Results for "JazzWax by Marc Myers"

Pepper Adams: London, 1981

October 16, 2015

In the wake of my post on Mosaic Records' Complete Bee Hive Sessions along with all the email heat that followed from readers knocked out by the box's baritone sax sessions, let's end the week with Pepper Adams. As you'll soon see and hear, Adams was an unassuming killer on the instrument. Here he is in ...

Early Nelson Riddle

October 15, 2015

Arranger Nelson Riddle is most often associated with Frank Sinatra. Which makes sense, since Riddle scored a number of successful albums for Sinatra in the 1950s that sassed up the singer's swinging sound at Capitol. He did this with playful sectional riffs, unusual instrumental textures and bright solo tones added for punctuation. But where did Riddle's ...

Billy Eckstine and Vocal Groups

October 14, 2015

Billy Eckstine was a sex symbol in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The vocalist's movie-star looks and seductive baritone earned him a prominent place in magazines and jukeboxes, leaving black and white girls with a terrible crush on him. All were smitten by the tenderness and understanding in Eckstine's butterscotch voice. Today, Eckstine and the ...

Complete Bee Hive Sessions

October 13, 2015

The late 1970s was a weird time for acoustic jazz. The profitability of rock and soul in the late 1960s and early '70s had drained the talent in jazz departments at all record labels. If you worked on the jazz side and hadn't made the leap to producing rock and soul artists, you were most likely ...

Post-Parker String Dates

October 12, 2015

The genius of Charlie Parker's studio recordings with strings in 1949, 1950 and 1952 for Norman Granz's Cleff label wasn't in the merging of jazz and fiddles. In Parker's case, that was something of a happy accident when he turned up at a Carnegie Hall recording session at the tail end of 1947 and asked to ...

Jack McDuff: France, 1964

October 9, 2015

Ramsey Lewis: The In Crowd

October 8, 2015

This week marks the 50th anniversary of Ramsey Lewis's The In Crowd peaking on the Billboard pop chart at #5. The album of the same name went to #2 in early November 1965, and it remained on the chart for 47 weeks. What's particularly astounding about The In Crowd LP reaching #2 are the other albums ...

Johnny Mandel: Harper, 1966

October 7, 2015

In 1966, Paul Newman starred in Harper, a film about a private investigator with a spent marriage who takes a challenging case 90 miles north of Los Angeles to get away from it all. In today's world, it's a TV pilot at best, but in the cool '60s, studios didn't need much of an excuse to ...

Don Elliott: A Musical Offering

October 6, 2015

There weren't too many instruments Don Elliott couldn't play. Starting in the early 1950s, Elliott recorded on vibes, mellophone, trumpet, bongos, marimba, xylophone, flugelhorn and a variety of percussion instruments. Whats' more, he was a superb vocalist. Like many multi-instrumentalists, Elliott had a multitrack recording studio in New York and at his home in Connecticut. Most ...

BBC Doc: Easy Listening

October 2, 2015

Easy-listening music is difficult to quantify today. As I wrote in a Wall Street Journal essay not long ago (go here), the genre began as mood music in 1945, when an attempt was made by record companies to ease the stress of post-World War II America with instrumental music designed to change moods. In the 1950s, ...