The Birth of the Cool Songbook
Posted in Shows on Jun 9th, 2008
The Birth of the Cool was a milestone in modern jazz—a handful of arrangements, compositions, recording sessions, and performances that, as historian Ted Gioia notes, “turned the jazz idiom on its head.” It extended the idea of what a jazz combo could sound like, and it provided an aesthetic head of steam for several of its creators. Recorded at the end of the 1940s by a group led by Miles Davis, these sides were obscure at first…
Based on the true story of accused murderess Barbara Graham, the 1958 movie I Want to Live! employed a jazz soundtrack written by Johnny Mandel and performed by such jazz stalwarts as Gerry Mulligan, Bud Shank and Art Farmer (who appeared in the movie’s opening scenes), along with Frank Rosolino, Jack Sheldon, and Shelly Manne. Susan Hayward (who met a grisly demise in many of her films from the 1940s and 1950s) played Graham, a woman with a troubled past and a real-life jazz and Gerry Mulligan fan who…
Clarinetist Pee Wee Russell’s career on record stretched all the way from the 1920s, when he played with musicians such as Jack Teagarden and Bix Beiderbecke, to the 1960s, when he appeared with Thelonious Monk at Newport and made albums that included compositions by modernists such as Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane. Although he was pegged as being Dixieland by some and trumpeted as an elder hero of the 60s avant-garde by others, Russell remained a school unto himself…
Based on the true story of accused murderess Barbara Graham, the 1958 movie I Want to Live! employed a jazz soundtrack written by Johnny Mandel and performed by such jazz stalwarts as Gerry Mulligan, Bud Shank and Art Farmer (who appeared in the movie’s opening scenes), along with Frank Rosolino, Jack Sheldon, and Shelly Manne. Susan Hayward
Jazz artists have occasionally revisited albums years or decades after their original release, sometimes rerecording them in their entirety. Often this has been done to take advantage…
The Subterraneans, the only novel of Jack Kerouac’s to be adapted to film so far, was released in 1960, when the media fever surrounding the Beat Generation (much of it inspired by the publication of Kerouac’s On the Road in 1957) was still at a high pitch. Hollywood took great liberties with Kerouac’s story…
This week on Night Lights it’s “Jazz Studio 3 & 4: John Graas and Jack Millman,” two more entries in Decca’s mid-1950s Jazz Studio series. John Graas was a classically-trained French horn player who worked with several famous big bands in the 1940s and who studied with both Lennie Tristano and West Coast music guru Wesley La Violette. In the 1950s he…
