History of Jazz

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

HISTORY OF JAZZ June 24, 2020

Harvey Husten Presents "Jazz in Jersey": The Red Hill Inn

On October 13, 1957, there was a concert at the Red Hill Inn in Pennsauken, New Jersey. Leonard Feather was there. Erroll Garner too. And Cannonball Adderley, Gerry Mulligan, and Oscar Pettiford. The occasion was the first annual memorial concert for one Harvey Husten. And the beginning of what was supposed to be a living memorial to Harvey Husten, the Harvey Husten Memorial Fund. As Jim Donahue wrote in Camden's Courier Post:"It will provide scholarships for music students, be they ...

HISTORY OF JAZZ April 7, 2020

Leo Smith and New Dalta Ahkri

By Daniel Barbiero

Coming to New England: Emerson, Ives and Brown When trumpeter/composer Leo Smith returned to the United States after having spent 1969-1970 in Europe, he settled not in New York, as most jazz musicians might be expected to do, or even in jny: Chicago, where he'd spent a fruitful several years in the 1960s. Instead, he chose to settle in jny: New Haven, Connecticut.New Haven at the time was, as it largely still is, an economically straitened, post-industrial college ...

HISTORY OF JAZZ February 29, 2020

The John Coltrane Home in Philadelphia: The Fight to Preserve an Historic Landmark

By Victor L. Schermer

John Coltrane (1926-1967) was in the upper echelon of the greatest jazz musicians of all time. He, along with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Dexter Gordon, Miles Davis, and other innovators, changed the face of jazz forever. Beyond such encomiums, Coltrane has become a great African American hero, overcoming his heroin addiction, experiencing a spiritual awakening which he brought to realization in his devoted marriages to Naima and Alice Coltrane, their children, and music (the iconic albums A Love ...

HISTORY OF JAZZ February 6, 2020

Elis Regina and Antonio Carlos Jobim: A Musical Love Story and a Timeless Recording

By Victor L. Schermer

One of my all-time favorite albums and desert island picks is Elis and Tom (Phillips, 1974), featuring duets by the legendary Antonio Carlos “Tom" Jobim and Elis Regina, an iconic Brazilian singer lesser known in the U.S. who a few years later died of a drug overdose at the age of 36. I'm writing about it now because recently I was listening to some of Jobim's records and took this one off the shelf and played it. I marveled as ...

HISTORY OF JAZZ December 12, 2019

Coleman Hawkins: Fifty Years Gone, A Saxophone Across Time

By Arthur R George

Fifty years ago this past year, Coleman Hawkins, considered the father of tenor saxophone in jazz, passed away. Thelonious Monk was pacing back and forth in the hallway outside Hawkins' hospital room when the saxophonist succumbed at age 64 on the morning of May 19, 1969, from pneumonia and other complications. Monk was holding a short stack of albums that Hawkins had gifted him just before being hospitalized. With Monk was the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, attendant to ...

HISTORY OF JAZZ July 8, 2019

The Creative Musicians Improvisers Forum: New Haven's AACM

By Daniel Barbiero

The late 1960s through the 1970s and '80s were difficult years for jazz and jazz-derived improvised music, but they were also years that saw musicians—by necessity—respond to these difficulties with creative solutions. With first the rise and then the commercial dominance during those years of rock music and the corresponding eclipse of jazz, creative musicians in various parts of the country began to organize themselves into artist-run groups in order to ensure the survival of the music both commercially and ...

HISTORY OF JAZZ June 28, 2019

Bird's Trumpets

By Matt Lavelle

Looking closely at all the trumpet players that played with Thelonious Monk in a piece I wrote in March 2018, I decided to continue the focus, and explore the trumpet players that played with Charlie Parker. As challenging as the trumpet is to play, playing Bebop raised the technical bar. Playing with Charlie Parker at fast tempos where he thrived took trumpet playing to an extreme that may have never been matched since. Parker certainly enjoyed the alto saxophone and ...