Results for "Norman Granz"

Thelonious Monk: An Alternative Top Ten Albums Of Deep And Staggering Genius

by Chris May
December 23, 2020

Thelonious Monk's position in cultural history grows in stature with each passing year and every new generation. Lionised by jazz fans and a continuing influence on musicians, Monk in 2020 is also held to be a hero by the hip hop movement. While his music no longer has the power to shock that it once possessed, ...

Yusef Lateef: An Alternative Top Ten Albums Blowing Cultural Nationalism Out Of The Water

by Chris May
November 18, 2020

A pioneer of global and modal jazz, the multi-instrumentalist and composer Yusef Lateef is only beginning to have his importance in the history of the music properly acknowledged. After languishing off-catalogue for decades, much of his output is being made available once more. A treasure trove of great jazz is out there waiting to be rediscovered. ...

Rez Abbasi: Django-shift

by Karl Ackermann
August 14, 2020

Django Reinhardt's music is so ubiquitous that it's easy to forget his career was relatively brief. The gypsy guitarist/composer had recorded hundreds of 78s and acetates before he died of a stroke in 1953 at age forty-three. On many early sides, he played a six-string banjo-guitar hybrid tuned in the standard tuning of a guitar. Norman ...

Lift Every Voice And Sing: Twenty #BlackLives Albums That Matter

by Chris May
July 23, 2020

Jazz has been inextricably linked with social and political protest since at least the late 1930s, when Billie Holiday made famous the leftist songwriter and poet Abel Meeropol's “Strange Fruit." The song, which has a power to move that is undiminished by familiarity, likens the bodies of lynched African Americans to fruit hanging in trees.

Charles Tolliver: Blowing Down The Walls Of Trump’s Jericho

by Chris May
July 21, 2020

Charles Tolliver has played with practically every major African American jazz stylist of his generation, and composed for some of them, too. In addition, he is the co-founder of Strata-East, the most influential label at the intersection of hard bop and spiritual jazz during the 1970s. Tolliver's long and distinguished career continues to flourish, with a ...

Norman Granz

Born: August 6, 1918

Nat "King" Cole: Hittin’ the Ramp: The Early Years (1936-1943)

by Victor L. Schermer
November 7, 2019

While he achieved fame and fortune as a pops crooner of the 1950s-60s, Nat “King" Cole firmly occupies a place in jazz history. Unlike Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney and others who began their careers as singers, Cole started out as a pianist, composer/arranger, and band leader, working small clubs in Chicago, soon adding vocals ...

Norman Granz and Verve Records (1944 - 1962)

by Russell Perry
August 6, 2019

In July 2, 1944, Norman Granz, a jazz fan and small-time LA promoter staged a concert in the Philharmonic Auditorium with $300 of borrowed money. His “Jazz at the Philharmonic" concerts were hugely successful and became tours that ran until 1957. These tours and the record labels they spawned—Clef, Norgran and especially Verve—became home to many ...

Yardbird - The Savoy and Dial Recordings of Charlie Parker (1945 - 1948)

by Russell Perry
April 23, 2019

Emerging from the Jay McShann Orchestra in Kansas City and relentlessly curious about how to play the new music he heard in his head, Charlie Parker found sympathetic players in New York, especially Dizzy Gillespie. In November of 1945, Bird, as he was universally known, began to record with his own quintets and sextets in a ...

Ella Plays Dice

by Eve Goldberg
November 15, 2018

Ella Fitzgerald was eating a piece of pie when the police burst into her dressing room, guns drawn. Nearby, Dizzy Gillespie and saxophonist Illinois Jacquet were playing a game of craps. The place was Houston, Texas. The date was October 7, 1955. The occasion was a sold-out concert at The Music Hall, one stop on tour ...