Jazz

Truth Telling at the Northampton Jazz Workshop What a pleasure it was hearing Sheila Jordan this week at the Northampton Jazz Workshop. She’s nearly 87, which she makes no secret of, and why should she?...

The Creator of We’ve long recognized the leading role jazz played in breaking down racial barriers in the U.S., but credit Sidney Bechet for effecting a rapprochement between the English poet Philip...

We’ve long recognized the leading role jazz played in breaking down racial barriers in the U.S., but credit Sidney Bechet for effecting a rapprochement between the English poet Philip Larkin and the people...

Today is Frank Sinatra’s 97th birthday anniversary.  Right from the outset of Jazz a la Mode in 1984, Sinatra was in the mix.  I’d been listening to jazz shows for over a...

Sir Charles Thompson died on June 16 near Tokyo, where he’d lived since 2002. He was 98, and was playing gigs up until a few years ago when he became ill with colon cancer. The Washington Post’s...

Sonny Criss October’s quite a month for big-time jazz birthdays, and this year it’s ringing with major milestones, including the centennials of Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie, the 95th of Illinois...

I’ve got a few friends in Northampton who are going to love this film of Sonny Criss with the Hampton Hawes All-Stars. I doubt that many towns of 30,000 have core constituencies of Criss fans, but NoHo’s...

Time for another PBS feature on Sonny Rollins, this one from the NewsHour.  The occasion is this weekend’s Kennedy Center Honors, where Rollins will be one of five recipients of the annual award....

Happy Birthday to the Tenor Titan Sonny Rollins; photo by Jimmy and Dena Katz In 2002, I was given the plum assignment of selecting the material and writing the liner notes for a Sonny Rollins anthology...

After posting about Northampton’s Jazz Workshop series last night, I flipped the calendar and saw that Sonny Stitt’s 88th birthday anniversary is today.  Stitt made a career of sitting in, of...