We love movies. Hell, we love movies almost as much as we love music. But unlike creative American forms such as jazz, rock and country, movies are no more dead or alive today than they’ve ever been, which bodes well for cinema’s future. Or sounds its death knell. Whatever. We love ’em regardless. Combining these […]
As anyone with even a cursory knowledge of jazz is aware, many of its most famous exponents, particularly those working in the years 1940 through 1960, were users of pharmaceuticals, both legal and otherwise. The most dangerous drug typically abused in that era was heroin. While musicians had been smokers of marijuana from jazz’s earliest […]
Musing away on a sunny. cold day in Michigan, we figured an aimless web search was in order. It’s amazing what one can turn up. First—and we’re filing this under the “Are You Serious? I Must Have a Closed-Head Injury!” column—news comes to us that Molly Ringwald—yes, that Molly Ringwald—is accepting payment as a jazz […]
Your (mostly one-man) staff here at Dead Like Jazz has been seriously “afk” for a few days, mostly due to an intervention by real life. A car accident to be specific. Luckily, even agnostics like us are blessed from time to time, and we escaped with minor, but reasonably painful, injuries. That relegated us to […]
Yesterday would have been Wardell Gray’s 92nd birthday. Why does that matter, and who the hell was he, you might ask? When I first started playing tenor saxophone back in the early 1970’s, I was oddly lucky to be turned on to Lester Young before almost any other saxophone players. Especially odd considering Young had […]
We have no idea why this popped into our consciousness today, but we thought we’d talk a bit about Soupy Sales. For those of you who are baby boomers around 60 years old, you’ll remember him for his daytime kids show on ABC, Lunch with Soupy, or perhaps from his many TV game-show appearances and […]
Continuing our swing playlist from yesterday, here are a few more items to check out. As always, click on the song title to link to Amazon audio samples and full versions for purchase. We’ve supported our contention that the late 1930’s saw an explosion of easily discernible styles among big band soloists and individual jazz […]
To provide audio support for our last post, “Individuality: a lost art, part 3”, here are some more items for your listening pleasure. These tracks will give you a taste of the artists we talked about. As always, click on the song title to hear a sample at Amazon.com, or to buy the music, a […]
We threatened to continue this diatribe, and so we will. Our contention is that creative American music all seemed to die at roughly the same time around 1980. We don’t mean that it disappeared. We simply mean that genres like jazz, country and rock all stopped evolving and either became repertory, classical forms, like jazz, […]