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How Bud Shank Invented Surf Music
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
In 1966, just before the country went psychedelic and the place to be was off the grid and deep in the woods, there was the beach. The passing this week of Mike Hynson—star of that year's cult surf film The Endless Summer, produced and directed by Bruce Brown—took me back to my childhood. When I was a kid in the early 1960s, going to New York's Jones Beach was excruciating. It was a place where mothers slathered kids in Coppertone, ...
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YouTubers Dig Bill Evans (Guitarists)
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
I love watching videos of musicians covering songs made famous by jazz legends. I've posted quite a few of these as part of my YouTubers Dig series. Today, I thought I'd share 10 clips with you of guitarists covering songs recorded by Bill Evans: Here's Waltz for Debby... Here's Two Lonely People... Here's Time Remembered... Here's Interplay... Here's Peace Piece... Here's How My Heart Sings... Here's Israel... Here's Turn Out the Stars... Here's Laurie... And here's Little Lulu... Bonus: If ...
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Backgrounder: Herbie Nichols Trio - Master Takes
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
Pianist Herbie Nichols has long been considered a Thelonious Monk disciple. In truth, Nichols had his own modernist bag that combined bebop's jagged attack and Dixieland's hard syncopation. A fascinating artist who was largely ignored during his lifetime (1919-1963), Nichols is perhaps best known for penning the jazz standard Lady Sings the Blues. Nichols began recording as a leader in 1955 after begging Blue Note's Alfred Lion to capture him in the studio. On his first albums, The Prophetic Herbie ...
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Cootie Williams: Jumping in the 1940s
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
In 1943, the country was coping with a recording ban launched by the American Federation of Musicians in mid-1942. With live music under assault by new technology ranging from records and radio to the jukebox, the union decided to pull the plug on members making records until record companies agreed to pay into a fund to support unemployed musicians. Technically, it wasn't a strike, since that would have been illegal during World War II. Instead, it was referred to as ...
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Nancy Harrow: Second Thoughts (2024)
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
Like vocalist Carol Sloane, Nancy Harrow came up just as the music world flipped upside down. Jazz was out, rock and soul were in and that was that. But like Carol, Nancy powered forward. In the early 1960s and again beginning in the late 1970s, Nancy recorded 16 albums with Buck Clayton, Dick Katz, Jim Hall, John Lewis, Phil Woods, Connie Kay, Gary McFarland, Frank Wess, Bob Brookmeyer, Roland Hanna and Clark Terry. Throughout this period, Nancy explored songs with ...
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Soundless Footage From Norman Granz Sessions
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JazzWax by Marc Myers
Wow, what a find! Loren Schoenberg is senior scholar of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem and on the faculty at Juilliard. He has taught at the Manhattan School of Music and the New School and played tenor saxophone in Benny Goodman's band in the 1980s. Last week, he posted to YouTube two silent black-and-white clips from two classic recording dates for Norman Granz's Verve label. The footage was found by filmmaker Christopher Seufert, who, Loren says, was permitted to ...
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Chick Webb: The Rightful King of Swing
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
The King of Swing in the 1930s wasn't Benny Goodman or Count Basie. It was Chick Webb. The drummer fielded, managed and drove one of the best dance bands in the country and held court at New York's Savoy Ballroom, at 596 Lenox Avenue, between 140th and 141st Streets in Harlem. Webb's band was built to keep people dancing, and the swing he produced to do so was imitated while he was at the peak of his fame and for ...
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Bill Evans: Stockholm, Sweden, 1964
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
Thank God for Europe and Scandinavia. If not for their government-sponsored TV stations, we'd never have intimate footage of American jazz stars in action. Today, two clips of the Bill Evans Trio in Stockholm, Sweden, in August 1964, with Evans on piano, Chuck Israels on bass and Larry Bunker on drums. Plus a bonus track: Here's an extraordinarily intense rendition of My Foolish Heart... And here's Johnny Carisi's Israel... Bonus: Here's audio of Bill Evans, bassist Eddie Gomez and drummer ...
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