“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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In the mid-1960s, as rock music continued its powerful ascent while jazz seemed to split into two camps of what one journalist tagged “heard-it-all-before or never-want-to-hear-it-again,” tenor saxophonist and flutist Charles Lloyd formed a quartet that found enthusiastic favor with young rock audiences and gave partial inspiration for the jazz fusion styles that Miles Davis and others would begin to explore as the decade ended. Lloyd had…

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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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Notes and tones from around the web:

Doug Ramsey on a posthumous release from pianist Gil Coggins.

On the heels of his fantastic Hal McKusick series, Marc Myers follows up with a profile of David Amram…

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