(left to right) Jerry Goodman, Stuff Smith, Regina Carter (continued from part 2) Jean-Luc Ponty, like Stephane Grappelli before him, was something of a teen prodigy among French violinists. As early as 1960, Ponty was wowing his countrymen with his biting, complex, hard bop lines, and by the late 1960’s, he had garnered international attention. […]
We’ve created a playlist to support the contentions we’ve made in our four-part post, “With apologies to Miles Davis“. As with all of our listening suggestions, you can click on the song title and you’ll be taken to an Amazon.com page where you can either listen to a sample, buy the individual song as an […]
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 […]
Detroit-bred trumpeter Donald Byrd, one of the leading figures in 1950’s jazz, and a prominent participant in pop music and academia in the years after that, has died at the age of 80. The Detroit Free Press ran one of the more lengthy obits yesterday. Read it here. In contrast to the esteem in which […]
In our last few posts, we’ve begun a lament about the demise of individuality and easily recognized styles among musicians. Here’s a suggested playlist to support what we’ve discussed thus far. As usual, hit the song titles, which are Amazon links, to listen to a sample, and to purchase the songs individually. We mentioned Count […]
Since we’ve already posted obituaries for rock & roll and country music, we’d better get down to the real business of this blogsite: jazz. As we’ve begun to prove, jazz—and every other form of American music—is dead. Just how and why will be explored at length as we move forward, but we thought it would […]
Well, perhaps not exactly. But John Travolta did star in a particularly bad 1980 movie called “Urban Cowboy” (a follow-up to his bigger, and less-maligned, music picture, “Saturday Night Fever”), which effectively marks the closest thing we can isolate as an exact time of death for genuine country music in America. And, as everyone knows […]
Don McLean, in his ubiquitous 1971 megahit “American Pie”, characterized February 3, 1959 as “the day the music died”. En route to a concert via a small, chartered plane, proto pop-rockers Buddy Holly, J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson and Ritchie Valens were all killed when their aircraft crashed in an Iowa field on that […]
Every blog, commercial and otherwise, needs a first post. This site will mostly be about jazz, but as an opening volley, we’ll share a post from a loosely-related blog which promotes a website selling vaguely humorous t-shirts. The original piece was meant to sell a t-shirt imprinted with the phrase “Rock & Roll Is Dead, […]