Suite History, Part 2: Michael McGerr on Ellington, Nelson, Carter and Marsalis
Posted in Jazz Notes on Feb 11th, 2008
Historian and Indiana University professor Michael McGerr is a man whose scholarly knowledge and personal enthusiasms are infectiously wedded. In Part 2 of this Night Lights interview, Michael talks about the influence of Duke Ellington’s ambitious Black, Brown and Beige suite and the civil-rights movement on later composers who undertook extended black musical histories as well. Michael is a guest on this week’s show, Suite History: Duke Ellington, Oliver Nelson, John Carter, and the African-American Odyssey…
In the early 20th century African-American composers began to write extended musical depictions of black American life–Scott Joplin with his unstaged opera 
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…
“Full Nelson” looks at the 1960s studio big-band recordings of saxophonist, arranger, and composer Oliver Nelson, who would have turned 75 on June 4, 2007. Nelson is best-known in the jazz world for his small-group Impulse LP…
“Dear Martin” is a program of jazz tributes to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. King was a jazz fan, and eloquently expressed his admiration for the music in his 
In 1960 Prestige’s Bob Weinstock launched a new series of records called Moodsville, as a response to the popularity of 1950s “mood music” albums, ushered in to a large extent by Jackie Gleason’s Capitol LPs featuring trumpeter Bobby Hackett. Prestige attempted to stake a somewhat higher aesthetic ground…
