Posted in Jazz Notes on Apr 5th, 2008
Rifftides blogger and jazz eminence Doug Ramsey hipped readers several days ago to a Sunday, April 6 broadcast of Benny Carter’s rarely-heard “Kansas City Suite.” It’s at 1 p.m. PDT on KPLU.org…
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Posted in Shows on Mar 17th, 2008
In 1945 pianist, composer and arranger Mary Lou Williams debuted her first extended work, The Zodiac Suite, with musical movements for each sign of the zodiac. Williams was 35 years old, already a veteran of the swing era; she was playing regularly at New York City’s Café Society, hosting a weekly radio program, and had begun…
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 Shows on Nov 25th, 2006
In 1945 pianist, composer and arranger Mary Lou Williams debuted her first extended work, The Zodiac Suite, with musical movements for each sign of the zodiac. Williams was 35 years old, already a veteran of the swing era; she was playing regularly at New York City’s Café Society, hosting a weekly radio program, and had begun…
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