Posted in Jazz Notes on Mar 16th, 2008
Some jazz news of note from the past week or so…
*Mosaic Records has put up information and a discography for their forthcoming Lester Young and Count Basie set. I was told last week that the Benny Goodman Columbia box is on track for an early-summer release.
*Ethan Iverson of The Bad Plus has posted his recent interview with bassist Charlie Haden, which originally appeared in this past January’s Downbeat.
*The widely-syndicated, Siskel-and-Ebert-style radio jazz program Listen Here! will cease distribution at the end of this month. Word is that NPR’s long-running…
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Posted in Jazz Notes on Nov 24th, 2007
Brief notes for the holiday weekend:
*Brian Morton–co-author, along with the late, great Richard Cook, of the Penguin Guide to Jazz–has an article about Roscoe Mitchell in the latest issue of The Nation. Keep an eye out for Mitchell’s classic late-1970s album Nonaah, which should be surfacing as a Nessa Records reissue very, very soon.
*Copacetic Night Lights friend Bill Kirchner is taking his monthly turn on WBGO’s Jazz From the Archives this Sunday evening with a program on pianist Dick Twardzik…
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Posted in Jazz Notes on Nov 17th, 2007
In advance of this weekend’s program on Voice of America jazz DJ Willis Conover, listeners and visitors to the site may want to check out the Night Lights archives for these two previous programs: Jazz Goes to the Cold War. which takes a look at how the U.S. State Department employed jazz…
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Posted in Shows on Nov 12th, 2007
“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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Posted in Jazz Notes on Nov 6th, 2007
NPR has launched a new multimedia jazz and blues page as part of a larger new musical site. The site offers content produced by NPR and a number of contributing stations, including interviews, reviews, blogs, and streaming music. A first glance reveals…
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Posted in Shows on May 19th, 2007
In the 1940s and 1950s the jazz format emerged on radio, and with it a number of colorful, laidback on-air personalities who helped disseminate the new sounds of bebop and early R & B. In response, musicians sometimes wrote and recorded tributes to these DJs. In this program, inspired by the passing of longtime DJ great Oscar Treadwell, we’ll hear Charlie Parker’s…
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