Dexter Gordon should have owned the Fifties. As the tenor playing counterpart to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and as a player revealed on concert air checks of the late forties as one who could sustain long, thematically cohesive solos…
A Man, A Plan, A Concept Album About Panama
Danilo Pérez got his start playing piano with Dizzy Gillespie. The celebrated composer’s latest project is an ambitious one: 500 years of trade, exploration and colonization represented in music.
Jon Hendricks
Tardo Hammer took a moment to ask the house to acknowledge Jon Hendricks’s presence, and Jon responded not only with a bow, but accepted Tardo’s invitation to join him for a tune. In this case, it was Hendricks’s lyrical celebration of “hip studs” Dizzy Gillespie, Don Byas, Oscar Pettiford, and Bud Powell on Thelonious Monk’s “In Walked Bud.”
Les McCann, jazz pianist with a soulful holler, dies at 88
An impromptu jam of “Compared to What” gave McCann a career-defining moment at the 1969 Montreux Jazz Festival.
Leny Andrade, known as the first lady of Brazilian jazz, dies at 80
Andrade was a consummate nightclub artist who sang torridly of love in a husky voice. A fixture in her home country since the ’60s, she became a sensation in the U.S. in the 1990s.
What makes that song swing? At last, physicists unravel a jazz mystery
For nearly a century, jazz musicians have debated what gives songs that propulsive, groovy feel that makes you want to move with the music. The secret may lie in subtle nuances in a soloist’s timing.