 94. A product of the thriving mid-20th century Central Avenue Los Angeles scene, in the late 1940s Lutcher scored a series of hits such as “Hurry On Down” and “Fine Brown Frame” that blended jazz, pop, blues and R & B in a way that made her one of the era’s first crossover stars.
Carla Bley is renowned today for her big-band writing, but it was small-group recordings of her work in the 1960s that introduced her to the jazz world.
Performers who mixed boogie, swing, ballads and blues with sly, suggestive lyrics brought out deeper nuance than their risque hits sometimes seemed to suggest.
Last week JazzWax blogger Marc Myers mentioned getting an e-mail from Hannah Rothschild, producer of the BBC documentary about jazz patron Pannonica de Koenigswarter, aka Nica, that I recently posted about. Turns out that she’s making a television documentary about Pannonica as well–and there’s now a website devoted to the Baroness which includes the BBC radio program in non-expiration form…
A couple of weeks ago Bernard Gordillo, who writes the WFIU early-music show Harmonia, mentioned a recent interest in Pannonica de Koenigswarter, also known as Nica, the Jazz Baroness, or simply the Baroness. The Baroness was a sort of jazz patron, a woman well-liked by the jazz musicians she befriended on the mid-20th-century New York bebop scene; she counted Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk among her closest companions from that community. As a wealthy white woman spending time…
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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