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Jazz Impressions of Paris

Paris 1950sLast 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.

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Thelonius Monk

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Too Little, Too Soon: Booker Little

Booker LittleTrumpeter 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…

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Memphis Beale StreetMemphis, 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…

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Portrait of Max: Max Roach, 1924-2007

Max RoachMax 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…

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Sonny RollinsIgnore 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…

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Sonny Rollins with Clifford Brown and Max RoachIn honor of tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins’ 77th birthday–and his upcoming Carnegie Hall concertSonnyRollins.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…

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More Max

Max RoachFellow 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…

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Max RoachRIP 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…

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