Latest posts
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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,…
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Brad Mehldau’s Art of the Trio, Vol. 4: Reinventing the Piano Trio at the Village Vanguard
Brad Mehldau and the Evolution of the Piano Trio By the time Brad Mehldau returned to the Village Vanguard in January 1999 with bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jorge Rossy, the trio no longer sounded like a young pianist surrounded by sympathetic accompanists. It sounded like a band. That distinction lies at the center of…
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Glenn Miller and the Swing Precision: Military Alignment, The Crystal Clarinet Lead, and the Permanent Archive of the 1939–1942 Bluebird Monoliths
The Chronicle of an Era: The Big Band Industrialization and the Blueprint of Modern Sectional Alignment By the arrival of the late 1930s, big band swing had ceased to be an informal, improvisational subculture born in the underground clubs of Kansas City and Harlem; it had evolved into the absolute dominant pop industry of the…
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Krzysztof Komeda’s Astigmatic: The Album That Gave European Jazz a Voice of Its Own
Warsaw, 1965: A Different Future for Jazz In December 1965, Krzysztof Komeda entered the Warsaw Philharmonic with a quintet that existed at a remarkable intersection of Polish, German and Scandinavian jazz. Komeda was at the piano, Tomasz Stańko played trumpet, Zbigniew Namysłowski alto saxophone, Günter Lenz double bass and Rune Carlsson drums. Over a handful…
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Michael Wollny and the Gothic Gothicism: Expressionist Ivory, Romantic Deconstruction, and the 2014 Weltentraum Monolith
The Chronicle of an Era: The European Piano Renaissance and the Post-Corelli Vanguard By the arrival of the mid-2010s, the European acoustic piano trio had entered a highly demanding phase of intellectual and stylistic evolution. The historical foundations laid down by the classic American post-bop schools and the pioneering, spacious lyricism of the early Scandinavian…
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Don Burrows Quartet at the Sydney Opera House: An Australian Jazz Landmark
Jazz Enters a New Australian Stage When the Don Burrows Quartet performed at the Sydney Opera House in the early 1970s, the significance of the occasion extended well beyond the prestige of appearing inside Australia’s most recognizable new cultural building. Don Burrows had already spent decades establishing himself as one of the country’s leading jazz…