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Why the Kennedy Center Hates Jazz
It seems the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has made another honest mistake. I say honest," because I assume the folks down in Washington, D.C., who head up the Kennedy Center are well educated and cultured. How else can one explain the decision by an organization of this national standing to repeatedly ignore jazz and ...
Interview: Danny Bank on BG
Danny Bank is one of the most recorded baritone saxophonists in jazz history. According to Tom Lord's Jazz Discography, Danny has recorded on 416 sessions (studio and live dates). To give you an idea of how large a number that is, consider this: Gerry Mulligan recorded on 376, Count Basie's baritone saxophonist Charlie Fowlkes recorded on ...
Interview: Loren Schoenberg on BG
Loren Schoenberg knows his Benny Goodman. As a tenor saxophonist, jazz writer and executive director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, Loren, 50, wrote the extensive liner notes that accompany Mosaic's Classic Columbia and Okeh Benny Goodman Orchestra Sessions (1939-1958), a fabulous new seven-CD box set I reviewed yesterday. Loren also is an insider. Back ...
Benny Goodman: Columbia Years
Benny Goodman, like Duke Ellington, lived nine musical lives. Goodman started recording in 1926 with Ben Pollack, and by the late 1920s was already established as a jazz clarinet virtuoso. In 1929, braced by enormous self-confidence at age 20, Goodman went out on his own as a freelancer. But when he started his first band in ...
Interview: Benny Powell (Part 3)
Part 2 Easily, the most influential and widely imitated big band of the 1950s was Count Basie's New Testament" orchestra. The impact that this band left on jazz, musicians, arrangers and popular music cannot be overstated. And the mere fact that Basie was able to take two completely different bands at two different points in his ...
Interview: Benny Powell (Part 2)
Part 1 By the late 1940s, Lionel Hampton had begun to turn out a spotlight hog, demanding that the focus and adulation be on his performances and stage routines. While this me-first approach worked wonders for the Hampton brand, it left many of his band's musicians yearning for recognition. Benny Powell was among them. In Part ...
Interview: Benny Powell (Part 1)
Benny Powell is probably best known for his trombone solo on Count Basie's hit, April in Paris. Benny's Tommy Dorsey-like reading comes about 44 seconds into the 1955 track, when he gently trots out the song's theme and states the melody with enormous warmth and grace. Benny is one of only a handful of surviving members ...
Louie Bellson Said It
"You can imagine the excitement that Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson created. That's the reaction that big bands had in those days. When Harry James played Two O'clock Jump, You Made Me Love You or Bugle Call Rag, people just freaked out. They just stopped while they were dancing to listen. We would play before 3,000 ...
Ornette Coleman Said It
"I was out at [anthropologist] Margaret Mead's school and was teaching some little kids how to play instantly. I asked the question, 'How many kids would like to play music and have fun?' And all the little kids raised up their hands. And I asked, 'Well, how do you do that?' And one little girl said, ...
Earl Swope: The Lost Session
Once again, iTunes is hiding the great stuff. This time, the e-retailer has overlooked one of trombonist Earl Swope's best small-group recordings. The iTunes download in question is entitled Lennie Tristano: Out On a Limb. All of the tracks feature pianist Tristano, of course, but seven have long been known in the Swope discography as The ...


