Take with the usual grain/caveat of subjectivity–that said, here are some titles from a year-for-the-ear in review…

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On this edition of Night Lights it’s “Moodsville 2,” a followup to our October program on Prestige Records’ early-1960s series that was a sort of “jazz-ballads-for-thinking-lovers” concept. This show features albums from vibraphonist Lem Winchester, a policeman-turned-musician who died in a…

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On December 27, 1927, the Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein musical Show Boat made its Broadway debut at the Ziegfield Theater. Show Boat, based on Edna Ferber’s novel, was one of the first musicals that wasn’t just a loose revue of unrelated songs; the songs in Show Boat actually helped establish characters and storylines. It also gave us songs like “Can’t Help Lovin Dat Man,” “Why Do I Love You,” “Bill,” and “Ol’ Man River.” The musical depicts life on the Mississippi, with a large cast of both white and African-American characters, and the song “Ol’ Man River,” which seeks to capture both the suffering of black laborers and the eternal spirit of the Mississippi…

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As expected, many more Oscar Peterson articles and tributes have appeared in the past two days. Here are a few of them:

New York Times obituary

Steve Voce in the Independent

Lots of love and spirited dissension in this Organissimo discussion…

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1957 was a prolific year for Art Blakey, the volcanic drummer and leader of the Jazz Messengers. The Messengers were one of jazz’s most-noted and longest-running collectives, and young musicians such as Freddie Hubbard, Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Woody Shaw, Keith Jarrett, and Wynton Marsalis all pulled tours of duty with the group, sometimes called “the hardbop academy.” Its bop-and-funk-driven history stretches from the late 1940s to the beginning of the 1990s; the lesser-known 1957 edition included…

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Sad Christmas Eve news that a number of jazz fans have probably heard by now: Canadian pianist Oscar Peterson has passed away at the age of 82. He was, as Doug Ramsey observes, “one of the great piano figures of his time… an inspiration to virtually every jazz pianist who followed him, his influence equaled only by his slightly younger contemporary Bill Evans.” A mainstay of Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic tours, an early devotee of Art Tatum and Nat King Cole who found his own voice of swing, soul, and sophistication, a presence on the jazz-piano scene befitting his bearishly-big body, projecting both strength and gentility, Peterson was perhaps easy to take for granted–a bit like living for many years in view of a beautiful mountain or ocean-front…

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Season’s greetings from Night Lights via holiday ambassador Mr. Cole:

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Ever since Louis Armstrong’s trumpet sound became a symbol of musical revolution and Bix Beiderbecke died tragically young in a New York City apartment, writers have been responding to jazz and the musicians who make it. In Ask Me Now, a new anthology of interviews conducted by poet and scholar Sascha Feinstein, the relationship between jazz and literature is explored at length in a series of conversations with artists who reflect on the profound emotional and aesthetic connections they’ve made through listening to, playing, and writing about the music…

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