Latest posts
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Baden Powell and Os Afro-Sambas: When Brazilian Guitar Met Afro-Brazilian Tradition
Few Brazilian guitarists made virtuosity sound as inseparable from cultural memory as Baden Powell. His technique could be spectacular, but technique alone never explained the force of his playing. Beneath the rapid lines, dense chord voicings and percussive attacks was an unusually broad understanding of what the violão could contain: samba, choro, bossa nova, classical…
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Duke Ellington and Anatomy of a Murder: When Jazz Entered the Crime Scene
When Hollywood Needed Duke Ellington By 1959, Duke Ellington had already spent decades proving that jazz could contain far more than the categories assigned to it. His orchestra had been a laboratory for composition, instrumental personality, orchestration, blues, popular song, extended form, and the constantly evolving language of African American music. Ellington had written for…
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George Shearing and the Shearing Sound: How a London Pianist Created One of Jazz’s Most Distinctive Quintets
George Shearing built one of the most instantly recognizable sounds in twentieth-century jazz without depending on volume, theatrical virtuosity or radical rupture. A few measures could be enough. Piano states a melody in tightly organized harmony. Vibraphone doubles it above. Guitar reinforces the line below. Bass and drums provide a supple rhythmic foundation. The resulting…
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Louis Armstrong Meets Oscar Peterson: When the Father of the Jazz Solo Met the Master of Swing
From New Orleans to the Art of the Individual Voice There is a strange problem with listening to Louis Armstrong from the distance of nearly a century. So much of what he introduced became fundamental to jazz that it can be difficult to hear how radical it once was. The long improvised solo, the instrumentalist…
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Dinah Washington and the Rhythmic Authority: The Queen, the Max Roach Precision, and the 1954 Dinah Jams Masterwork
The Chronicle of an Era: The Mid-Fifties Studio Jam Session Vanguard and EmArcy’s Pure Captive Energy By the arrival of 1954, the recording of vocal jazz was largely dictated by tight, commercial radio formulas. Record executives typically placed female vocalists behind rigid, highly polished pop orchestras, allowing them exactly three minutes to deliver a pristine,…
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Bessie Smith and the Acoustic Majesty: The Empress, Young Louis Armstrong, and the 1925 St. Louis Blues Foundation
The Chronicle of an Era: The Acoustic Era Twilight, the Primitive Horn, and Columbia’s Early Race Records In the freezing weeks of January 1925, the global recording industry was standing on the absolute precipice of its first massive technological revolution. The invention of the electric microphone was still a closely guarded laboratory secret at Western…
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Nina Simone and Pastel Blues: Where Blues, Protest and Classical Discipline Became One
There are albums that document a singer at a particular moment, and there are albums that seem to contain an entire artistic identity. Nina Simone’s Pastel Blues belongs to the second category. Released by Philips in 1965, it lasts little more than half an hour, yet within that relatively compact space Simone moves through blues,…
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Sarah Vaughan with Clifford Brown: When the Divine One Met the Brightest Trumpet in Jazz
Some jazz albums feel inevitable only after they exist. Sarah Vaughan with Clifford Brown is one of them. Sarah Vaughan had already established herself as one of the most technically extraordinary singers to emerge from the bebop generation. Clifford Brown, still in his twenties, had become the trumpeter whose combination of brilliance, warmth and melodic…
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Keith Jarrett — The Köln Concert: The Night Improvisation Became a World of Its Own
Cologne, January 24, 1975: A Concert That Almost Never Happened Few recordings in jazz history have accumulated a mythology as persistent as The Köln Concert. The circumstances seem almost designed for retrospective legend: a twenty-nine-year-old Keith Jarrett arrives in Cologne exhausted from touring, discovers that the piano prepared for him is not the instrument he…