Posted in Shows on Mar 17th, 2007
The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, considered today to be the most renowned of the 1940s “all-girl” bands, emerged in the late 1930s from the Piney Woods School, a foster-child institution for African-American children in Mississippi. The “International” part of their moniker was inspired by the Chinese, Hawaiian, Mexican, and Native American heritage of some of the members. By 1941 the Sweethearts were playing the Apollo Theater…
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Posted in Shows on Mar 10th, 2007
Many listeners know Peggy Lee as a great jazz singer, but she was also a prolific writer of songs—composing or co-composing nearly 200 of them, including hits such as “I Don’t Know Enough About You” and…
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Posted in Shows on Mar 3rd, 2007
Alice Coltrane grew up as Alice McLeod in the thriving Detroit jazz scene of the 1940s and 1950s and first gained notice in the jazz world through her work with vibraphonist Terry Gibbs. In 1963 she met the tenor saxophonist John Coltrane while Coltrane and Gibbs’ groups…
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Posted in Shows on Nov 25th, 2006
In 1945 pianist, composer and arranger Mary Lou Williams debuted her first extended work, The Zodiac Suite, with musical movements for each sign of the zodiac. Williams was 35 years old, already a veteran of the swing era; she was playing regularly at New York City’s Café Society, hosting a weekly radio program, and had begun…
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Posted in Shows on Oct 28th, 2006
Dick and Kiz Harp were a husband-and-wife, piano-and-vocals duo who ran their own nightclub (converted from a warehouse and called “The 90th Floor,” after a lesser-known Cole Porter song they performed) in Dallas, Texas at the end of the 1950s. They’ve developed a cult following among jazz-vocal aficionados …
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Posted in Shows on Jun 3rd, 2006
Mary Ann McCall, whom Johnny Mandel once called “the greatest of all the big band singers,” is a secret heroine of American jazz vocal music. Little-known today, and not widely recorded during even…
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Posted in Shows on Mar 25th, 2006
“The Late Miss D” features the 1962-63 Roulette recordings of Dinah Washington, who died at the age of 38 in 1963. Washington’s Roulette period offers a mix of ballads with strings, blues, pop, and big-band jazz; although often…
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Posted in Shows on Mar 18th, 2006
Although an admirer of Jimmy Smith, Shirley Scott found her own sound on the Hammond B-3 and became its most renowned female practioner, recording a number of soul-jazz classics from the late 1950s onward. We’ll hear selections from the many albums that she and husband Stanley Turrentine recorded during the 1960s, as well as collaborations [...]
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