Jazz
Brubeck Cover of Time Magazine 1954
I interviewed Dave Brubeck five years ago for a WFCR news story about his appearance at the Academy of Music in Northampton. A few years earlier, I’d read a proclamation...
Dave Douglas brought his ensemble Brass Ecstasy to Amherst last night to play a beautifully-programmed benefit concert in memory of his mother, Emily Douglas, who died on August 27 at the age of 78. ...
I began the day today uplifted by the soulful, elegiac music of Dave Douglas. The trumpeter’s new release, Be Still, is dedicated to his mother, Emily Bates Douglas, who died last August. Douglas says...
The fall classic has passed, this year’s capped by a scintillating Game 7, the brilliant pitching of a new folk hero, Madison Bumgarner, and a third ring for the 27-year-old Kung Fu Panda, Pablo Sandoval....
A Mutual Admiration Society On View at the Copley Plaza in 1982
Dave McKenna was born 85 years ago, May 30, 1930. The Woonsocket, RI, native died on October 18, 2008. The Dave McKenna Appreciation Society...
Among the most formative experiences I had in developing a love and appreciation for jazz and saloon songs was hearing Dave McKenna at The Columns in West Dennis on Cape Cod. I was 18 when I began dropping...
Dave McKenna
The grandest joy I’ve experienced since the Red Sox won the World Series last month was opening a mailer this week from Arbors Records and discovering a new Dave McKenna album. Dave...
Dexter Gordon
Dexter Gordon vies with Duke Ellington as the most charismatic jazz artist I’ve ever seen in person. His horn shook with the same swagger as the Los Angeles native’s 6’5″ gait, and good...
Dexter Gordon should have owned the Fifties. As the tenor playing counterpart to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and as a player revealed on concert air checks of the late forties as one who...
Jazz has known a fair number of charismatic personalities throughout its history, but few as mythical or colorful as Dexter Gordon. In a multi-volume career that spanned a half-century, Gordon rose...