Latest posts
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Chet Baker and the Art of Restraint: How Chet Baker Sings Redefined the Cool Jazz Voice
Before the Voice, There Was the Trumpet By the time Chet Baker began recording the performances that would form Chet Baker Sings, American jazz already knew the essential characteristics of his trumpet. The sound was light but not weak, lyrical without becoming decorative, technically controlled without advertising virtuosity, and emotionally direct in a way that…
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Tubby Hayes and the British Hard Bop Explosion: The Little Giant, High-Velocity Tenor Cascades, and the 1961 Tubbs Masterpiece
The Chronicle of an Era: The London Jazz Frontier and the West End Crucible By the dawning of the 1960s, British modern jazz was fighting a fierce battle for creative self-determination. For over a decade, London’s West End clubs had been heavily dominated by the immense cultural gravity of American import records, leaving British musicians…
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Charlie Parker and the Birth of Bebop: How Bird Changed the Language of Jazz
There are musicians who become central to the history of jazz because they perfect an existing language, and there are musicians who make the language itself sound suddenly insufficient. Charlie Parker belonged to the second group. When his alto saxophone began circulating through the clubs, jam sessions and recording studios of the 1940s, the shock…
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Milton Nascimento — Courage: The Album That Carried the Sound of Minas to the World
Before the World Knew Milton When Courage appeared in 1969, Milton Nascimento was still several years away from the album that would permanently attach his name to one of the most important musical movements in Brazil. Clube da Esquina had not yet arrived. The extraordinary network of musicians, composers and lyricists associated with Minas Gerais…
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Django Reinhardt: How a Romani Guitarist Created a New Language for European Jazz
Django Reinhardt: How a Romani Guitarist Created a New Language for European Jazz Long before the electric guitar became one of the defining instruments of popular music, Django Reinhardt demonstrated that a guitarist in Europe could alter the direction of jazz without imitating the musicians who had created the music in the United States. His…
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Ella Fitzgerald and Cole Porter: The Songbook That Redefined the Art of Jazz Singing
Ella Fitzgerald and Cole Porter: The Songbook That Redefined the Art of Jazz Singing By 1956, Ella Fitzgerald had already lived several musical lives. She had been the young singer whose recording of “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” became a national success with Chick Webb’s orchestra; she had inherited leadership responsibilities after Webb’s death; she had mastered the…
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Sérgio Mendes & Brasil ’66: How Brazilian Music Found a New Global Audience
From Rio de Janeiro to Brasil ’66 Long before Sérgio Mendes became internationally recognizable through the bright vocal harmonies and rhythmic precision of Brasil ’66, he was a jazz pianist in Rio de Janeiro trying to understand what modern Brazilian music could become. That beginning matters because the enormous commercial success of “Mas Que Nada,”…
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Lisa Ono and the Bossa Nova Diaspora: Transpacific Minimalism, The Acoustic Nylon Whisper, and the Sophisticated Archive of the 1989–1991 Rio-Tokyo Landmarks
The Chronicle of an Era: The Transpacific Bossa Nova Migration and the Aesthetic of Total Subtlety By the arrival of the late 1980s, the global landscape of Bossa Nova had transitioned from its golden mid-century explosion into a highly sophisticated, cross-cultural diaspora. The pioneering, sun-drenched architecture laid down in Rio de Janeiro by João Gilberto,…
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Herbie Hancock and Empyrean Isles: The Album That Connected Post-Bop to the Groove
In June 1964, Herbie Hancock entered Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Englewood Cliffs with Freddie Hubbard, Ron Carter and Tony Williams and recorded an album that seems, in retrospect, to contain several possible futures of jazz at once. Empyrean Isles lasts little more than thirty-five minutes and contains only four compositions, all written by Hancock,…