Results for "JazzWax by Marc Myers"

The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper at 50

June 1, 2017

Fifty years ago today, Capitol Records released the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Bandin the U.S. Two months later, my Aunt Mary gave me the album for my birthday. Astonishingly, nothing from the album was released as a single for AM radio. At 11, I was a big Beatles fan, but I couldn't figure out ...

Jazz Feel in New York Film

May 31, 2017

Jazz was so potent in the 1950s that young experimental filmmakers in New York tried to express the improvisational feel with motion and abstraction. I've been doing a bit of research lately on the subject. Here are four of the best by the New York school of filmmakers with a fifth as a bonus. Here's D.A. ...

Frank Deford (1938-2017)

May 30, 2017

Frank Deford, a legendary sportswriter with Sports Illustrated from 1962 to 1989 and again from 1998 to the present, as well as an NPR sports commentator for the past 32 years, died on May 28. He was 78. Frank had a way of profiling sports legends with deceptively simple language and colorful insights that became the ...

Larry Elgart in the Early '60s

May 29, 2017

Larry Elgart deserves respect, and it looks like he's finally receiving some with the release of a new two-fer from Blue Moon Records—Larry Elgart and His Orchestra: Sophisticated Sixties (1960) and The Shape of Sounds to Come (1961). I've never been a huge fan, but then again I never gave Larry Elgart or his bandleader brother ...

Videos: Basie Documentary

May 26, 2017

Terry Gibbs: 92 Years Young

May 25, 2017

One of the giants of the jazz vibraphone has just released a fabulous new album—92 Years Young: Jammin' at the Gibbs House (Whaling Cit Sound). It's a stone-cold swinging killer. Every single track on here is out-of-control great, proving that true beauty never ages. Gibbs's recording career goes back to 1946, when he waxed 78s with ...

Roger Moore and Sinatra

May 24, 2017

Roger Moore, who played a dashing secret agent in TV's The Saint and in seven James Bond films, died on May 23, 2017. He was 89. Though Roger wasn't a jazz musician and had nothing to do with music (the point of this blog), I had an opportunity to interview him for one of my Wall ...

Ray Mantilla: High Voltage

May 23, 2017

A week or so ago I received a call from Harry Sepulveda. Harry and I go way back. We first met in the 1970s, when I used to buy Latin-jazz albums at Record Mart, his store in the Times Square subway station, down a flight of stairs from the Shuttle. Today the store still exists, though ...

Oscar Pettiford: 1955-'58

May 22, 2017

In the spring of 1956, bassist Oscar Pettiford (pictured above with cello), in tandem with producer Creed Taylor, began assembling musicians and arrangers for what would become one of the hippest and sexiest big bands of the mid-decade period. Two albums were recorded a year apart for ABC-Paramount, where Creed was head of jazz A&R. Back ...

European Jazz on Film

May 19, 2017