Jazz

Benny Golson composed “I Remember Clifford” for his “friend forever,” Clifford Brown. They’d been colleagues in Tadd Dameron’s orchestra in 1953 and had played together...

Happy Holidays! I hadn’t given much thought to a list of 2014 favorites until today when suddenly a few listeners looking for gift ideas wrote to ask if I was going to post a Top Ten. On short notice,...

WFCR Music Director John Montanari has been letting his all-genres music flag fly on the Classical Blog at NEPR, and last week posted a list of his “individual musical selections that come as close as...

I corresponded with Mark Miller, the Toronto-based jazz historian, over the weekend.  Miller wrote on Friday with information challenging the long-held assertion that Ernst Ansermet’s 1919 review...

30 Years of Jazz à la Mode A special celebration of Jazz à la Mode’s 30th Anniversary is taking place on Sunday, November 16, at the Community Music School of Springfield. The occasion is giving me cause...

A 90th birthday tribute to one of the brothers Thank God, and Mr. and Mrs. David Cohn, for bringing Alvin Gilbert Cohn into the world 90 years ago today. It’s hard to measure the value of swing and soul,...

The voice of Ellington’s Second Sacred Concert As if her singing weren’t enough, could one wish for a better listener than Alice Babs? Watch how this Swedish nightingale, after singing Duke Ellington’s...

Allison Miner at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in 1991 Here’s a moving film tribute to Allison Miner, a beautiful spirit who made a major difference to the preservation and perpetuation...

Illness notwithstanding, I ventured out into the bitter cold of Saturday night for the second half of the Easthampton Jazz Festival’s nighttime lineup with the Andy Jaffe Octet; it was...

Andy McGhee Andy McGhee was a household name in the world of jazz education, but Berklee’s gain meant that Andy remained one of the least-known and most under-recorded tenor masters of the past...