Recently jazz composer, musician, and educator David Baker sat down for an interview with me, and yesterday we posted Part 1, in which David talked about his experiences playing with George Russell and Wes Montgomery, as well as the origins of the Indiana University jazz studies program. The interview originally appeared in Bloom Magazine; here’s Part 2, in which he discusses jazz education and changing trends in the music, his dream band…

Continue Reading »

Let us now praise famous avises: Charlie Parker, born August 29, 1920. Parker’s been in the air a lot lately, what with the death of his bebop compatriot Max Roach. Like Billie Holiday, his art is still somehow strong enough to defy all of the categorization and commodification that’s been heaped onto it. A hipster saint he may be, but burn your candles for the hard grace of his music. Suggested Night Lights listening: our August 2005 At the Birth of Bop program…

Continue Reading »

A few weeks ago I interviewed jazz composer, educator, and musician David Baker, who played in George Russell’s
early-1960s progressive-bop group (featured in the Night Lights program When Russell Met Baker). For the past 40 years David has run the jazz studies program at Indiana University while continuing to compose and perform, and he also leads the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra. A new CD of his big band compositions performed by the Buselli-Wallarab Orchestra, Basically Baker, garnered four and a half stars in a recent Downbeat review. Here’s Part 1 of the interview, which originally…

Continue Reading »

Do the Math reports that jazz writer Richard Cook, co-author of The Penguin Guide to Jazz and author of books about Blue Note Records and Miles Davis, has passed away at the age of 50. Cook was a fine and interesting writer, and I’ve turned to the Penguins many times for insight and information about various artists and albums; it’s the best of the jazz CD guides around. His efforts will be missed.

This past weekend’s program, I Want to Live!, is now archived. Tomorrow I’ll be posting Part 1 of an interview with jazz musician, composer, and educator David Baker.

There’s a good article in the August 27 issue of the New Yorker by Alex Ross, discussing Aaron Copland’s political difficulties during the Cold War…

Continue Reading »

“Here were the children of the American bop night,” Jack Kerouac wrote in his 1957 novel On the Road, which, like many of Kerouac’s other writings, celebrated and invoked the music of Charlie Parker, Lester Young, and many other jazz greats. We’ll mark this weekend’s 50th anniversary of the publication of Kerouac’s best-known book with a program that explores his relationship with jazz, including recordings he made with saxophonists Al Cohn and Zoot..

Continue Reading »

Alto saxophonist Frank Morgan, born in 1933, is one of the last great bop storytellers and living connections to that age of music. He’s also one of the last musicians left from the glory days of Los Angeles’ Central Avenue scene, a school-of-the-streets from which Dexter Gordon, Charles Mingus, Art Farmer, and many others graduated…

Continue Reading »

… not to mention Dick Contino and The Platters!
Yesterday I suggested listening to our previous episode The Wild One as a companion program to this weekend’s upcoming I Want to Live! show, which tells the story of the film based around jazz-lover and accused-murderess Barbara Graham (the real-life Graham was…

Continue Reading »

As we head into this weekend’s “I Want to Live!” program, with Susan Hayward as a jazz-loving murder suspect, here’s a suggested companion show from our archives: the December 2004 program The Wild One. Released at the end of 1953, The Wild One is a key entry in the cinematic annals of jazz-as-the-soundtrack-of-rebellion (rendered here by Leith Stevens and some of the emerging West Coast usual suspects)… and it’s interesting to consider that…

Continue Reading »