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Britain Plays the Blues
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JazzWax by Marc Myers
How did all those British rock bands learn to play the blues in the 1960s and why were they so fascinated by the form? What was the unlikely impact of the Yardbirds, the Animals, the Rolling Stones, Manfred Mann, John Mayall, Cream and other British bands introducing white audiences to the blues in the U.S.? Most people think their education came from blues records they got their hands on in the U.K. And that playing here was something of an ...
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Frech Doc: Bud Powell
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JazzWax by Marc Myers
To fully feel the beauty and grace of jazz at its highest level, you must appreciate the sadness that comes with the joy and the poetry that's baked into the music's history. They are one, like two sides of a coin. Virtually all of the exceptional jazz musicians had tragic sides, making one wonder whether greatness was even possible without the demons and deep sadness. Yesterday, Matt LeGrouix sent along a link to a stunning French documentary on Bud Powell ...
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Stan Getz: The Movies and TV
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JazzWax by Marc Myers
By the mid-1950s, tenor saxophonist Stan Getz had become a sensation as a soloist and started to be featured in films. A few years later, Getz's horn could be heard in European films and then American films upon his return to the U.S. in 1960. From the 1960s until his death in 1991, Getz was heard regularly on TV shows such as Ironside and The Courtship of Eddie's Father as well as in movies. Here are 13 clips of Getz ...
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Doc: Toronto Jazz (1963)
Source:
JazzWax by Marc Myers
In 1963, Toronto was a bustling jazz center akin to New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. The city's jazz establishments flourished after Ontario's Liquor Licensing Board changed its dining lounge rules in 1946 to permit live venues to sell alcohol. Toronto became a destination for Canadian musicians and for touring American artists. Clubs ranged from the posh Imperial Room at the Royal York Hotel to the House of Hambourg, George’s Spaghetti House, the Colonial and Bourbon Street, to name just ...
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Pete Rugolo and the Beaver
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JazzWax by Marc Myers
The death of Ken Osmond last week came as a shock to anyone who grew up watching TV's Leave It to Beaver in the early 1960s. The shock for me wasn't that Osmond had died but that he had been alive all this time. The word on the playground in the late 1960s and early '70s was that the guy who played Eddie Haskell had died in Vietnam. Everyone believed it, and why not? Obviously, that wasn't the case, but ...
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Documentary: Grant Green
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JazzWax by Marc Myers
At his peak in the early 1960s, Grant Green was one of the most soulful, swinging jazz guitarists recording. Unfortunately, many of his albums weren't released until after his death in 1979. The business reasoning remains puzzling but the decision by Blue Note clearly had nothing to do with his playing. Green appeared on many albums as a sideman, and I suppose the label didn't want to saturate the market. In addition, tastes were shifting to soul-jazz and boogaloo. In ...
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Doc: Velvet Underground, 2006
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JazzWax by Marc Myers
One of the most influential rock albums of the 1960s was The Velvet Underground & Nico. Recorded in 1966 and released in March 1967—three months before the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper—the album broke new ground and set the tone for multiple rock movements of the late 1960s and early '70s. Unlike the Beatles, who came out of the Liverpool poetry and music hall traditions, the Velvets surfaced as part of the New York pop art and trans-national avant-garde music scenes. The ...
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StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: A jazz film mini-festival (shutdown edition)
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St. Louis Jazz Notes by Dean Minderman
With live music still shut down for the foreseeable future, this week we revisit an idea used in this space occasionally during the slow weeks of summer, and offer up a mini-festival of six feature-length films about jazz. The first film, embedded up above, is 1959, The Year That Changed Jazz, a 2009 documentary originally aired on the BBC. It uses archival performances and interviews to look at developments in jazz as reflected in four historically significant albums released that ...
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