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Little Walter: The Chess Masters
The harmonica is an instrument that doesn't turn up often in jazz. When it does, the instrument typically is played in a polished, mannered style. Jazz chromatic harmonica masters include Toots Thielemans, Jerry Adler, Ron Kalina, Julian Jackson and Hendrik Meurkens. Past legends include Larry Adler and Jerry Murad. But deep down, the harmonica is most ...
Woody Herman: Columbia Years
The big band era didn't end with the rise of bebop in 1944. Bands simply figured out how to adapt to the new music's language and soldiered on. For big bands, this language shift meant a need for musicians familiar with the idiom and arrangers who could put the new concepts on paper. Charts had to ...
John Coltrane: Side Steps
When box sets are smartly packaged, they provide enormous joy and education. Listening to an artist through a great set exposes you to vital recordings you may have skipped otherwise. You also experience the full thrust of the artist's work and are able to track the creative growth curve over a period of years. But for ...
Art Farmer: The Aztec Suite
Many top jazz albums recorded in 1959 were exhaustively celebrated this year in print on behalf of their 50-year anniversaries. The list includes Kind of Blue, Giant Steps, Time Out, Mingus Ah Um and The Shape of Jazz to Come. One recording that's in the same league but has been strangely overlooked is Art Farmer's The ...
Interview: Terry Teachout (Part 5)
The more time you spend looking at Louis Armstrong on film and listening to him on record, the more you come to a single realization: Armstrong has done more than any other performer to shape America's collective personality. Virtually every entertainer from the late 1930s onward was influenced by Armstrong's folksy sense of humor, relaxed demeanor ...
Interview: Terry Teachout (Part 4)
Given Louis Armstrong's jolly nature, it's somewhat fitting that his last known recording would be a narration of The Night Before Christmas. The recording was made at his home in Queens, N.Y., on February 26, 1971. Louis would die five months later. Throughout his life, Armstrong understood the misery of his origins, the heights of his ...
Interview: Terry Teachout (Part 3)
Greatness always finds itself under siege. It can't be helped. Sooner or later an impatient rival comes along who wants the attention and adulation afforded the top dog. In the late 1940s, this natural course of events pitted Dizzy Gillespie against Louis Armstrong. Since his days in Cab Calloway's band, Gillespie worked hard to stand out, ...
Interview: Terry Teachout (Part 2)
Louis Armstrong is slowly slipping into obscurity. Sadly, his music is heard less and less on the radio, and fewer and fewer people know or care much about his sound or his contribution to jazz and America's personality. Like Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong's oxidation is a direct result of his parodying singing style and stage presence. ...
Interview: Terry Teachout (Part 1)
Wall Street Journal drama critic, author, blogger and arts essayist Terry Teachout has managed to do the impossible. For the past six years, Terry has worked steadily on Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, which was published a week ago to rave reviews. What's remarkable is not that Terry wrote the book on the side while ...
Photostory11: Lester Young
Lester Young was the first jazz musician photographer Herb Snitzer captured with his camera. In fact, the image you see here of Young outside the Five Spot in New York is the first jazz photograph Herb ever took. Writer Nat Hentoff has called this image by Herb “the quintessential Lester Young photograph." This photo and the ...
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