Over the past few years, I’ve posted several blogs about Dizzy Gillespie. Click here for a compendium that includes features on his collaboration with Chano […]

Over the past few years, I’ve posted several blogs about Dizzy Gillespie. Click here for a compendium that includes features on his collaboration with Chano […]
I first learned of Sister Rosetta Tharpe when I read Tony Heilbut’s landmark book, The Gospel Sound, in the early 1970s. It was an eye-opener […]
Illness notwithstanding, I ventured out into the bitter cold of Saturday night for the second half of the Easthampton Jazz Festival’s nighttime lineup with the […]
“Finesse” earned Stewart the French Grand Prix for the best composition of 1939, and Gunther Schuller considers it “the most remarkable in its effect…Four simple guitar chords…
Alas, the Worcester-born pianist Barbara Carroll has died at age 92. My Worcester-born mother told me about her the first time I mentioned jazz, for […]
As for fame, Wardell Gray, who composed “Twisted” and was depicted as an iconic jazzman in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, was a brilliant, in-demand saxophonist, influenced by Lester Young and the new direction that jazz was taking in the mid-forties. He worked for a Who’s Who of bandleaders including Earl Hines, Benny Carter, Billy Eckstine, Benny Goodman, and Count Basie, and with such trailblazing colleagues as Charlie Parker and Dexter Gordon.