The Daily Music Break’s first video chat features Jeff Claassen, a trumpet player and Associate Professor of Harmony at the Berklee School of Music. Jeff...
Category - Jazz
The first paragraph of the 1969 obituary of Coleman Hawkins in The New York Times puts him right where he belongs: Alongside Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington...
In the video above, Herbie Hancock explains to the audience and a rapt Elvis Costello the story behind the song “Watermelon Man,” which was a hit for him and...
Tenor sax player Stanley Turrentine, a native of Pittsburgh, lived from 1934 to 2000. Wikipedia’s profile notes that his career began in what it terms...
Sometimes, lesser known musicians are responsible for direction that music takes. Anderson Meade Lewis – better known as Meade Lux Lewis (the “Lux” is a...
My good friend MC Antil, who was nice enough to let me repost some of his insightful music commentary (here and here), this week posted a great appreciation of...
The Red Hot Jazz Archive – the place to go for information about old jazz – says that Fletcher Henderson ran the most successful African-American jazz band of...
Click to hear “Mood Indigo” by Duke Ellington, Barney Bigard and Irving Mills. Everyone knows that jazz sounds great. It looks great, too. Perhaps...
Roy Eldridge was known as Little Jazz because he was only 5 feet 6 inches tall. It is a cliche, but true: The small man had a very large influence. NPR says...
We tend to cut and package eras of music into neat and discreet parts. That helps us understand more easily how things evolved, what the essence of each...
