Nellie Lutcher, a star pianist and singer of the late 1940s who mixed boogie and swing riffs on the keyboards with sly and humorously suggestive lyrics, once remarked that it was 1930s performer Cleo Brown who’d “sort of started a trend for girl piano players and vocalists” with her recording of the song “It’s a Heavenly Thing.” There had been an even earlier, blues-oriented practitioner of the style, Kansas City’s Julia Lee…

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Benny Carter led an extraordinarily long life in jazz; as one writer pointed out, he was probably the only musician who both recorded into an acoustic horn and surfed his own website. Big-band veteran and arranger, author of jazz standards such as “When Lights Are Low” and “Blues in My Heart,” pioneer for black composers in Hollywood…

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