Sun Ra, whose real name was Herman or “Sunny” Blount, grew up in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1920s and 30s, living within sight of a huge sign welcoming Birmingham visitors to “the Magic City.” It’s a prophetic sign in the Sun Ra legend, for Herman Blount—who was named by his mother after the popular vaudeville magician Black Herman– went on to become a sort of musical wizard, staging shows with dancers, wild lighting, musicians dressed in space costumes, sermons on far-ranging topics, and music that drew on hardbop, big-band, and free jazz, with chanting, electronic keyboards, shrieking saxophones, and a wide array of unusual musical effects that resulted in what he called “cosmo dramas”…

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Gerald Wilson has been leading big bands and recording albums for more than 60 years now, and this week he celebrates his 90th birthday. “Last of the Lions: Gerald Wilson” features two of his most significant outfits: a modernistic 1940s powerhouse that included up-and-coming musicians such as trumpeter Snooky Young and trombonist Melba Liston, and an all-star 1960s West Coast unit that highlighted soloists such as tenor saxophonist Harold Land and guitarist Joe Pass.

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At the end of World War II Duke Ellington was coming off one of the most commercially and artistically successful periods of his career—the so-called Blanton-Webster years of the early 1940s. He had managed to keep much of his orchestra intact during the war and had maintained a high public profile with concerts and broadcasts during the 1943-44 recording ban that kept him and other artists out of the studios. In late 1944 he’d scored a smash hit with “I’m Beginning to See the Light”…and with service men and women beginning to return home as the war wound down in 1945, it seemed that the big bands would keep riding the wave of popularity that had sustained them since the mid-1930s.

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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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Jazzwax master blogger Marc Myers’ mention of the late arranger Bill Finegan yesterday reminded me that I did a show about Tommy Dorsey’s post-World War II orchestra a couple of years ago when I hosted WFIU’s The Big Bands. As Marc points out, Finegan crafted some fantastic arrangements for that particular Dorsey ensemble. In an e-mail followup exchange he asked if the program was still available…

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*Mosaic Records will release a three-CD Select set of mid-1970s RCA Toshiko Akiyoshi-Lew Tabackin big-band recordings later this year.

*I can say with confidence that Peter Pullman’s long-awaited Bud Powell biography has taken a big step towards finally achieving publication–more details soon, hopefully.

Elsewhere around the jazz blogosphere this past week…

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Gil Evans, a Canadian-born pianist and composer, “enormously expanded the vocabulary of the jazz orchestra,” as writer Gene Lees pointed out, reducing the standard big-band instrumentation, restraining its vibrato, and adding flutes, oboes, English and French horns, and tubas. Self-taught as an arranger, he created a quietly dramatic, dark-hued sound-world that drew on a multiplicity of influences ranging from Spanish music and the French Impressionists to Duke Ellington and…

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Duke Ellington’s 1941 musical Jump for Joy was a cultural milestone, an assertive, satirical riposte to the servile depictions of African-Americans in both film and the theater, and a forerunner of later extended Ellington works such as Black, Brown and Beige. Though the show ran only in Los Angeles and never made Broadway, Ellington cited it as one of his proudest achievements, and in his lifetime it occasionally resurfaced in one way or another (Cannonball Adderley’s…

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