Tag: jazz

Pianist Agnar Mar Magnusson plays an original composition “Tristanotomia” dedicated to legendary piano player and composer Lenny Tristano. Ben Street on bass and Bill Stewart on drums. Recorded on the Reykjavik jazz festival 2008.

Tony Malaby, tenor saxophone; Ben Monder, guitar; Eivind Opsvik, bass; Nasheet Waits, drums. Live at The Jazz Gallery, New York City, January 24, 2009.

Sometime ago I ran the (fairly) famous jazz clip “Jammin’ the Blues,” featuring Lester Young, and went so far as to include a poem I’d written about Lester, called “Goodbye Porkpie Hat,” in reference to a tune that Charlie Mingus had written to commemorate Lester’s death. Here are two recent versions of GPH, one a…

The famous “Sound of Jazz” clips of Monk. The show aired December 8, 1957. This is the earliest footage I know of Monk, and he’s still wearing period “bebop” attire. Monk was mightily irritated that Count Basie decided to insert himself in the proceedings. I reviewed an early, cheap version of a “Sound of Jazz”…

Well, pretty much. Back in the early fifties, Thelonious Monk wrote a tune, so the story goes, for his son Thelonious Jr. called “Little Rootie Tootie.” He recorded it for Prestige, which was not all that excited about Monk’s limited sales. Then after Monk moved to Riverside, the tune was redone, with Hall Overton rewriting…

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,…