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Play It in the Closet: The Return Farewell of J.D. Salinger
43 years ago J.D. Salinger, the reclusive writer who rose to cult status in the 1950s and early 1960s on the strength of his novel The Catcher in the Rye and his stories about the talented but troubled Glass family, bade farewell to the published literary life with a long piece of fiction titled Hapworth 16, ...
Dick Twardzik Bio Lives!
Richard Twardzik, the rather haunted-looking pianist who was a mainstay of the Boston jazz scene in the early 1950s, recorded only once as a leader before dying at the age of 24 during a European tour with Chet Baker. His quirky, fluid style, influenced by Bud Powell and Art Tatum and sprinkled with touches of dissonance ...
On a Turquoise Cloud: Duke Ellington After the War, 1945-47
At the end of World War II Duke Ellington was coming off one of the most commercially and artistically successful periods of his career--the so-called Blanton-Webster years of the early 1940s. He had managed to keep much of his orchestra intact during the war and had maintained a high public profile with concerts and broadcasts during ...
Jazz and Jack Kerouac
“Here were the children of the American bop night," Jack Kerouac wrote in his 1957 novel On the Road, which, like many of Kerouac's other writings, celebrated and invoked the music of Charlie Parker, Lester Young, and many other jazz greats. We'll mark this weekend's 50th anniversary of the publication of Kerouac's best-known book with a ...
I'll Be Seeing You: Jo Stafford, 1917-2008
Jo Stafford, one of the last great vocalists from the “songbird" era of big band vocalists, passed away Wednesday at the age of 90. A World War II icon dubbed “GI Jo" and beloved by soldiers for her performances and recordings such as “Long Ago and Far Away," Stafford possessed one of the most graceful, limpid ...
Golden Arms and Glasses: When Algren Met Holiday
Novelist Nelson Algren and singer Billie Holiday are two iconic figures of mid-20th-century American culture, though Holiday's name and visage--not to mention her voice--is surely better-known and remembered than Algren's is today. (At least Starbucks hasn't taken to hawking copies of The Man With the Golden Arm at the coffee counter yet.) Algren, perhaps, made the ...
One More You Wrote Through Us: Horace Tapscott
In 1961 pianist Horace Tapscott turned down a chance to have a high-profile career with the Lionel Hampton band and spent the next several decades in Los Angeles, leading several community-jazz bands and doing his best to extend the mentoring and teaching tradition that he had experienced growing up during the glory days of L.A.'s Central ...
From the Archives: Let Freedom Ring
Night Lights made its debut on WFIU four years ago almost to the day--or night, as it were--with a program called Let Freedom Ring that aired on the eve of the July 4th holiday. I had been working at WFIU for exactly two years, subbing for weekday afternoon jazz host Joe Bourne and producing WFIU jazz ...
Conover's Coming Over: Willis Conover and Jazz at the Voice of America
“Willis Conover did more to crumble the Berlin wall and bring about collapse of the Soviet empire than all the Cold War presidents put together," jazz writer Gene Lees once said. Working for decades as a broadcaster for the Voice of America, Conover was perhaps the most influential jazz DJ of the 20th century. He brought ...
