Posted in Shows on Oct 8th, 2007
Max Roach was a revolutionary bebop drummer, a leader of the classic Clifford Brown-Sonny Rollins hardbop quintet, a social activist, jazz educator and intellectual, a forerunner of Do-It-Yourself recording, and an explorer of the avant-garde…among other things. Max Roach contained multitudes, and his death in August of 2007 reverberated across the jazz world as if it were a long solo being played on a cosmic drumset. This program, an audio snapshot of his career on record, features his work with pianists Herbie Nichols and Bud Powell, his hardbop configurations with Clifford Brown and Sonny Rollins…
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Posted in Jazz Notes on Sep 14th, 2007
This weekend’s upcoming program, The Connection, takes a look at the music and movie version of Jack Gelber’s award-winning play about heroin addicts, a number of whom are jazz musicians. As a companion Night Lights program from our archives, check out Resolution: Jazz From Rehab, which features two early-1960s albums made by jazz musicians either in recovery or emphasizing…
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Posted in Jazz Notes on Aug 29th, 2007
Let us now praise famous avises: Charlie Parker, born August 29, 1920. Parker’s been in the air a lot lately, what with the death of his bebop compatriot Max Roach. Like Billie Holiday, his art is still somehow strong enough to defy all of the categorization and commodification that’s been heaped onto it. A hipster saint he may be, but burn your candles for the hard grace of his music. Suggested Night Lights listening: our August 2005 At the Birth of Bop program…
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Posted in Shows on Aug 27th, 2007
“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..
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Posted in Shows on May 19th, 2007
In the 1940s and 1950s the jazz format emerged on radio, and with it a number of colorful, laidback on-air personalities who helped disseminate the new sounds of bebop and early R & B. In response, musicians sometimes wrote and recorded tributes to these DJs. In this program, inspired by the passing of longtime DJ great Oscar Treadwell, we’ll hear Charlie Parker’s…
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Posted in Shows on Feb 10th, 2007
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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Posted in Shows on Jan 6th, 2007
This program focuses on two unique early-1960s albums made by guitarist Joe Pass and pianist Elmo Hope. Pass’ 1961 Pacific Jazz LP Sounds of Synanon was his debut as a leader; although he’d begun to play professionally as a teenager in the late 1940s, stays in prison and rehabilitation centers for drug addiction had hampered his career throughout the 1950s…
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Posted in Shows on Sep 9th, 2006
Jazz impresario Norman Granz, who started the popular Jazz at the Philharmonic concert tour series in the 1940s as well as the record label that came to be known as Verve, also produced a lavish package of jazz recordings…
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