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 […]
To an attentive jazz listener, and one who’s into arcane and archaic music, the tenor saxophone playing of Ben Webster is immediately recognizable, and sounds nothing like that of Lester Young. Or Sonny Rollins. Or even like a less-ambitious player such as King Curtis. Similarly, none of the these players sound like any of the […]