Home » Search Center » Results: Genius Guide to Jazz
Results for "Genius Guide to Jazz"
Coming Up at the Half
by Jeff Fitzgerald, Genius
It is a little known fact about your Own Personal Genius that I once aspired to a far different career path. When I entered the hallowed halls of Mars Hill College (hallowed by R.L. Purvey and Sons Professional Hallowers of New Bern, NC) as a music education major in the fall of 1985, it was my ...
Duking It Out
by Jeff Fitzgerald, Genius
If you're anything like me, you are 5'10" tall, left-handed, and named Jeff. You also watched the epic Ken Burns documentary Jazz with a somewhat jaundiced eye (although in my case, it was just some stray popcorn butter on my glasses), thinking that perhaps Burns tended to fawn over certain personalities while leaving other important figures ...
Free to A Good Home
by Jeff Fitzgerald, Genius
Suppose you woke up tomorrow morning (around 7am, but you hit the snooze till about 7:30, before finally getting up to make some coffee), and found that all the old rules of music no longer applied. Notes no longer had to have any relationship with chords, chords didn't have to relate to keys, time was no ...
A Mingus Among Us
by Jeff Fitzgerald, Genius
If you were to sit down and make a list of jazz's greatest bassists/composers/bandleaders of all time, you wouldn't get very far at all because it is almost time for dinner and you still have this article to read yet. But as short as that list would be, it would certainly include Charles Mingus. In fact, ...
And Miles to Go Before We Sleep
by Jeff Fitzgerald, Genius
Remember back to those halcyon days of February, kids? The world seemed a simpler, rounder place in which to live. Disney-esque choirs of singing cartoon mice heralded even our most mundane daily routines, the air smelled of fresh lilacs, we all walked around in a dreamlike haze where our feet barely touched the ground, and I ...
Romance and the Modern Bachelor
by Jeff Fitzgerald, Genius
Well, kids, Spring is coming up, and you know what they say about Spring. It's the time of year when a young man's fancies turn to thoughts of...I'm sorry, just typing that sentence actually caused my fancies to turn to thoughts of Nicole Kidman wearing a little black dress and a “come hither" look.
The Gospel of St. John
by Jeff Fitzgerald, Genius
As stated last month, kids, I'm going to spend a portion of this year on in-depth profiles of some of the greatest forces in jazz history. I had originally intended to go in chronological order, beginning with some great pioneer like Jelly Roll Morton or the ubiquitous Louis Armstrong, but a recent experience convinced me to ...
Jazz and the Modern Bachelor
by Jeff Fitzgerald, Genius
If you were to visit the Geniusdome, providing you could work your way through the gauntlet of Rube Goldberg-esque booby traps, you would find an urbane oasis of culture and refinement (pay no attention to the empty Budweiser 12-pack boxes and my collection of eighties teen sex comedies on VHS). You would find a place of ...
What I Say
by Jeff Fitzgerald, Genius
If they ever make a biopic out of my life, and there's no clear reason why they wouldn't since I am the Dean of American Jazz Humorists® and one of the world's foremost experts on baseball's balk rule, I hope they are able to get Jamie Foxx to reprise his Oscarâ"¢-winning role in the pivotal “Genius ...
For Art's Sake
by Jeff Fitzgerald, Genius
Drummer and bandleader Art Blakey is driving through a small town when he notices a sparsely-attended graveside service being conducted in the hamlet's cemetery. He stops his car and gets out, perhaps paying his respects to some anonymous soul he would now never even meet. As the pastor's service winds down, a call is made for ...
