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Daily articles carefully curated by the All About Jazz staff. Read our popular and future articles.
The Vinyl Frontier: The Story Of The Voyager Golden Record
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 ...
read moreThe Entertainers – Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway and Lionel Hampton (1929 - 1940)
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 ...
read moreNew Orleans Diaspora – Louis Armstrong (1926 - 1929)
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 ...
read moreDot Time Legends Series: Is Every Night New Year's Eve Around Here?
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 ...
read moreJazz Ambassadors: Representing A Segregated America During The Cold War
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 ...
read moreState and Mainstream: The Jazz Ambassadors and the U.S. State Department
The Cold War that began in 1947 and ran for forty-four years, had jazz music as its primary deterrent to global tensions, and it did more to foster good will between the U.S. and global citizens than any previous program launched by the U.S. Department of State. Jazz music, even in its Golden Age, was seldom a front page story in the national press so it was a rare publishing event when the Sunday New York Times placed such a ...
read moreMarch 2018: Louis Armstrong, Bunny Berrigan, and Henry “Red” Allen.
Episode 135 takes a thorough and loving look at Louis Armstrong's 1930's recordings for the Decca company. After a couple years nursing a blown lip and searching for new musical contexts, Louis hooked up with manager Joe Glaser and soon had a contract with Decca records, which featured him on a kaleidoscope of recordings, from remakes of some Hot Fives triumphs to collaborations with the Mills Brothers to novelty numbers about Hawaii. The resulting four hours of music is surprisingly ...
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