A compendium of NEPR blog features on jazz in the City of Light
In this week’s Jazz à la Mode, we’ll mourn the November 13 terrorist attacks against Paris and celebrate the special relationship that’s existed between American jazz musicians and the people of France since World War I. Join me on NEPR for jazz compositions inspired by the City of Light; recordings made in Paris by American jazz greats and Parisian legends Django Reinhardt, Martial Solal, and Pierre Michelot; highlights from Wynton Marsalis’s Marciac Suite; and several renditions of the great French ballad, “Autumn Leaves” (“Les feuilles mortes”) which takes on even greater poignance now.
Click on the highlighted names and url’s for blogs that focus on Paris-related jazz milestones.
Sidney Bechet, “The Symbol of Jazz!”
Rex Stewart’s 1939 recording session in Paris with Django Reinhardt.
Lucky Thompson on view in 1960 at the Club St. Germain in Paris.
Duke Ellington welcomes Don Byas and Archie Shepp in Paris to play”C-Jam Blues.”
Sidney Bechet was Louis Armstrong’s only serious rival as a pace-setting jazz soloist in the twenties. Thanks to the far-sighted, posterity-minded French for capturing him on film, here in 1958, the year before his death, at Cannes.
Note: that’s trumpeter Roy Eldridge, the legendary “Little Jazz,” on drums, and he sounds great.