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Blue Highways and Sweet Music: The Territory Bands, Part I
by Karl Ackermann
Part 1 | Part 2 OriginsBy the second half of the 1920s, New York had supplanted Chicago as the center of jazz. The “Jazz Age"--a label incorrectly ascribed to F. Scott Fitzgerald--could rationally have been framed as the “Dance Age." Prohibition, and the speakeasies that it spawned, were packed with wildly enthusiastic patrons of ...
Dot Time Legends Series: Is Every Night New Year's Eve Around Here?
by Richard J Salvucci
Soon after The Embers opened in New York City in late 1951, Joe Bushkin and His Quartet spent 16 memorable weeks there. With Milt Hinton and Jo Jones, Bushkin was joined by Buck Clayton on trumpet. Astoundingly, Art Tatum had a solo piano gig there at the same time. Bushkin and Tatum listened to each other ...
Mandla Mlangeni: Born to Be
by Seton Hawkins
Mandla Mlangeni has been engaged. The South African trumpeter, composer, and bandleader oversees three groups, notably the Amandla Freedom Ensemble and the Tune Recreation Committee. Additionally, his works are marked by an intense effort to explore and connect with social discourse in the country today. Indeed, from the Tune Recreation Committee's naming nod to South Africa's ...
Meet Martin McFie
by Tessa Souter and Andrea Wolper
Super Fan Martin McFie is so into live music he doesn't even have a record collection. These days, McFie, British by birth, calls both South Carolina and Nice, France, home. The frequent-traveling “jazz detective" has made it his business to seek out jazz of all kinds in some of the most unlikely places, especially when he's ...
Nice Jazz Festival and Jazz at Juan les Pins 2018
The Cote d'Azur, France's legendary playground, celebrated the first jazz festival 70 years ago but the concept did not become an annual event until the early 1970s. Set beside the impossibly blue Mediterranean, jazz festivals are celebrated all along the coast from Cannes to Monte Carlo. Here we look at two major events in July, Nice ...
Jazz Ambassadors: Representing A Segregated America During The Cold War
by Victor L. Schermer
Jazz Ambassadors THIRTEEN Productions 2018 Here, long overdue, is a comprehensive documentary about the legendary jazz musicians in the 1950s who served as “cultural ambassadors" under the aegis of the U.S. State Department, touring Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Soviet Union. The film comes sixty years after the fact. As Americans continue ...
Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong: Cheek to Cheek
by Dan McClenaghan
Cheek to Cheek, a four CD box set, collects three classic albums from Verve Records featuring Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald: Ella and Louis (1956), Ella And Louis Again (1957) and Porgy And Bess (1958). This sequence began before rock and roll had deepened its roots--in spite of the Elvis Presley blossoming--and before The ...
Sun Ra: Of Abstract Dreams
by Ian Patterson
Neither Sun Ra's death nor the passing of a quarter of a century since has slowed down the seemingly insatiable appetite for archival recordings of the pianist, composer and poet. In 2014, to mark the centenary of Sun Ra's birth--né Herman Poole Blount--Strut Records and Art Yard issued the 2-CD, career-spanning compilation In The Orbit of ...
State and Mainstream: The Jazz Ambassadors and the U.S. State Department
by Karl Ackermann
The Cold War that began in 1947 and ran for forty-four years, had jazz music as its primary deterrent to global tensions, and it did more to foster good will between the U.S. and global citizens than any previous program launched by the U.S. Department of State. Jazz music, even in its Golden Age, was seldom ...
A Day at AAJ
by Jeff Fitzgerald, Genius
One of the main benefits of being the Dean of American Jazz Humorists©, besides a free Orange Julius whenever I want one (at participating locations) and 2-for-1 Redbox rentals, is my unfettered access to the inner workings of the entire Jazz universe. As a member of AAJ's Inner Sanctum, I am no more than three degrees ...
