If you haven’t checked out Christian McBride’s exciting trio, with piano phenom Christian Sands and drummer Ulysses Owens, we’d like to offer you the opportunity to sample their easy, youthful brilliance and exuberance. Recorded At Scala, in Leverkusen, Germany.

-Nick Moy

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David Murray has paid ample homage to the tradition of the tenor saxophone ballad. His ballad playing aptly reflects his avowed linear predecessors like Ben Webster, but Murray makes his own voice clearly heard. From the Village Vanguard, with John Hicks at the piano, Fred Hopkins on bass and Ed Blackwell on drums.

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This is a 1984 all-star Jazz Messengers reunion in Japan with Freddie, Curtis, Benny Golson, Walter Davis, Jr. and Buster Williams. I worked on a slew of these kinds of concerts with Art in the early ‘80s in the U.S., Europe and Japan. It was a great time to do this since so many great alumnae were still at the top of their game and the Jazz Messengers songbook was an endless list of great compositions.

-Michael Cuscuna

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Hope you listened to our post on the Gazette when fellow Philadephian Christian McBride talked at length about a local legend — organist Joey DeFrancesco. We offer this video, from the 2012 Java Jazz festival, in support of what the Joey DeFrancesco legend is all about.

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Fletcher won quite a few battles of music with “King Porter Stomp” And Jelly Roll Morton knew this, and he used to go and say “I made Fletcher Henderson.” And Fletcher used to laugh … and say “You did,” you know. He wouldn’t argue.

Toward the end of his life in May 1938, Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton (1890-1941) walked into the Library of Congress’s Coolidge Auditorium sporting an expensive suit, a gold watch fob and rings, and a diamond-studded incisor. H e sat down at the piano and, with the assistance of folklorist Alan Lomax, conveyed his music and life story into what Lomax called a “one-lung portable Presto recorder”. Speaking in a measured, orotund baritone, Morton explored his past at a leisurely, dignified pace, but he was eager to set the record straight on one particular subject: that he had “personally originated jazz in New Orleans in 1902”. Historians have since shown the origins of jazz to be more complicated than Morton allowed but none can refute the story of his most popular and enduring composition, “King Porter Stomp”.

This tune become to be the outstanding favorite of every great hot band throughout the world that had the accomplishments and qualifications of playing it. And until today this tune has been the cause of many great bands to come to fame. It has caused the outstanding tunes today to use the backgrounds that belong to “King Porter” in order to make great tunes o f themselves.

“King Porter Stomp” did indeed become a standard during the Swing Era, widely performed by big bands throughout the 1930s and beyond. Moreover, as Morton said, many musicians used the chords, the “backgrounds,” of ” “King Porter“‘s Trio and Stomp sections as the basis for new tunes. Adding luster to “King Porter“‘s agency in jazz history, Benny Goodman gave the piece a key role in an account of his band’s legendary performance at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles on the night of August 21, 1935. As Goodman recalled, when the band started playing Fletcher Henderson’s arrangements o f “Sometimes I ‘m Happy” and ” King Porter Stomp,” the “place exploded”

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Clarinetist Don Byron has made forays into a wide range of musical forms, including funk, klezmer, and the music of Ellington and Junior Walker. His latest exploration is a gospel quintet, honoring gospel greats Thomas Dorsey and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Here’s a look into Byron’s gospel experiment.

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