By Fritz Byers As a way of doing my share to promote the spirit of the week, I’ve organized this week’s show around the theme of thanks. You can check the titles of the tunes if you wonder what that means. Read More
By Fritz ByersBy 1958, the tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins had established himself firmly at the apex of jazz, sitting alongside John Coltrane as heirs of their instrument’s tradition, founded on the triumvirate of Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and Ben Websters, and as the progenitors of the tenor’s next great era. Read More
By Fritz ByersThe first hour of this week’s show is given over to Kim Kleinman’s artfully designed compare-and-contrast exercise, placing the orchestras of Duke Ellington and Count Basie side-by-side. Big bands were everywhere, certainly by the 1930s, and there were dozens of great ones. But the common wisdom, which just this once is correct, is that Duke’s and Count’s ensembles rose above the rest. Explicating that truth would be worthwhile, and fun, but it is beyond my ambition for this post. Read More
By Kim Kleinman, Jazz Spectrum Contributing Writer Read More
By Fritz Byers(A few of my thoughts on Carla are in my post from two days ago.) Carla’s music, spanning more than fifty years, was vast and vibrant. From her early years with Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra; through her shifting mid-size bands (usually about octet-ish), which were always staffed by protean instrumentalists at home in the avant-garde and also lured by Carla’s sly wit; to her late sumptuous, richly colored recordings with the saxophonist Andy Sheppard and long-time bassist Steve Swallow – Carla never failed to be interesting. Read More
By Fritz ByersLast weekend I watched the noir-adjacent movie, On Dangerous Ground, directed by Nicholas Ray and released in 1951. Read More
By Fritz ByersEach of the first four sets of the show this week celebrates a jazz birthday.
