Jazz

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Lucky Thompson at the Club St. Germain
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...
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Lucky Thompson plays Tenderly
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...
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Marian McPartland, R.I.P., 1918-2013
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...
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Marian McPartland: Framing Marian
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,...
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Marian McPartland’s 95th
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...
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Marian McPartland’s In My Life
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...
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Marion Brown Day by Proclamation
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...
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Mark Murphy, R.I.P.
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...
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Marsalis and McBride: Jazz at Tanglewood
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...
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Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Humanity of Jazz
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,...