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Hughes' Blues: The Langston Hughes Songbook

Source: David Brent Johnson
February 3, 2011

We know Langston Hughes as a celebrated African-American author of poems, essays, stories, memoirs and more. But Hughes also wrote songs-hundreds of them. Music was at the heart of his work, with jazz and blues informing the cadences, structures, and subject matter of many of his poems. In an early essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," he touted jazz and blues as a valid and vital expression of African-American identity in art; he was one of the few ...

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Portrait of Little Jazz: a Centennial Tribute to Roy Eldridge

Source: David Brent Johnson
January 28, 2011

They called him “Little Jazz," but he was born David Roy Eldridge on January 30, 1911 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Roy Eldridge has often been called the link or bridge between Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie. He was indeed a strong influence on Gillespie, who called him “the Messiah of our generation," and he certainly admired Armstrong, who he said taught him how to build a story out of his solos. Biographer John Chilton writes that: “The combination of Armstrong's ingenious ...

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"The David Baker Songbook"

Source: David Brent Johnson
December 21, 2010

David Baker is a renowned jazz educator and bandleader who came out of Indianapolis' great Indiana Avenue scene of the mid-20th century, counting among his friends and colleagues Wes Montgomery, J.J. Johnson, and Freddie Hubbard. His jazz resume is studded with notable accomplishments, associations, and awards. He came up as a standout trombonist and switched to cello after a car accident injured his jaw. His Indianapolis hard bop group of the late 1950s became a leading progressive-jazz ensemble under the ...

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Playland at the Beach: Dave Brubeck's Early Octet and Trio

Source: David Brent Johnson
December 6, 2010

Chances are you've heard Dave Brubeck before, even if you're not a jazz fan. His 1959 album Time Out has sold over a million copies and “Take Five," written by longtime Brubeck collaborator and saxophonist Paul Desmond, became a hit single and cultural musical staple. Brubeck made the cover of Time Magazine in 1954, did global tours for the U.S. State Department during the Cold War, and has enjoyed a long run as an icon of mainstream jazz. But at ...

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The Billy Strayhorn Songbook

Source: David Brent Johnson
November 29, 2010

Night Lights celebrates the 95th anniversary of Billy Strayhorn's birth with “The Billy Strayhorn Songbook," a program featuring interpretations of Strayhorn's music by the Duke Ellington orchestra, Ellingtonians such as Johnny Hodges, Ray Nance, and Ben Webster, John Coltrane, the Dutch Jazz Orchestra, and Strayhorn himself. Strayhorn was Ellington's writing partner for 27 years, contributing scores of compositions and arrangements; we'll hear some of his signature tunes such as “Chelsea Bridge," “Lush Life" (a rare performance by Strayhorn himself), and ...

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A Brief History of Mary Lou Williams

Source: David Brent Johnson
November 27, 2010

Does anybody embody the history of 20th-century jazz as much as Mary Lou Williams? The arc of her career extends from the territory bands and Kansas City swing of the 1930s to the heights of the big-band era, the bebop movement of the 1940s, the American expatriate jazz of the post-World War II era, the sacred-jazz trend of the 1960s, and the emergence of jazz education in the 1970s. Only Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and Benny Carter can compare to ...

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