Jazz Articles about Gene Krupa

About Gene Krupa

Book Review

The Master of Drums: Gene Krupa and the Music He Gave The World

by Richard J Salvucci
April 29, 2025

The Master of Drums Elizabeth J Rosenthal 320 Pages ISBN: 978-0-8065-4320 Kensington Publishing Company 2025 In the interests of full disclosure, I spent an extended period with Gene Krupa as an adolescent. Relatives were friends of Krupa's. All the nice things Elizabeth J. Rosenthal says about Krupa as a human being were their constant refrain. If you think maybe Krupa, in Rosenthal's handling, sounds to good-to-be-true, well, maybe he was. Not a saint, ...

Album Review

Gene Krupa Quartet: The Gene Krupa Quartet: Live 1966!

Read "The Gene Krupa Quartet: Live 1966!" reviewed by Richard J Salvucci

by Richard J Salvucci
November 15, 2018

This was a period, late in Gene Krupa's career, when he really wasn't up to much, or so some critics said. Whether that's fair or not is not for me to say. When Krupa appeared in the summer of 1965 at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City he only rated second billing to The Supremes. He didn't seem to care. The band he had was, with the exception of Eddie Shu, this one. If you were young and impressionable, you ...

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Album Review

Gene Krupa: Boogie, Ballads, and Be-Bop: The Best of the Columbia Years 1945-1949

Read "Boogie, Ballads, and Be-Bop: The Best of the Columbia Years 1945-1949" reviewed by David Rickert

by David Rickert
September 2, 2002

Gene Krupa’s flailing arms and floppy hair were undeniable emblems of the Big Band Era. As the first drummer to explore the uses of the full drum kit in jazz (and insist that it be miked at full volume) he helped propel Benny Goodman to stardom-who hasn’t heard the famous opening to “Sing, Sing, Sing”? His success with Goodman (and, as some claim, ego clashes) led to Krupa forming his own big band, which was as successful as any of ...

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Album Review

The Gene Krupa Quartet: Live from the Inn Club, Chicago, IL, January 11, 1957

by Jack Bowers
June 1, 2001

By January 1957, when this concert date was recorded at the Inn Club in Chicago, Gene Krupa’s salad days as a member of the Benny Goodman Orchestra and leader of his own big bands were behind him, but he remained a major figure on the Jazz scene, even though his flamboyant style of drumming, once considered state–of–the–art (at least in the public’s mind), had been overshadowed by the incomparable Buddy Rich and such be–bopping innovators as Kenny Clarke, Max Roach, ...