Articles

Daily articles carefully curated by the All About Jazz staff. Read our popular and future articles.

PROFILE September 1, 2020

American Frederick Thomas: 'The Black Russian' Who Connected Jazz To The Margins Of Asia

The child of former slaves, Frederick Bruce Thomas' New York Times obituary called him “the sultan of jazz," for the jazz palace he founded in Constantinople (now jny: Istanbul) after World War I, a jazz borderland beyond even the music's early jny: Paris outpost. He was hosting bands in Constantinople in 1921 even before Louis Armstrong joined King Oliver (1922) or started the Hot Five (1925). Frederick Thomas had journeyed from his 1872 birthplace in Mississippi northward, and ...

RADIO June 25, 2020

Jazz for James Bond and other Secret Agents, Spies and Detectives - Part 1

By Ludovico Granvassu

For a reason or another, movies about detectives, secret agents or spies have gone mano a mano with jazz, and so this week we'll feature jazz inspired by adventurous characters. In this first segment, the focus is on James Bond and how anyone from Louis Armstrong and Count Basie to Bill Frisell, Dave Douglas and Steven Bernstein, among others, have played with John Barry's compositions just like James Bond has played with Dr. No, Auric Goldfinger and whole bunch of ...

BOOK REVIEW September 18, 2019

The Vinyl Frontier: The Story Of The Voyager Golden Record

By Ian Patterson

The Vinyl Frontier:The Story Of The Voyager Golden Record Jonathon Scott 288 Pages ISBN: 978-1-4729-5613-2 Bloomsbury Sigma 2019 It was a message-in-a-bottle on a truly cosmic scale. In 1977, two golden records containing images, music and sounds from Earth were attached to the sides of the Voyager I and Voyager II spacecraft and launched into deep space. The records were intended as a cosmic greeting and a message of peace to any ...

RADIO March 5, 2019

The Entertainers – Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway and Lionel Hampton (1929 - 1940)

By Russell Perry

Jazz has often been looked at through the lens of the conflict between art and commerce. In the 1930s, several artists successfully blurred these distinctions. Louis Armstrong adopted popular song as his vehicle for a successful career shift into the mainstream. Cab Calloway defined his popular hipster persona while fronting one of the most professional big bands of the era and providing an incubator for numerous future jazz starts including Dizzy Gillespie, Chu Berry and Milt Hinton. Lionel Hampton, a ...

RADIO December 27, 2018

New Orleans Diaspora – Louis Armstrong (1926 - 1929)

By Russell Perry

In the past two hours, we've heard the music of the newly conceived jazz orchestras of New York and the Harlem-style or “Stride" pianists. We touched on Louis Armstrong's contributions to the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra and the invention of the big band soloist. In this hour, we return with Louis Armstrong to Chicago and listen to his seminal small group recordings. We are joined in this hour by John D'earth—trumpet player, composer, educator, member of the music performance ...

MULTIPLE REVIEWS June 16, 2018

Dot Time Legends Series: Is Every Night New Year's Eve Around Here?

By Richard J Salvucci

Soon after The Embers opened in New York City in late 1951, Joe Bushkin and His Quartet spent 16 memorable weeks there. With Milt Hinton and Jo Jones, Bushkin was joined by Buck Clayton on trumpet. Astoundingly, Art Tatum had a solo piano gig there at the same time. Bushkin and Tatum listened to each other every night. The crowd was as distinguished as the players. Louis Armstrong sat in with Bushkin, and Vladimir Horowitz was in the house one ...

FILM REVIEW May 11, 2018

Jazz Ambassadors: Representing A Segregated America During The Cold War

By Victor L. Schermer

Jazz Ambassadors THIRTEEN Productions 2018 Here, long overdue, is a comprehensive documentary about the legendary jazz musicians in the 1950s who served as “cultural ambassadors" under the aegis of the U.S. State Department, touring Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Soviet Union. The film comes sixty years after the fact. As Americans continue to mourn the loss of Tom Brokaw's “Greatest Generation" of WW II soldiers and their families, we jazz fans also grieve the passing of ...