Posted in WFIU Jazz Shows & Specials on Sep 28th, 2007
Wrapping up our series this week of Duke Ellington Treasury shows: In August of 1945 the United States’ war with Japan ended suddenly, and the war bonds that Ellington promoted every Saturday on “Your Date With the Duke” turned into “Victory Bonds.” His bond pitches placed special emphasis on the many wounded and injured veterans returning–or soon to return–from the war. In this program we’ll hear broadcasts from that month of “Work Song” and “The Blues” from Ellington’s…
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Posted in WFIU Jazz Shows & Specials on Sep 27th, 2007
This edition of our ongoing Duke Ellington Treasury series features mid-summer performances from an Ellington appearance at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, including “Day Dream,” “Carnegie Blues,” and a medley of Billy Strayhorn tunes with Strayhorn at the piano, while Marie Ellington (no relation, but Nat King Cole’s future wife) and Al Hibbler take turns…
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Posted in WFIU Jazz Shows & Specials on Sep 26th, 2007
Duke Ellington was on the road during the summer of 1945 promoting the war-bond drive, and some of this program’s selections come from an Evansville, Indiana concert. In addition to “Indiana,” we’ll hear the Ellington orchestra performing “Body and Soul,” Ellington’s extended instrumental “New World a-Comin” (named after Roi Ottley’s proto-black pride 1943 book), the title song from his musical Jump For Joy, and classic Ellington songbook numbers such as…
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Posted in Jazz Notes on Sep 26th, 2007
Posted in WFIU Jazz Shows & Specials on Sep 25th, 2007
As part of our daily presentation this week of several big-band shows that I did in 2005 devoted to Duke Ellington’s Treasury shows, the Tuesday “May 1945″ edition finds World War II ending in Europe, something we hear Duke Ellington acknowledge several times throughout this program in his pitches for U.S. war bonds…
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Posted in Jazz Notes on Sep 24th, 2007
A Los Angeles City Beat article sings the praises of Jefferson High, the school that gave us alto saxophonist Marshall and trumpeter Ernie Royal, drummer Chico Hamilton, saxophonist Jackie Kelso, drummer Bill Douglass, tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon, trumpeter Lamar Wright, singer Ernie Andrews, violinist Ginger Smock, alto saxophonist Sonny Criss…
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Posted in Jazz Notes on Sep 24th, 2007
The day Louis Armstrong told the U.S. government to go to a very choice place: David Margolick’s article in the New York Times yesterday provides some historical elaboration. (Margolick is the author of Strange Fruit: the Biography of a Song.) There’s also an online NPR story, Remembering Louis Armstrong’s Little Rock Protest. For more about Armstrong and how the politics of the era mixed with jazz, check out our previous program Jazz Goes to the Cold War.
Is it Tatum or is it MIDI? Yesterday this message appeared on one of my listservs:
Sony BMG Masterworks and Zenph Studios have announced that a “re-performance” of legendary jazz pianist Art Tatum’s 1949 recording “Piano Starts Here”…
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Posted in Shows on Sep 24th, 2007
Bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik played with pianists Randy Weston and Thelonious Monk in the 1950s before going on to make a handful of dates that helped forge a path for the fusion of jazz with world music. “American jazz is dull,” he told Metronome in 1958. “‘The Man I Love’ things have all been said before… now is the time to transfuse new blood–foreign scales, foreign melodic lines, the Oriental flavor.” His ensuing albums such as East Meets West, Jazz Sahara, and The Music Of Ahmed Abdul-Malik and Sounds of Africa (combined on the CD reissue Jazz Sounds of Africa employed both ethnic musicians and hardbop greats like Johnny Griffin and Lee Morgan…
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The remarkable 
