Tag: jazz

Created in New Orleans and played around the world, the music we call jazz is filled with genius, legend, and tragedy.

“Live your life now in a positive way. Help people if you can. Don’t hurt people. That works perfectly for me, man.”

Jessica Lynne remembers a long distance love affair that began in Miami and the Billie Holiday song that kept her company through the relationship’s transitions.

Combining island sounds with stylish clothes and an unforgettable stage presence, one of New York City’s most original bands helped influence 1980s pop culture, and they never sacrificed their unclassifiable artistic vision.

When Columbia Records breached one of their big star’s contracts back in the 1950s, he sued and won.

Eccentricity was inseperable from this musical innovator’s artistic vision.

The ambitious radio personality created his own form of expression, called “word jazz,” to properly accomodate his musical voice and artistic ambitions.

The saxophone colossus recorded two concerts at the same venue fifty years apart. Only one recording emerged from the vault.

The influential singer’s voice cut across genres and decades, and it will continue to.

Greed and contractual disputes kept one beloved jazz singer’s masterpiece off the shelf for 40 years, and sent him into retirement.

An album that took five months to record sat in the vault for 20 years before finally getting pressed to vinyl.

On one summer day in 1998, XXL magazine gathered 177 hip-hop artists for one of the greatest musical photographs of all time: A Great Day in Hip-Hop.

Nate Chinen may have been the last full-time jazz reviewer at any American newspaper. He says jazz hasn’t been in a better place since the ’60s — but the commercial infrastructure is broken.

Jazz radio host Phil Schaap uses his deep knowledge of mid-century jazz to keep the music alive.

They were scheduled to play Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1959. So why did the gigs never happen?

Europe’s “First Lady of Jazz” moved to New York in 1955, played for five more years, then disappeared — while royalty checks piled up with her record label.

A century-defining album’s improbable genesis.

In the Seattle Weekly, Steve Griggs writes about John Coltrane’s first and only performances in Seattle, at the 225-seat Penthouse club, in 1965. Griggs provides a snapshot of the saxophonist’s life following his groundbreaking album A Love Supreme, during a period of artistic transition. Coltrane was usually in transition. He was expanding his sound again in […]

During the 1960s and 70s, legendary jazz drummer Art Taylor interviewed his fellow musicians. The interviews are collected in the 1993 book Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews, and it’s one of jazz’s greatest. The familial, casual conversations are also serious and insightful, full of history, portraiture, and revelations about race relations in America, and the […]

Horace Silver was one of jazz’s most influential composers and talented pianists. He’d played with countless greats, from Sonny Rollins to Miles Davis, and led a quintet that shaped jazz as we know it. You might not know Silver’s songs by name, but you’ve probably heard his melodies sampled in hip-hop. Silver died in June 2014 […]