Jazz Articles about Billy Higgins

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Ornette Coleman: Genesis of Genius: The Contemporary Albums

by Jeff Kaliss
April 25, 2022

For many an Ornette Coleman devotee, devotion was pledged with the singular saxophonist's The Shape of Jazz to Come (Atlantic). It was recorded in May and released in November of 1959, and it's a matter of when in our life we caught up with it. For some of us, that's when we first felt liberated by jazz. That album, produced by Nesuhi Ertegun, remains a hard act to follow, even for Coleman himself. Or to precede. But “Hollywood ...

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Hank Mobley: The Complete Hank Mobley Blue Note Sessions 1963-70

by C. Andrew Hovan
March 8, 2020

The music world has changed considerably since Michael Cuscuna and Charlie Lourie founded their boutique reissue label Mosaic Records back in 1983. From its inception, vinyl was still the preferred format, shortly to be overtaken by the popularity of the compact disc. At the cusp of vinyl's recent resurgence, Mosaic briefly got back into that format only to find themselves on the brink of closing up shop. Fortunately, the powers that be have forged on and recent CD boxed sets ...

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Lee Morgan: The Sidewinder

by Greg Simmons
February 13, 2020

Legend tells us that 1964's The Sidewinder was the album, and indeed the song, which saved Blue Note Records at a time when the label was struggling financially. Dashed off to fill some tape, at the end of the recording session, it peaked at number 25 on the Billboard charts—almost unheard of for a hard-bop record—stabilizing the label's finances as well as providing Lee Morgan with steady royalties for the remainder of his tragically abbreviated life. Although the ...

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Something Else!!!!

by C. Michael Bailey
July 21, 2011

Robert Louis Stevenson noted that, “The mark of a good action is that it appears inevitable in retrospect." The middle-to-late 1950s in jazz were populated with several “good actions," all considered inevitable evolutionary reactions to earlier genre, specifically swing and bebop--the latter the complex and elevated jazz style that had dominated the creative American musical structure the decade before, and, to some degree has done so since. These unfolding styles included hard bop--perhaps the most direct descendant of bebop; modal ...

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Clifford Jordan: Glass Bead Games

by Robert Iannapollo
March 16, 2008

Perennially underrated saxophonist Clifford Jordan recorded two of his best albums for the Strata East label and Glass Bead Games is arguably his greatest recording and one of the great albums of the 1970s. Everything is right about this date; Jordan never sounded so good, his tone rich and full, his improvisatory ideas taking the models of Coltrane and Rollins and giving them his own twist. Recorded on a “stormy Monday, October 29, 1973," it was originally issued as a ...

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Glass Bead Games

by Samuel Chell
August 16, 2007

"I suddenly realized that in the language of the Glass Bead Game every symbol and combination of symbols led not to single examples but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge."---Hermann HesseClifford Jordan was a soulful, powerful, deeply thoughtful Chicago tenor player who, though sought after by pianist Horace Silver and praised by fellow saxophonist Sonny Rollins, was fated to be the Lester Young of his era, misunderstood and often overlooked ...

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Lee Morgan: The Gigolo

by Samuel Chell
February 26, 2007

Lee Morgan The Gigolo Blue Note Records 2007

As we observe the 35th anniversary (Feb. 19) of the death of the talented trumpeter who would also become the major player in one of American music's more noteworthy Frankie and Johnny stories, the title of this Lee Morgan session and several others (The Tom Cat, The Rajah, The Procrastinator) take on a note of eponymous self-characterization, if not ghoulishly ironic subtext. Regrettable or not, the ...