Latest posts
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Paulinho da Costa: The Brazilian Percussionist Who Changed the Rhythm of American Music
From Rio to Los Angeles There are musicians whose influence is easy to measure because their names stand at the front of the record. Paulinho da Costa belongs to a more elusive category. For decades, his percussion has been embedded inside recordings heard by millions of people who may never have known who was creating…
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Max Roach and the Architecture of Resistance: Avant-Garde Percussion, Screaming Liricism, and the 1960 Freedom Now Civil Rights Monument
The Chronicle of an Era: The Civil Rights Flashpoint, the Candid Records Underground, and the 1960 Avant-Garde Inversion By the turn of the 1960s, the American social and musical landscape was vibrating with a fierce, unstable revolutionary energy. The superficial peace of the 1950s post-war boom had completely dissolved, replaced by the explosive, unyielding demands…
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Miles Davis, Gil Evans, and the Iberian Mirage: Orchestral Impressionism, Flamenco Agony, and the 1960 Columbia Stereophonic Canvas
The Chronicle of an Era: The Third Stream Confluence, the 30th Street Studio Sanctuary, and the 1960 Aesthetic Metamorphosis By the turn of the 1960s, the American jazz avant-garde was seeking to break free from traditional American blues structures and pop-song frameworks. While small combos were exploring the open vistas of modalism, a highly sophisticated…
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Bill Evans Trio at the Village Vanguard: The Day Three Musicians Changed the Piano Trio
A Sunday in Greenwich Village On Sunday, June 25, 1961, Bill Evans sat down at the piano in the Village Vanguard with Scott LaFaro on bass and Paul Motian on drums. The trio had been developing its language for roughly two years, gradually moving away from the conventional hierarchy in which the pianist occupied the…
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Colosseum and the Proto-Fusion Apex: Heavy Blues-Jazz Architecture, Hammond Incantations, and the 1969 Vertigo Spiral Masterpiece
The Chronicle of an Era: The British Underground Inversion, The Vertigo Spiral Laboratory, and the 1969 Counterculture Confluence By the arrival of 1969, the international musical underground was experiencing a volatile, highly creative state of stylistic friction. In London, the traditional boundaries separating genres were completely disintegrating. The electric blues boom that had dominated the…
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Herbie Hancock and Maiden Voyage: The Album That Turned the Ocean Into Modern Jazz
On March 17, 1965, Herbie Hancock entered Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Englewood Cliffs with an idea that was unusually ambitious even by the standards of a decade transforming jazz almost month by month. Rather than simply assemble five compositions for another Blue Note session, Hancock imagined an album whose pieces would inhabit a shared…
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Frank Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim: How Bossa Nova Taught the Chairman to Whisper
When Frank Sinatra Lowered His Voice By January 1967, Frank Sinatra had almost nothing left to prove as a singer. He had survived the collapse of his first period of fame, rebuilt himself during the 1950s, transformed the long-playing album into a vehicle for sustained emotional narratives, and developed one of the most sophisticated approaches…
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Gerry Mulligan & Chet Baker at Carnegie Hall: A Reunion Across Two Jazz Eras
When the Past Walked Back Onto the Stage By the time Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker appeared together at Carnegie Hall in November 1974, their original partnership had already become part of jazz history. More than twenty years had passed since the pianoless quartet they formed in Los Angeles had transformed a simple instrumental limitation…
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Oneness of Juju and the Afro-Centric Continuum: Incantatory Grooves, Spiritual Avant-Garde, and the Black Fire Coordinates of ‘African Rhythms’
The Chronicle of an Era: The Independent Underground Network, The Black Fire Label, and the 1975 Liberation Grooves By the middle of the 1970s, the radical socio-political fires that had fueled the late 1960s Black Power movement inside the United States were transforming into deeply sophisticated, self-sustaining cultural institutions. Major corporate record labels were aggressively…