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Weekend Extra: Art Ensemble Of Chicago
Source:
Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
From the mid-1960s through the early years of this century, the Art Ensemble of Chicago crafted elements of free jazz into an ensemble personality that brought it extensive exposure. Often, as much attention went to the band’s costumes and makeup as to its wide range of influences from all eras of jazz and music of Africa, Asia, Latin America and other parts of the world. Apart from their primary instruments, the five musicians played an array of brass, reed, percussion ...
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Lou Bennett: Enfin, 1963
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
Lou Bennett, one of finest organists of the 1960s, is little known among many jazz fans today, largely because he rarely played in the U.S. after 1960. Bennett was a bop pianist who began his career leading a piano trio in Baltimore in the late 1940s, switching to organ after hearing Jimmy Smith in 1956. He toured the U.S. on organ between 1957 and 1959 before moving to Paris in 1960. Unlike many jazz expatriates who moved to Europe and ...
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StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Terence Blanchard and the E-Collective
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St. Louis Jazz Notes by Dean Minderman
When we last saw Terence Blanchard here in St. Louis back in February 2014, the New Orleans-born trumpeter was playing on short notice at the Sheldon as a substitute for pianist Chucho Valdes, who had canceled his long-scheduled performance there due to a mid-tour injury. Blanchard also spent a good amount of time here the previous year, leading up to the world premiere of his opera Champion in June 2013 at Opera Theatre St. Louis. And local jazz fans knew ...
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Weekend Extra: Steps Ahead, Still Ahead
Source:
Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
The modern jazz sub-genre called jazz fusion emerged in the 1960s, attracted a wide audience and received extensive radio air play through the second half of the twentieth century. The music combined elements of rhythm and blues, jazz, rock, funk and, often, time signatures that were challenging for both musicians and listeners. Fusion came in for criticism for traditionalists and purists. “Con-fusion, I call it,” the great bassist Gene Ramey once told me. Nonetheless, the category—like jazz itself—was flexible enough ...
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Paul Desmond: 38 Years
Source:
Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
Since Rifftides began, every year on May 30 I have posted something about Paul Desmond. He died thirty-eight years ago today. For reasons that I cannot clearly identify, this year I struggled with the idea. Until the last moment I put off the remembrance and finally concluded that the best option was to have Paul speak for himself with his playing. At the 1954 recording session for the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s album Brubeck Time, LIFE magazine photographer Gjon Mili shot ...
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The Things We Did Last Summer
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
Yesterday I couldn't get The Things We Did Last Summer out of my head. The song was written by Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne for Frank Sinatra, who recorded it in 1946 for Columbia under the direction of Alex Stordahl. Here's Sinatra's original followed by seven terrfic versions... Here's Fats Navarro in 1949, a rare ballad for the trumpeter, who would die seven months after this live recording... Here's a group led by Sahib Shihab in 1957, with ...
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StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Dr. Lonnie Smith & Lionel Loueke
Source:
St. Louis Jazz Notes by Dean Minderman
Dr. Lonnie Smith is the elder statesman of jazz organ, one of the last living links back to the 1960s and 70s heyday of Jimmy Smith, Brother Jack McDuff, Jimmy McGriff, Charles Earland, Richard “Groove" Holmes, and other Hammond heroes. Lionel Loueke is a guitarist from a different generation and half a world away who mixes jazz with the rhythms of his home country, the west African nation of Benin. Both men have distinctive sounds that tend to dominate the ...
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