Results for "Howard Johnson"

Howard Johnson

Howard Johnson is universally known as the finest proponent of the jazz tuba in the world, as well as being quite proficient on the baritone saxophone. He also plays flugelhorn, bass clarinet, cornet, and penny whistle among other instruments. Howard was born in Montgomery, Alabama on August 7, 1941. He taught himself the baritone sax in 1954 and the tuba a year later. He moved to New York in 1963—at a time when the tuba was not a fashionable jazz instrument (outside of the New Orleans-style bass-line chores, the only visible player was Ray Draper) but Charles Mingus welcomed Howard into his workshop in 1964

Muse Records: Ten Smoking Hot Albums

By CHRIS MAY

Alone among the other great jazz labels of the 1960s and 1970s—Blue Note, Prestige, Riverside, Impulse!, Strata-East and Atlantic—Joe Fields' Muse is rarely anthologised, written about or otherwise celebrated. Yet like its peers, Muse was prolific, releasing over 200 premium-grade albums during the 1970s, its most active decade, alone. This relative obscurity is ...

Lift Every Voice And Sing: Twenty #BlackLives Albums That Matter

By CHRIS MAY

Jazz has been inextricably linked with social and political protest since at least the late 1930s, when Billie Holiday made famous the leftist songwriter and poet Abel Meeropol's “Strange Fruit." The song, which has a power to move that is undiminished by familiarity, likens the bodies of lynched African Americans to fruit hanging in trees.

Impulse! Records: An Alternative Top 20 Zeitgeist Seizing Albums

By CHRIS MAY

There can be little argument that a jazz label ever captured a zeitgeist more completely than Impulse! did during its original 1960s incarnation. In the US, the fight back against white racism was cresting, opposition to the Vietnam war was growing, outrage over the assassinations of figures of hope such as President Kennedy, Martin Luther King ...

Bob Thiele's Flying Dutchman Records: Ten High Altitude Albums

By CHRIS MAY

Bob Thiele is best remembered for his years as the artistic director and house producer of Impulse!. He took over from founder producer Creed Taylor in 1961 and stayed with the label until 1969, when he left to run his own Flying Dutchman Records. Thiele's tenure at Impulse! was its most glorious period, when Thiele curated ...

Funk in a Deep Freeze

By MARY FOSTER CONKLIN

For the Sunday of the Women's March we played new releases by pianist Judy Night, flutist Magela Herrara, Judy Bisantz, Bob Levy and saxophonist Carol Sudhalter with birthday shout outs to Eartha Kitt, Irene Kral, Jose James, Cheryl Bentyne, Peter Eldridge, Sade, and Dolly Parton, among others. Playlist Pam Fleming “Keep It Movin" from ...

The Complete Jan Akkerman: Focusing on a Life's Work

By JOHN KELMAN

He may be largely regarded as the most influential guitarist to emerge from the Netherlands, a country that, bordering on the North Sea, is roughly one-quarter the physical size of England and, with a current number of about seventeen million, has just one-third the population of the UK's largest country. Still, despite garnering major in-country recognition, ...