Jazz

Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker review of Terry Teachout’s Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington includes the outlandish charge that Duke “played no better than O.K. piano.” Evidence...

Ralph Waldo Emerson; anonymous woodcut I’m thinking about Greater Boston today, not only because of the Marathon and the Red Sox annual forenoon first pitch, but because it’s Patriot’s Day and Ralph...

Ed Bickert Ed Bickert, the renowned Canadian-born guitarist who was a prominent figure on the Toronto jazz scene, died on February 28 at 86. I learned of Bickert through his great work with Paul Desmond...

December 18 marks the 100th anniversary of Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson’s birth in Houston, Texas. Vinson straddled two divides, jazz and blues, swing and bebop, and was a double threat as a singer and...

Today is the 90th birthday anniversary of Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis.  Had the saxophonist been a Texan, he’d be one of the most celebrated of the Texas Tenors.  But because he was a New Yorker,...

I enthused over Ehud Asherie two years ago on this blog, and my appreciation for the pianist only grows. I’ve seen him twice since then, and two or three new recordings have appeared as well, so...

Ehud Asherie is one of the musicians I look for whenever I’m in New York, and if he’s not on the road, I usually get lucky and find him at a piano somewhere in town.   On a recent visit,...

Evans/LaFaro/Matthiessen/Jarrett I’ve been working on a Scott LaFaro blog, and yesterday read of how he got turned on to Zen meditation through Bill Evans. In a letter written in 1960 in which he wondered...

Eli Newberger interview Eli & the Hot Six is led by the tuba player and pianist Eli Newberger, a legendary figure in traditional jazz circles. Newberger, a world-renowned pediatrician and...

The First Lady of Song, April in Paris, and Wild Bill Davis April is book-ended, give or take a few days, by the birthdays of Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald; Billie on April 7, 1915, Ella on April...