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Louis Armstrong: Denmark 1933
Back in 1933, before the hamming and caricature roles in movies, Armstrong was in Copenhagen, Denmark, during a year-long tour of Europe. There, three songs were filmed, the first time Armstrong was captured by a movie camera. What we see and hear is Armstrong on stage at the Tivoli Concert Hall playing and singing jazz's swing ...
Chet Baker and Artt Frank
Drummer Artt Frank first heard Chet Baker on Armed Forces Radio while aboard the U.S.S. Des Moines toward the end of the Korean War, in 1953. The following year he went to see the trumpeter at George Wein's Storyville in Boston and spoke to him afterward. Baker was kind to Artt, and Artt responded to the ...
Sean Connery's Lined Face
The sad death of Sean Connery over the weekend took me back. Those of us who were around in the early 1960s remember the secret-agent craze that began with the wild popularity of his James Bond movies. At the start in '62, Bond predated the Beatles in America by two years and was responsible for launching ...
Lamont Lament: London with Love
Back in April, I posted about Duncan Lamont, a wonderful British saxophonist who was an elegant songwriter. He composed a song a day well into his 80s. A majority of them were wonderful and beautifully crafted. His best known is probably Pretty People, which is now a standard and has been recorded by dozens of vocalists. ...
Groovy Bands Make the Scene
The thrift-shop fashion statement of hippies photographed in San Francisco's during the Summer of Love in 1967 reached the country's youth culture nationwide a year later. Then came the colorful satin Nehru outfits of the Beatles in India in '68, which had a strange effect on adults in '69 and beyond. That year, many grownups decided ...
Elmo Hope and Joe Morris
Bebop's fast tempo and complex rhythms were embraced by modern-jazz fans when the jazz style emerged in the mid-1940s. But bop also provided jump blues with an opening. Bebop was spectacular and electrifying, but it wasn't for dancing. It was mostly for sitting and listening. As a result, the big-beat, horn-driven dance music made major inroads ...
Elmo Hope Trio
In 1957, pianist Elmo Hope moved from New York to Los Angeles. He had little choice. His cabaret license was suspended following a drug conviction, and the only place where he had musician friends and the likelihood of work was on the West Coast. As Leonard Feather remarks in his liner notes for one of Hope's ...
Documentary: Horace Parlan
The response to my Horace Parlan post earlier this week was enormous. Parlan really was special and should be thought of as one of the Top-10 post-war piano greats. So why not another post on Parlan. Though I posted the following documentary some years back, I thought I'd post it again for the thousands of readers ...
Horace Parlan: Movin' + Groovin'
By now, it's no secret that Bill Evans is my favorite pianist. In second place would have to be Horace Parlan. Born in Pittsburgh, Parlan at a young age contracted polio, which left his right hand partly disabled and disfigured. Two of the fingers in his right hand were out of commission. As a result, his ...
Art Framer: Perception
Art Farmer had a way of playing the trumpet and flugelhorn that sounded as if he was dancing or singing. Farmer was less about blasts and taut nuance and more about a light, pretty touch. His horn had a classical elegance and a jazz tone that delighted the ear without being commercial. On ballads, you could ...


