Tag: illinois jacquet

Individuality: another swing playlist, part 2
By February 12, 2013 0 Comments Read More →

Individuality: another swing playlist, part 2

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 […]

Posted in: Hear & Buy Playlists, Jazz
Individuality: a lost art, part 3.
By February 10, 2013 0 Comments Read More →

Individuality: a lost art, part 3.

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, […]

Posted in: Jazz, Rants
By February 8, 2013 0 Comments Read More →

Let’s watch a movie! About jazz!

In 1944, the then-young jazz impresario Norman Granz was asked by Warner Bros. to put together some musicians for a short subject film about jazz. Granz had been recommended by photographer Gjon Mili, an Albanian-born engineer and technical photographer who had recently become famous by using his freeze-motion photographic technique on a series for Life […]

Posted in: Jazz, Videos