You don’t get to heroic stature as a jazz musician without establishing a genuine connection to your forbears.
Chris Potter has emerged over the past 15 years as one of the most engaging and creative tenor saxophonists today. Like Mark Turner and Marcus Strickland and others of that generation, Potter seems to need a number of different ensembles to realize and express everything he’s hearing as a saxophonist and composer.
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John Coltrane’s Neighborhood: Philadelphia as Post-War Jazz Capital
All About Jazz is hosting a series of articles about the Philadelphia where John Coltrane spent his formative years. And not just Coltrane: the Heath Brothers, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Smith, Philly Joe Jones, Benny Golson, Lee Morgan and Reggie Workman, among many others. In this article, Rob Armstrong revisits the Philadelphia local culture that, as Odean Pope asserts, harbored the most important US jazz scene between World War II and the mid 1960s.
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The Singular Sound of Yusef Lateef
Doug Ramsey provides a link to a two-hour edition of Nick Spitzer’s wonderful syndicated radio show“American Routes”. Robert Randolph, Clifton Chenier, Aaron Neville, Lena Horne and the amazing 92-year-old Yusef Lateef are covered on this wonderful program. Doug also unearthed a 1963 kinescope of Yusef playing the blues (on oboe!) with the Cannonball Adderley sextet. The rhythm section is Joe Zawinul, Sam Jones and Louis Hayes.
-Michael Cuscuna
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Michael Brecker- Interview, Lecture & Performance e
Randy Brecker used to sing the praises of his younger brother Michael when Mike was still a college student in Indiana. And when Mike finally came to New York and joined Randy in Horace Silver’s quintet, the band Dreams and Billy Cobham’s group, he more than lived up to his brother’s advance praise. A beautiful person and a magnificent saxophonist, Michael Brecker left us way too early after a handful of agonizing years in search of a bone marrow match. This lengthy 1984 talk and performance at North Texas State makes us miss him all the more.
-Michael Cuscuna
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Read MoreWhat did Charlie Parker hear in the music of Claude Debussy?
Jazz players often bring up Claude Debussy’s music when they talk about their classical influences. Charlie Parker and Bill Evans were just two of the prominent jazz musicians who listened to Debussy. Check out this excerpt from Debussy’s String Quartet; see if you can hear where Bird and Evans were coming from. The Talich Quartet performs. (The video is amusing, too.)
-Nick Moy
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Dexter Gordon 90th Birthday: February 27, 1923
Last year marked Charles Mingus’s 90th birthday and this year, another star Los Angeles native hits the same milestone. Dexter was not only a pioneer in the bebop movement, charting the blueprint for the tenor saxophone, but he was also a unique character and well-read intellectual. Despite his one major failing of putting A-1 Steak Sauce on perfectly good meat, he was fond of pointing out, “I’m not the boy next door.” A biography & more from the gorgeous DexterGordon.com website. Please visit.
-Michael Cuscuna
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Read MoreDexter Gordon Documentary Excerpt
This is a wonderful six-minute except from Don McGlynn and Leonard Malone’s Dexter Gordon documentary “More Than You Know” which focuses on his years in Copenhagen. Unfortunately this wonderful film is no longer available on video. Dexter was a delightful, one-of-a-kind personality and that comes through on this wonderful footage.
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The Dexter Gordon Society: Launch Date February 27, 2013
The Dexter Gordon Society has been created to honor, preserve, document, and present the life’s work and musical legacy of world-renowned Jazz musician, band leader, composer, Academy Award nominated actor, and the world’s first Bebop tenor saxophonist, Dexter Keith Gordon (1923-1990).
The Society will serve to increase public awareness and appreciation for the cultural and artistic contributions of Dexter Gordon and his musical contemporaries through historical research and documentation, educational workshops, musical performance, public panels and presentations, technology, and archival work.
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Read MoreDexter Gordon: Live At Montreux 1973
This is a very cool performance as Dexter Gordon digs into Jimmy Heath’s “Gingerbread Boy” with an all-star rhythm section. This performance was issued as Dexter’s final Prestige album, but it’s cool to see all the 1973 trappings like Dexter’s dashiki-like top and Hampton Hawes and Bob Cranshaw on electric instruments.
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The Human Voice of Lester Young
Only two of the four posted audio clips from Lester Young’s February 6. 1959 interview in Paris with Francois Postif les than 6 weeks before his death are still up here. The clips center on his early influence, his childhood experiences in his family band and some thoughts on a future that would never come. It is interesting how closely his human speaking voice resembles his tone on tenor sax.
-Michael Cuscuna
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