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
By Fritz ByersA few weeks ago, Kim Kleinman wrote, elucidatingly, about his struggle, not easy but ultimately successful, to pierce the often-overwhelming image of The Great John Coltrane and to hear Trane’s music – “as music,” in Kim’s characteristic phrasing. Kim’s right – that’s the best way to hear music. But now we’re back at the shrine – the centerpiece of this week’s show is the Master’s A Love Supreme, the suite he recorded with his Classic Quartet in one inspired session on December 9, 1964. Read More
By Kim Kleinman Read More
