Jazz

I spoke with Jeff Holmes on Columbus Day.  Holmes is the longtime Director of Jazz Studies at UMass, and he’s just released a CD entitled Of One’s Own. It features saxophonist...

Here’s some of the finest blues singing and piano ever recorded. “Winin’ Boy Blues” was played by Jelly Roll Morton on a solo session he made for General Records in 1939. It was...

Jeremy Pelt is one of the great trumpeters on the scene today.  The Los Angeles native, who’s now 35, studied at Berklee, and since his arrival in New York in 1998, he’s worked with the Mingus Big...

Jim Hall was featured on the premiere recording of John Lewis’s “Two Degrees East, Three Degrees West” in 1956.  It’s the subtitle on Grand Encounter, which Lewis made for Pacific...

I think it was of Jim Hall that someone once mocked, “Funny, you don’t look like a jazz musician.”  Whitney Balliett, whose New Yorker profile of the guitarist is one of his most personal...

Count Basie introduces Jimmy Forrest as “my man” in this rare footage of the saxophonist from a 1974 concert filmed in Poland. Basie said he had a weakness for tenor players, and...

Remembering the Life of Ana Grace “Love wins,” is how Jimmy Greene concludes the liner note essay he’s written for his new recording, Beautiful Life. That’s a powerful statement coming from a man...

For nearly three decades, it’s been my pleasure to tout the Greater Hartford area as one of the most fertile in the nation in developing home-grown jazz players who’ve gone on to wider renown.  Jimmy Greene,...

Miles Davis, Kenny Drew, Art Blakey, and Jimmy Heath, 1953; photo by Francis Wolff It was a delight to hear the ever witty and candid Jimmy Heath profiled by Tom Vitale on Weekend Edition on Saturday. ...

Jimmy Rowles Tomorrow is Jimmy Rowles’s 99th birthday anniversary. The Spokane, Washington, native was quirky, unpredictable, and utterly compelling, making even the most hackneyed standard sound...