Jazz

On Friday, a listener noticing that Dizzy Gillespie’s 95th birthday anniversary is today, asked where he could find a copy of “I’ll Never Go Back to Georgia.”  When I told him that that’s the vocal...

Dizzy Reece at the Rubin Museum in New York, in 2007; photo by Jack Vartoogian Dizzy Reece‘s 85th birthday was yesterday. Alphonso Son Reece was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on January 5, 1931, and...

June 19, 2013 Django in June, as sure a sign of summer in the Valley as the Bright Moments Festival used to be, is celebrating its tenth anniversary this week in Northampton.   Kudos to...

Dmitry Baevsky One of the most exciting jazz discoveries I’ve experienced in recent years involved the Russian-born alto saxophonist Dmitry Baevsky and a restaurant in the tiny Massachusetts-Vermont...

I’ll be playing Benny Golson’s 1962 quartet recording Free in tonight’s Jazz a la Mode, a complement to last week’s golden anniversary feature on Benny’s Jazztet partner Art Farmer. Golson...

Donald Byrd, who died on February 4 at age 80, came to prominence in the mid-Fifties with bands led by Art Blakey, Horace Silver, and George Wallington.  His frontline partner with Blakey and Silver,...

Bay Area Jazz Advocate The jazz world lost another of its important stewards this weekend.  Dr. Herb Wong, a stalwart of the Bay Area jazz scene for over 65 years, died on Sunday at the age of 88. ...

Notwithstanding the bold and daring recordings made by Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, Charles Mingus, and other musicians who found common cause with the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950’s and...

Martin Luther King, Jr. at the March on Washington; Mahalia Jackson wearing corsage at lower right In the speech he gave before the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington in August 1963, Dr. Martin...

Autumn Leaves in Stockholm I awoke the other morning out of a Zoot Sims dream. The tenor saxophonist was sitting in with a group of friends who were playing before a convivial local audience much like...