Each week, Fritz exchanges thoughts with Aly Krajewski about the Song of the Week featured on Jazz Spectrum Saturday.By Fritz ByersHi Aly,
e.e. cummings was right to say that
“Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully out of Nowhere)arranging Read More
By Fritz ByersThe tenor saxophonist Lester Young is widely – and I think plausibly – credited with inventing the use of the word “cool” to describe something hip or fashionable or, well, you know. That alone should land him in one or more Halls of Fame – who in American history has more enduringly shaped the national vocabulary with a single word? This cracks me up: the original OED isn’t having any of this use of cool. BUT, in a supplement, the editors added several usages. Read More
By Fritz ByersThis Friday’s 10pm hour presents in its entirety the pianist Andrew Hill’s 1964 triumph, Point of Departure. Twined with the five tracks from that album are two cuts from the guitarist Nels Cline’s 2006 date, New Monastery: A View into the Music of Andrew Hill. Each of the Cline excursions is tied to Point of Departure. Read More
By Fritz Byers In 1930, Babe Ruth signed a contract with the Yankees under which he was paid $80,000 a year to play baseball. At the time, Herbert Hoover occupied the position of President of the United States. It is a measure of the quaintness of those days, and of the near-century of ensuing dislocations, that a journalist thought it apropos to ask Babe if he deserved to make more money than the President. Read More
By Fritz ByersThere’s nothing like teaching a class to help you learn. A blog post or two ago I mentioned I’m teaching a jazz-history class. Here’s a thanks to Lourdes for letting me do it and to the students for being so thoughtful and giving me so much to think about. Since Tuesday’s class I’ve been thinking about hard bop – you know, the style that emerged as a reaction to cool jazz, which was a reaction to bop, which was a reaction to swing, which . . .. Read More
By Fritz ByersCharles Llloyd Photo Album Credit: Photo and Design by Dorothy Darr
By Fritz Byers At the end of the 1950s, John Coltrane surveyed the departing decade and its admixture of swing, bebop, cool (and its sibling/cousin/offspring, West Coast jazz), hard bop, and whatever Miles Davis was up to that week, and thought it was time to say goodbye to all that (even to Miles’s modal masterwork, Kind of Blue, to which Coltrane contributed indispensably.) So he wrote “Giant Steps,” a tune whose chord structure and harmonic invitations are so dense, complex, and hectic that it would be difficult to play even if ‘Trane hadn’t chosen the br Read More
Read this week's Jazz Spectrum blogs on Ornette Coleman by Fritz Byers and contributing writer, Kim Kleinman. Read More
By Fritz ByersLast night, a friend and I saw the trumpeter Dave Douglas perform with the Bowling Green State University Lab Band. Read More
