Jazz

Joe Williams in the 1957 movie, Disc Jockey Jamboree Count Basie called Joe Williams his “Number One son.” The great singer first worked with Basie’s Octet in 1950, and when he re-joined...

One of the most exciting tenor duels I’ve ever witnessed took place between Joel Frahm and Jimmy Greene on a hot summer night in 2010.  It was in West Hartford at Szechuan Tokyo, not exactly the Elks...

Farewell Tour with Miles Davis in Europe John Coltrane had already decided to leave Miles Davis when he reluctantly agreed to make a 22-city European tour with the trumpeter in the spring of 1960. Davis’s...

Here’s the John Coltrane Quartet playing “Alabama” on Ralph J. Gleason’s public television series, Jazz Casual.  Coltrane composed the elegy in commemoration of the four girls murdered in the fire-bombing...

John Coltrane One of the first things I did when I began using I-Tunes in 2002 was create a playlist of John Coltrane playing ballads. Coltrane’s music offers one of the most complete realizations of...

The Golden Anniversary of John Coltrane’s Hymn of Praise John Coltrane recorded A Love Supreme 50 years ago today. Coltrane’s suite was a wholly original work motivated by a spiritual...

John Coltrane had already decided to leave Miles Davis when he reluctantly agreed to make a 22-city European tour with the trumpeter in the spring of 1960. Davis’s quintet was part of a Jazz at the...

John Coltrane John Coltrane’s Ballads was viewed as something of an anomaly that came in the midst of the saxophonist’s turbulent creative development in the early sixties. Ben Ratliff calls it a “contrivance”...

Today is John Lewis’s 96th birthday anniversary. Lewis grew up in Albuquerque, where he heard Lester Young in the early thirties, and graduated from the University of New Mexico in 1942. After army service...

I quoted from John Pizzarelli’s memoir, World on a String, in yesterday’s blog on Frank Sinatra, and I’m delighted to say that the excerpt is consistent with the qualities of wit, humility, and...