Jazz

Hand in Glove Duets How’s this for perfect pitch?  Jim Hall said he tuned his guitar to Ella Fitzgerald’s voice. “If it was a choice between her and the piano, I would go for her!”  Hall’s...

Ella Fitzgerald’s Twelve Nights in Hollywood Great fanfare greeted the release of Ella Fitzgerald’s Twelve Nights in Hollywood when it was issued in 2009.  The four-CD set was culled...

Like many American homes of the post-war era, mine had bookcases lined with Book-of-the-Month Club selections.  William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; Page Smith’s two-volume...

Like many American homes of the post-war era, mine had bookcases lined with Book-of-the-Month Club selections.  William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; Page Smith’s two-volume...

Some Carp, But 40 Years After His Death, Duke’s Legacy Endures Duke Ellington died forty years ago on May 24, 1974.  He was 75; I was 20.  I’d seen him six times, and suddenly felt like...

Bill Cosby brought a copy of Duke Ellington at Newport to play before his benefit for New England Public Radio on Saturday night at Symphony Hall in Springfield.  It was quite a thrill to...

Ellis Marsalis, Jr., pianist and patriarch of the world’s most famous jazz family, died on April 1 at 85. He’d been hospitalized with Coronavirus symptoms. New Orleans currently has the most...

Harold Bloom’s Emersonian reading of jazz Harold Bloom; photo by John Abbott My pride in Massachusetts runs deeper than ever today.  36,000 runners are boldly resurrecting the Marathon and...

I remember being impressed by the title of Whitney Balliett’s New Yorker profile of Erroll Garner, “Being a Genius.“  I’d seen Garner on Ed Sullivan, and later on The Tonight Show, where his frequent...

Maybe it was just the odd hour (11:30 on a beautiful Saturday morning), or the lack of outreach to the jazz community, but fewer than ten people were in the house for the Northampton Film Festival’s local...