Articles by Arthur R George

History of Jazz

In Circuses and Carnivals, Sideshows Brought Black Music To The Heartland

by Arthur R George
May 30, 2026

Black musicians in circus and carnival sideshow bands from the late 1800s well into the Twentieth Century brought ragtime and what would become jazz and rhythm and blues to white audiences deep into Midwest agricultural regions. Trumpeter Lester Bowie, later known for the avant-garde Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Brass Fantasy, joined circus and carnival bands early in his career when he needed any job he could get, ...

Jazz Fiction

Interruptions On A Christmas Eve

by Arthur R George
December 24, 2025

The small restaurant and occasional music bistro was closed for Christmas Eve. Its owner Ernie DiVitale had darkened the room. There was light enough, from the Christmas tree in the corner and spilling in from a lamp over the prep area in the kitchen, to relax with his wife Veronica at a back table over cappuccini and frutti di bosco tortas, ricotta cheese cake with fresh fruit toppings, a special treat in winter. For Ernie and Veronica it ...

Jazz Fiction

Holiday Notes Across A Hallway

by Arthur R George
December 23, 2025

A knock on the door of Augie Cannataro's apartment. He peered through the security window to see the single mother from across the hall. They had always nodded politely at each other when passing in the lobby or hallway. He was respectful but didn't want to approach an involvement in whatever her life was with her son, who Cannataro had also seen in passing and had heard through the walls of their apartments making painful attempts at saxophone practice.

History of Jazz

Vince Guaraldi’s Christmas Sauce: Adding Spice to Charlie Brown Vanilla

by Arthur R George
December 21, 2025

It's not simply that pianist Vince Guaraldi slipped jazz past the unsuspecting in composing A Charlie Brown Christmas, the evergreen “Peanuts" animation and soundtrack that has become inescapably part of the holiday. First broadcast in 1965, going on to six decades ago, A Charlie Brown Christmas is a tradition unto itself. It returns to television through PBS and PBS Kids on the evening of Sunday, December 19. Some who can't wait, or want to watch and listen again and again, ...

History of Jazz

Gravity and Resurgence: The Many Dimensions of Dexter Gordon

by Arthur R George
February 6, 2025

Long Tall Dexter; swinger, bebopper, saxophone balladeer; acting the dissipated genius expatriate who was not unlike himself in the movie Round Midnight; his dressed-up persona “Society Red;" the laconic elder statesman of his later years. Dexter Gordon is all those things, but more than a kaleidoscope of caricatures. Those who trace their lineages through Sonny Rollins or John Coltrane and beyond contain within them the earlier influence of Dexter Gordon. Joshua Redman, among contemporary players, attributes his robust ...

Profile

Autumn Jazz Weathers Well in San Francisco

by Arthur R George
October 26, 2023

Autumn is a special season for jazz in San Francisco. The weather at other times of the year variously drives one indoors for warmth, a good enough reason to seek shelter in jazz. But in the autumn, mostly gone is the bone-chilling summer fog that pours into the city from the cold Pacific Ocean. Not yet are the winter rains that soak damp alleys. The days and nights are crisp and clear, good for being out and listening. ...

History of Jazz

Where Clifford Brown Learned to Play: Love In A Wilmington Neighborhood

by Arthur R George
June 20, 2023

Part 1 | Part 2 Robert “Boysie" Lowery was trumpeter Clifford Brown's first music instructor in the early 1940s, and mentored decades of young musicians thereafter in Wilmington, Delaware. He taught as a sideline to club work, a resource for his community but caring not so much about being paid for his lessons. That generosity continues with the eighth year of a tuition-free Boysie Lowery Living Jazz Residency, in conjunction with the Clifford Brown Jazz Festival, which runs ...

Book Review

Decades of Worldwide Promotion By the Man in the Room

by Arthur R George
April 14, 2023

A Life In Music Wulf Müller 384 Pages ISBN: # 9798353190752 Amazon Direct Publishing2022 Working in Europe and facilitating jazz internationally, Wulf Müller reveals himself in his autobiography A Life in Music (Amazon Direct Publishing, 2022) as a man who for 40 years was in the rooms where it happened. That was true even by long distance phone call, as with Sonny Rollins who held Müller on the line while the saxophonist ...

Book Review

The Lives of Lost Pianos Look Past Siberian Terrors

by Arthur R George
December 9, 2022

The Lost Pianos of Siberia Sophy Roberts 433 Pages ISBN: 0802149286 Doubleday/Grove Atlantic2020 In The Lost Pianos of Siberia (Doubleday/Grove Atlantic, 2020), British writer Sophy Roberts uses the piano to channel the past and tell the stories of people's lives through earlier cycles of Russian history before the current Ukraine violence. Roberts comes to understand pianos not as mere inanimate objects, passive elements in jazz and classical music until played, but characterized ...

Album Review

Eda And: Live in Hamburg

Read "Live in Hamburg" reviewed by Arthur R George

by Arthur R George
October 8, 2022

Turkish pianist Eda And went large in her ambitious debut CD, Augmented Life (Kalan), in 2018, leading a contemporary jazz big band in Istanbul through compositions and arrangements that she originally created for the NDR Bigband in Hamburg, Germany. She has returned, scaled back and in a completely different direction, solo, with Live in Hamburg on the Z Musik label. Covid's travel restrictions had made And more reminiscent about her Turkish roots while sequestered in her second home ...