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.

Video / DVD

Blizzard of '78 Playlist

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers
January 26, 2015

With a record-breaking snow storm bearing down on New York, I thought I'd share a story with you—and some music. On the morning of Monday, February 6, 1978, I lived in Boston. I was a junior at Northeastern University, a five-year school that allowed you to spend half the year working at a job related to what you wanted to do when you graduated. I worked at The New York Times through college, and my work period the previous year ...

Continue Reading...

Video / DVD

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Riding the "Night Train" with Jimmy Forrest

Source: St. Louis Jazz Notes by Dean Minderman
January 25, 2015

What's the most performed song ever written by a St. Louis jazz musician? While it's probably impossible to ever know with absolute certainty, at first one might guess that it's something from Miles Davis' Kind of Blue. After all, it is the best-selling jazz album of all time, and tunes from it such as “All Blues" and “So What" frequently get played at jam sessions and on cover gigs, and have been recorded by various other musicians besides Davis. However, ...

Continue Reading...

Video / DVD

Patti Page and Nat Cole

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers
January 22, 2015

On October 29, 1958, singer Patti Page hosted Nat King Cole and Gene Krupa as well as Illinois Jacquet, her musical director Rocky Cole and other musicians on ABC's The Patti Page Oldsmobile Show, which featured the swinging Vic Schoen Orchestra. Shows like this take me back to when I was a very little kid, being parked at my grandmother's house in the Bronx as my parents went out on a Saturday night. My grandmother hadn't a clue what they ...

Continue Reading...

Video / DVD

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Winter/spring 2015 jazz preview, part 5

Source: St. Louis Jazz Notes by Dean Minderman
January 18, 2015

Today, it's the fifth and final part of StLJN's winter/spring 2015 jazz preview, offering a look at the touring bands and musicians who will be be performing here during the first half of the year. (Parts one through four can be found, and here. And speaking of part four, last week in this space we were remiss in not mentioning tenor saxophonist Harry Allen, who will be performing with Freddy Cole from Wednesday, April 1 through Saturday, April 4 at ...

Continue Reading...

Video / DVD

'A Gal in Calico': 1946-2011

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers
January 12, 2015

In December 1946, Warner Bros. released a mess of a film called The Time, the Place and the Girl—a post-war feel-good feature with a dopey storyline on which it hung as many musical numbers as possible. Everything about the film was forgettable—except for A Gal in Calico, a song by Leo Robin and Arthur Schwartz. In the film, the catchy song was sung by Dennis Morgan, Jack Carson and Martha Vickers, whose voice was dubbed by Sally Sweetland. To give ...

Continue Reading...

Video / DVD

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Winter/spring 2015 jazz preview, part 4

Source: St. Louis Jazz Notes by Dean Minderman
January 11, 2015

Today, we continue with part four of StLJN's winter/spring 2015 jazz preview, covering the touring bands and musicians who will be be performing here during the first half of the year. (Parts one through three can be found here, here, and here.) For this week's edition, we turn the calendar ahead to the third week of March, when a band fronted by saxophonist Lou Marini, trombonist Steve Wiest, and trumpeter Clay Jenkins will headline the show on Friday, March 20 ...

Continue Reading...

Video / DVD

Billie Holiday and Helen Merrill

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers
January 8, 2015

Tessa Souter, whose singing voice I love (go here), sent along a lovely email the other day. Tessa knows I've interviewed Helen Merrill at length (start here) and wanted me to hear something. It was a link to a tape of Helen and Billie Holiday singing You Go to My Head at producer-writer Leonard Feather's apartment in New York in November 1956. This is right around the time of Holiday's Carnegie Hall concert with Chico Hamilton, and months earlier Helen ...

Continue Reading...

Video / DVD