Just as we were getting started with the long, arduous defense of our position that jazz—and all other creative forms of American music—died sometime before 1980, we caught wind of an article from the November, 2012 issue of The Atlantic that agrees with us in principle, but takes a wildly divergent view of the mechanics […]
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 […]
One thing that has always intrigued us, at least in a silly, coincidental sort of way, begins with the fact that many of the Count Basie band’s best 1960’s arrangements were written by Sammy Nestico. Any dweeb who ever played in his high school jazz or stage band has played a Nestico arrangement at least […]
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, […]