Posted in Shows on Apr 7th, 2008
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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Posted in Jazz Notes on Apr 3rd, 2008
*Several radio stations around the country are adding Night Lights to their weekly lineup. KMHD-Portland, Oregon will be carrying the program at 8 p.m. PDT on Monday evenings. Beginning May 10, KOSU-Oklahoma Public Radio will broadcast Night Lights on Saturday evenings at 11 p.m. CDT. And KMBH/KHID-McAllen and Brownsville, Texas will soon
Posted in Jazz Notes on Feb 11th, 2008
Historian and Indiana University professor Michael McGerr is a man whose scholarly knowledge and personal enthusiasms are infectiously wedded. In Part 2 of this Night Lights interview, Michael talks about the influence of Duke Ellington’s ambitious Black, Brown and Beige suite and the civil-rights movement on later composers who undertook extended black musical histories as well. Michael is a guest on this week’s show, Suite History: Duke Ellington, Oliver Nelson, John Carter, and the African-American Odyssey…
Posted in Jazz Notes on Feb 9th, 2008
Our guest on this week’s Night Lights program Suite History is Michael McGerr, a historian and professor at Indiana University in Bloomington. Michael, author of the book A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920, frequently teaches a course at IU on American popular music in the 20th century. He has a particular passion and expertise for Duke Ellington, one of the three composers whose music is featured in Suite History, and he can be heard in two previous WFIU documentaries…
Posted in WFIU Jazz Shows & Specials on Feb 6th, 2008
The inspiration came from a late-night party, a convergence of Hollywood glamour and nascent civil-rights activism with one of America’s greatest jazz orchestras. In the summer of 1941, as Americans warily regarded a world war that seemed to be edging ever closer to their shores, Duke Ellington staged what he would later call “the first ’social significance’ show,” Jump for Joy. Jump for Joy was an all-black musical revue that Ellington said “would take Uncle Tom out of the theater and say things that would make the audience think.” It featured the Ellington orchestra in its so-called “Blanton-Webster” years, playing at the peak of its powers, and up-and-coming African-American…
Posted in Shows on Feb 4th, 2008
In the early 20th century African-American composers began to write extended musical depictions of black American life–Scott Joplin with his unstaged opera Treemonisha, pianist James P. Johnson with his Yamekraw: a Negro Rhapsody, and–perhaps most successfully–William Grant Still with his Afro-American Symphony in 1931. That same year Duke Ellington told a reporter, “I’m going to compose a musical evolution of the Negro race.” It took Ellington…
Posted in Jazz Notes on Jan 19th, 2008
A number of radio stations around the country have picked up the Night Lights show Dear Martin: Jazz Tributes to Martin Luther King Jr. Station links and air dates follow:
WGBH-Boston: Monday, Jan. 21 from midnight-1 a.m. EST
KZYX-Mendocino County, California: Sunday, Jan. 20 at 2 p.m. Pacific time
KSJD-Cortez, Colorado: Monday, Jan. 21 at 1 p.m…
Posted in WFIU Jazz Shows & Specials on Jan 2nd, 2008
More from last Friday evening’s Afterglow program devoted to jazz and jazz-vocal recordings of the songs from Show Boat. Hour 2 features several very different versions of “Ol’ Man River,” including a contemporaneous …
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