Stan Getz used to worry about being the Jewish Lester Young. Well, nice work if you can get it, I would say. When Stan was on, as he very often was through the Fifties, he was half a step behind Lester, if that. Here in Germany in 1960, with Jan Johansson piano, Ray Brown, brass,…
Search Results for: JAZZ
Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary. Oh, and Mark too
Back in the day, and what a day it was, too, the Washington Post comics page would stack Mary Worth, Zippy the Pinhead, and Mark Trail right one on top of one another. The Zipster’s labored, po-mo, self-referencing meta facetiousness, combined with Mark’s two-fisted, straight from the fifties outdoor action and Mary’s two-fisted, straight from…
Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Tony Williams
Pre-sellout,mid-sixties Miles with his last great quintet, the “E.S.P.” “Miles Smiles” quintet. In 1969, Davis played the Newport Jazz Festival, as he always did, a festival that had become, much to the chagrin of organizer George Wein, the Newport Jazz/Rock Festival. It was Miles’ invariable practice to arrive at the festival minutes before his set…
Lester Young—“Jammin’ the Blues”
Filmed back in 1944, this is simply the coolest jazz video ever, starting out with an opening shot of Lester Young’s pork pie hat. (Sorry, but if I had to tell you, you’re not quite as cool as you might be.) Lester Young is the coyest, least satisfying of the great jazz musicians. He broke…
Joe Lovano
Tenor sax man Joe Lovano, one of the leaders in “post-Ornette” jazz, is shown here in 1995 with George Mraz on bass and Al Foster on drums. Two years later, Lovano made one of the greatest free jazz albums ever—Trio Fascination*—with Dave Holland on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. *Trio Fascination (edition one) to…
George Russell
Back in the fifties, the heyday of “intellectual jazz,” George Russell was perhaps the most cerebral of them all, not that it netted him much at the box office. But he did get on the tube now and again, on those Sunday afternoon “public service” broadcasts the networks put on to satisfy the FCC and…
A World Without Thelonious?
Fortunately, we don’t have to face that prospect. Thelonious Monk has been in the grave for more than 20 years, but his music lives on, in dozens of his own CDs and dozens more that other musicians have recorded in honor of his genius. But how, you may ask, can one select from the dozens…
What sort of man reads Playboy?
Well, not me, though God knows I’ve tried. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been gnawing away at Playboy Cover to Cover: the Fifties, an indispensable compendium of Playboy’s first bloom. Yet in the old days, people really did read Playboy—not for the articles, but for the fiction. For Hef and the gang, fiction…