Jazz

I’ve loved Eli “Lucky” Thompson’s mellifluous tenor and soprano saxophone playing since I first heard it on Lucky Strikes about 45 years ago. His name resonates too, even though...

Since posting this blog entry on Lucky Thompson and Don Byas last year, I’ve discovered footage of Thompson playing “Tenderly.”  “Tenderly” was composed by Walter Gross in 1941...

Marian McPartland died last night.  She had been off the scene for a few years, but in March when I spoke with her friend Huey, the filmmaker who directed the McPartland documentary In Good...

Duke Ellington’s greatest asset may have been his skill as a listener.  He famously recruited a wide array of musicians and coaxed from them the individual sounds that he prized as theirs alone,...

Below is the blog entry I posted on Marian McPartland a year ago.  Today is her 95th birthday, and as this small world would have it, I sat next to Huey, the producer of the McPartland...

Marian McPartland’s In My Life, recorded in 1993, has an eclectic quality that’s fairly typical for the English-born pianist. But how many other jazz artists are able to maintain their identity through...

Saturday’s Northampton Jazz Festival, in addition to presenting headliners Matt Wilson, Sheryl Bailey, and Gary Smulyan, will honor the memory of Marion Brown, the late jazz artist who called Northampton...

Mark Murphy in 2005 [Ed. note: This post was originally published on October 23, 2015] How’s this for a “What are the odds?” moment with Mark Murphy? On a very hot Sunday afternoon in July 2004, my...

I slipped away from the control board in time to hear the Christian McBride Trio and Wynton Marsalis Quintet at Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood on Monday.  Both sounded great, and it...

In the speech he gave before the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington in August 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., employed the refrain, “Now is the time.” Was he inspired by Charlie Parker’s,...