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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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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Jazz writer and musician Allen Lowe has put together a terrific series of 9-CD sets documenting jazz from 1895 to 1950 called That Devilin’ Tune, which includes his book of the same name. I’ve posted about these sets before, particularly Volume 4, which covers the 1945-1950 period…

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Mosaic Records has posted information, including discographies, about new sets featuring Dave Liebman’s Pendelum group and some Helen Merrill jazz-vocal sides on their upcoming releases page, along with more details about the forthcoming early-1950s Oscar Peterson collection.

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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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Spirituals were African-American religious folksongs that grew out of the slavery experience and the introduction of Christianity into slaves’ lives. Rooted in African musical tradition as well, they reflected life in a strange and terribly oppressive new world. They were often improvisations upon older hymns that became entirely new songs, and in some ways they foreshadow…

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Music has been an important part of the Disney formula ever since the studio began making films in the late 1920s, and the enormous success of the so-called “Magic Kingdom” has pushed many of its movie songs to the…

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