Home » Jazz News
Video / DVD News
Timely announcements covering new album releases, tours, concert series, special events, job postings, crowdfunding campaigns and more. You can find more news by searching our website, viewing our news stream, seeing what's trending or reading our blog posts. Subscribe to our news RSS feed and/or embed AAJ news content on your website or blog. Learn about our news service here. Submit news here.
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 ...
Continue Reading
StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Terence Blanchard and the E-Collective
Source:
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 ...
Continue Reading
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 ...
Continue Reading
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 ...
Continue Reading
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 ...
Continue Reading
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 ...
Continue Reading
Pat Friday: Ghost Vocalist
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
It's Friday, so what better day to celebrate Pat Friday, a singer you may have heard but never saw. Friday was a movie voiceover vocalist—the person who sang the songs after the actors mouthed the words. Friday was the singing voice of Lynn baritone (above), who starred in two films made by Glenn Miller—Sun Valley Serenade (1941) and Orchestra Wives (1942). While baritone's eyes smolder as she mouths the words in both movies, it's Friday's voice you actually hear. Here's baritone ...
Continue Reading
