Latest posts
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Clifford Jordan: The Tenor Saxophonist Who Never Needed to Shout
Chicago, Blue Note and the Making of a Voice Chicago Before New York When Clifford Jordan arrived in New York in 1957, he was entering a jazz world crowded with extraordinary tenor saxophonists. Sonny Rollins was establishing an imposing new standard for thematic improvisation. John Coltrane was moving rapidly toward the language that would transform…
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Motoharu Yoshizawa and the Tokyo Free Jazz Underground: Mutant Acoustic Textures, Zen Minimalism, and the Subterranean Friction of ‘Inland Fish’
The Chronicle of an Era: The 1970s Tokyo Jazz-Kissa Subculture and the Radical Expansion of Free Improvisation By the arrival of 1974, the underground musical landscape of Tokyo, Japan, had engineered one of the most insular, intensely radical, and uncompromising artistic subcultures on the planet. While the mainstream global jazz markets were chasing the commercial…
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Kuku Agami: The Voice Between Copenhagen, Hip-Hop and the Global Groove
A Different Kind of JazzLatitude Story Some artists enter the JazzLatitude universe through an instrument. Others enter through a scene, a record label or a historical movement. Kuku Agami arrives through something more fluid: the movement of the human voice across hip-hop, soul, funk, electronic production and jazz-adjacent groove. Born in Denmark in 1977 and…
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Chris McGregor: The South African Exile Who Set European Jazz on Fire
Before the Brotherhood, There Was a Country He Had to Leave Chris McGregor’s music begins with a contradiction. He was a white South African pianist who became one of the most important interpreters and organizers of Black South African jazz during the apartheid era. He received formal training in European composition but was transformed by…
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The Lost Brazilian Jazz-Fusion Masterpiece That Waited 45 Years to Be Heard
The Brazilian Future That Almost Disappeared Some lost albums sound lost. They arrive decades later carrying obvious traces of unfinished sessions, abandoned experiments or musicians still searching for a direction. Their historical fascination can be greater than their musical achievement. The 1976 recordings of Marcos Resende & Index are something else entirely. When the tapes…
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Michael Garrick: The Poet of British Jazz Who Made Improvisation Speak in an English Voice
Before British Jazz Found Its Own Accent There was a time when being a serious modern jazz musician in Britain almost inevitably meant looking across the Atlantic. New York was the center of gravity. Charlie Parker had rewritten the language of improvisation, Thelonious Monk had transformed harmonic possibility, and Miles Davis, Charles Mingus and John…
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The Detroit Visionaries Who Built Their Own Jazz Universe
Detroit Had Its Own Idea of Freedom When the history of radical jazz in the 1970s is told, geography usually determines the story. Chicago had the AACM. St. Louis had the Black Artists Group. Los Angeles had Horace Tapscott and the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. New York remained the gravitational center, where loft jazz, free…
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Tohru Aizawa: The Japanese Jazz Bass Pioneer Who Defined an Era
The Quiet Foundation of Japan’s Jazz Revolution The history of Japanese jazz is often told through its extraordinary pianists, visionary saxophonists and internationally celebrated composers. Yet every thriving musical movement also depends upon artists whose work is less visible but equally essential. Among them stands Tohru Aizawa, one of the bassists who helped transform Japanese…
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Mongezi Feza: The South African Trumpet Genius Who Changed European Jazz
From the Eastern Cape to Exile Mongezi Feza’s story belongs to two histories that cannot easily be separated. One is the history of modern South African jazz, a music that developed under apartheid while drawing together American bebop, township rhythms, dance music, church traditions and local melodic languages. The other is the history of European…