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.
Vince Guaraldi’s music is loved by millions of people around the world—forever associated with the TV version of a popular comic strip. Who was the man behind that music? Jazz critic Doug Ramsey, Peanuts producer Lee Mendelson, Guaraldi’s son David and others join Night Lights this week for a musical exploration of Vince Guaraldi’s jazz legacy.
John Coltrane revolutionized the sound of modern jazz and wrote a number of compositions that have become jazz standards. “The John Coltrane Songbook” celebrates the saxophonist’s birthday with performances of Coltrane pieces such as “Naima,” “Countdown” and “Giant Steps” by Dexter Gordon, McCoy Tyner, Dave Liebman, Steve Kuhn and more.
The Beatles’ explosive arrival on the American music scene in 1964 shook up the jazz world just as much as it did the rest of America—perhaps even more so.
Jazz pianist Horace Silver, a founding father of hardbop and soul jazz and one of the most renowned figures of the post-World War II jazz scene, turns 80 on September 2, 2008. Many of his compositions, such as “Opus de Funk,” “The Preacher,” “Nica’s Dream,” and “Peace” have become jazz standards heard frequently today.
A commonly-heard phrase in late 1950s/early 1960s jazz parlance was, “Will the big bands come back?” Woody Herman had a retort: “Sure, next football season.” But there’s fresh, less sarcastic evidence at hand that a few did, with Herman’s among them: a new Mosaic Select set of the bandleader’s early-1960s recordings for the Philips label…
Pete Candoli, a big-band and West Coast trumpeter whose Superman-caped solos with the mid-1940s Woody Herman orchestra captured the exuberance of the swing era, has passed away at the age of 84
As expected, many more Oscar Peterson articles and tributes have appeared in the past two days. Here are a few of them:Lots of love and spirited dissension in this Organissimo discussion…
Woody Herman called trumpeter Sonny Berman “one of the warmest soloists I ever had.” His sound was humorous, lyrical, and harmonically adventurous, with a penchant for bitonality. Berman died at the age of 21 in 1947, leaving behind only a few brilliant solos, most of them recorded with Herman’s big band.
In the mid-to-late 1940s, as the sound of swing gave way to the rise of bebop, popular bandleaders found themselves trying to incorporate the new music’s more complex rhythms and harmonies into their dance-orchestra styles. Bebop was just one of several challenges the big bands faced after the end of World War II, but it inspired…
Mary Ann McCall, whom Johnny Mandel once called “the greatest of all the big band singers,” is a secret heroine of American jazz vocal music. Little-known today, and not widely recorded during even the most active periods of her career, she has sometimes…
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