Memphis, Tennessee is renowned throughout the world for its remarkable contributions to 20th-century popular music–a place where the Sun Records and Stax/Volt labels played significant roles in shaping the respective sounds of rock ‘n roll and soul music, and where musicians from W.C.Handy and B.B. King to Elvis Presley and Alex Chilton found their artistic voices. But Memphis also has a jazz legacy, and one group of musicians that emerged from the city in the late 1950s…
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Alto saxophonist Lee Konitz is a longtime master of melodic improvisation who’s played a part in some of jazz’s most momentous acts–the Claude Thornhill big band and the Miles Davis Birth of the Cool nonet in the late 1940s, and the Lennie Tristano groups of the 1950s and early 1960s. After working in Stan Kenton’s orchestra and making some albums for Atlantic, Konitz recorded a series of LPs as a leader in the late 1950s for the Verve label…
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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…
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Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami on his introduction to jazz and what it meant to him. (If you’re interested in jazz and post-WWII Japan, check out…
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This week on Night Lights it’s “The Night Before Christmas,” with Christmas-Eve jazz from Fats Navarro, Dexter Gordon, Louis Armstrong, Duke Pearson, Frank Sinatra, and more…
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After jazz journalist Gene Lees heard Bill Evans for the first time, he told the pianist that his recordings “sounded like love letters written to the world from some prison of the heart.” Lees was just one of many to feel such an emotional connection with Evans’ playing, which inspired a cult-like following that continues to this day. The group that he formed in 1959 with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian helped set the template for the modern jazz trio, and the albums they made–particularly the live Waltz for Debby and Sunday at the Village Vanguard–have become jazz classics. But this group came to an abrupt end shortly after those albums were recorded, when…
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After 25-year-old trumpet great Clifford Brown died unexpectedly in a 1956 automobile accident, some critics and fans looked to a recent Manhattan arrival from Detroit as a possible successor: Donald Byrd. This week we’ll celebrate the trumpeter’s 75th birthday (he was born on December 9, 1932) with a program devoted to his hardbop recordings from the late 1950s and 1960s, drawing on albums that he made with saxophonists Gigi Gryce, Jackie McLean, Pepper Adams, and Sonny Red–the first incarnation…
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Trumpeter Don Ellis is best-known today for the big bands he led during the late 1960s and early 1970s that made use of odd time signatures, but he made his first impact on the jazz world at the beginning of the 1960s, leading several progressive small-group dates that drew both praise and criticism from the jazz media. Ellis made himself available for the fray, joining roundtable discussions and firing off a three-page riposte in response to a bad review from…
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Dick and Kiz Harp were a husband-and-wife, piano-and-vocals duo who ran their own nightclub (converted from a warehouse and called “The 90th Floor,” after a lesser-known Cole Porter song they performed) in Dallas, Texas at the end of the 1950s. They’ve developed a cult following among jazz-vocal aficionados …
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“Willis Conover did more to crumble the Berlin wall and bring about collapse of the Soviet empire than all the Cold War presidents put together,” jazz writer Gene Lees once said. Working for decades as a broadcaster for the Voice of America, Conover was perhaps the most influential jazz DJ of the 20th century. He brought the music into eastern Europe and other areas of the world where jazz was either repressed or commercially unavailable, helping to bridge the cultural gap between Western and Communist-bloc countries. In addition to the many fans he garnered around the globe, he…
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