Jazz

Polka Dots and a Blindfold Test Lester Young at Newport; photo by Ted Williams Here’s some choice Lester Young material to complement the feature I’m presenting on him this week in Jazz à la Mode....

Time Magazine may feel differently, but I can’t see anyone making a claim on 2016 as their year more than the President of the Tenor Saxophone, Lester Young. Pres is at the heart of a major...

Lester Young playing tenor saxophone with the horn held at a 45-degree angle Lester Young was born 108 years ago, on August 27, 1909, in Woodville, Mississippi. The state’s been the birthplace...

“Very little about the tenor saxophonist Lester Young was unoriginal,” wrote Whitney Balliett in one of the most memorable of his jazz musician profiles forThe New Yorker. “When he played, he held his...

I’ve never spoken at length with Lewis Nash.  When I introduced the Tommy Flanagan Trio at the Litchfield Jazz Festival 15 years ago, he sought me out after their set to thank me for giving Flanagan...

Lionel Hampton’s YOU BETTER KNOW IT was one of the essentials of my early jazz education. I checked it out of the Worcester Public Library constantly, and it remains my favorite album by the vibes master...

Yesterday was the 102nd anniversary of the birth of Roy Eldridge.  As he says up front in this BBC radio documentary, he was short and slight of build, and that earned him the nickname “Little...

One of the watershed experiences in my early appreciation of jazz was seeing Dave McKenna, Dick Johnson, and Lou Colombo at The Columns in West Dennis on Cape Cod in 1971.  McKenna’s two-fisted piano...

Still Groovin’ at 90!  There are few more telltale signs of the jazz critics’ conceit that innovation is the truest marker of artistic value than the condescending manner in which Lou...

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a Lou Donaldson performance I didn’t like. On record, in person, as a leader or sideman, Donaldson never fails to swing soulfully. Among the alto saxophonists who emerged...