Posted in Shows on Jul 7th, 2008
Last year Night Lights began an annual Bastille Day-week salute to the convergence of all things French and jazz with Paris Noir, a program about post-World War II expatriate African-American musicians in France. This year our tribute show focuses on jazz interpretations of the many songs that have been written about the City of Light.
Continue Reading »
Posted in Shows on Mar 31st, 2008
Trumpeter Booker Little would have turned 70 this Wednesday if he were still alive. Little was born in Memphis on April 2, 1938; he died in October of 1961 at the age of 23, leaving behind a small but significant body of recorded work that continues to influence modern-day jazz artists such as trumpeter Dave Douglas, who recorded a tribute to Little in the 1990s. He was part of a superlative generation of Memphis jazz musicians that included…
Continue Reading »
Posted in Shows on Jan 16th, 2008
Memphis, Tennessee is renowned throughout the world for its remarkable contributions to 20th-century popular music–a place where the Sun Records and Stax/Volt labels played significant roles in shaping the respective sounds of rock ‘n roll and soul music, and where musicians from W.C.Handy and B.B. King to Elvis Presley and Alex Chilton found their artistic voices. But Memphis also has a jazz legacy, and one group of musicians that emerged from the city in the late 1950s…
Continue Reading »
Posted in Shows on Oct 8th, 2007
Max Roach was a revolutionary bebop drummer, a leader of the classic Clifford Brown-Sonny Rollins hardbop quintet, a social activist, jazz educator and intellectual, a forerunner of Do-It-Yourself recording, and an explorer of the avant-garde…among other things. Max Roach contained multitudes, and his death in August of 2007 reverberated across the jazz world as if it were a long solo being played on a cosmic drumset. This program, an audio snapshot of his career on record, features his work with pianists Herbie Nichols and Bud Powell, his hardbop configurations with Clifford Brown and Sonny Rollins…
Continue Reading »
Posted in Jazz Notes on Sep 17th, 2007
Ignore the terrrible headline (boy, that’s dignity for ya, after playing certain parts of your southern anatomy off for the past 60 years): Sonny Rollins is back in trio form tomorrow night at Carnegie Hall. The performance will be coupled on CD with Rollins’ debut at Carnegie 50 years ago for a Voice of America concert. In the meantime, a previously…
Continue Reading »
Posted in Jazz Notes on Sep 8th, 2007
In honor of tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins’ 77th birthday–and his upcoming Carnegie Hall concert–SonnyRollins.com is putting up a track every day from a previously unreleased June 1956 performance of the Max Roach-Clifford Brown Quintet, featuring Sonny in the tenor spot…
Continue Reading »
Posted in Jazz Notes on Aug 17th, 2007
Fellow drummer Stan Levey:
The way he broke things up between his hands and feet confused me at first. But I came to realize that, because of him, drumming was no longer just time, it was music.
An amazing discussion of Roach and his recordings at Organissimo which actually began more than a week…
Continue Reading »
Posted in Jazz Notes on Aug 16th, 2007
RIP posts are a drag, for obvious reasons, and this one is a major bummer–Max Roach has left us. Another giant gone. The New York Times has an obituary up, and WKCR has begun a memorial broadcast that will continue through August 22. (Also check out the tribute at Who Walk in Brooklyn.) Word is that he passed away in his sleep early this morning, that his family was…
Continue Reading »