Composer Johnny Green wrote the music for several songs that went on to become staples of the jazz-and-popular-song canon, including “Body and Soul,” “Out of Nowhere,” and “I Cover the Waterfront.” Born in New York City on October 10, 1908, he went to Harvard at the age of 15, did some early arranging work for Guy Lombardo, and notched his first hit with “Coquette.” After an unhappy turn as a stockbroker, Green abandoned Wall Street…

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“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 Sims…

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Last year Night Lights began an annual Bastille Day-week salute to the convergence of all things French and jazz with Paris Noir, a program about post-World War II expatriate African-American musicians in France. This year our tribute show focuses on jazz interpretations of the many songs that have been written about the City of Light.

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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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Trumpeter Cal Massey was an African-American jazz composer, little-known now and in his lifetime, but whose work was recorded by musicians such as John Coltrane, Freddie Hubbard, Charlie Parker, Lee Morgan, Jackie McLean, McCoy Tyner, and Archie Shepp. In the 1960s Massey made his Brooklyn home into a kind of community center for jazz artists and produced…

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Some jazz news of note from the past week or so…

*Mosaic Records has put up information and a discography for their forthcoming Lester Young and Count Basie set. I was told last week that the Benny Goodman Columbia box is on track for an early-summer release.

*Ethan Iverson of The Bad Plus has posted his recent interview with bassist Charlie Haden, which originally appeared in this past January’s Downbeat.

*The widely-syndicated, Siskel-and-Ebert-style radio jazz program Listen Here! will cease distribution at the end of this month. Word is that NPR’s long-running…

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A couple of weeks ago Bernard Gordillo, who writes the WFIU early-music show Harmonia, mentioned a recent interest in Pannonica de Koenigswarter, also known as Nica, the Jazz Baroness, or simply the Baroness. The Baroness was a sort of jazz patron, a woman well-liked by the jazz musicians she befriended on the mid-20th-century New York bebop scene; she counted Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk among her closest companions from that community. As a wealthy white woman spending time…

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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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