Some of the greatest jazz of the 20th century was recorded in a Hackensack, New Jersey, living room by an optometrist who hated vinyl. Given vinyl is widely considered to be the ideal medium for jazz, that last detail is surprising. “As far as I’m concerned, good riddance. I’m glad to see the LP go,” […]
Alan Braufman is a lauded jazz musician, saxophonist, and composer. His 1975 album, Valley of Search, is renowned amongst collectors and his new record, The Fire Still Burns, drops August 2020. A friend of mine asked me the other day, “What were the albums early in my life that influenced my musical development?” Upon thinking […]
Keyboardist Bob James has been sampled in hip-hop classics from Run-DMC’s “Beats to the Rhyme” to Eric B. and Rakim’s “Follow the Leader.” An agogô-bell breakbeat from one of his recordings has propelled tracks by N.W.A. and A$AP Rocky. No jazz artist has been sampled more than him. The term “godfather of hip-hop” has even […]
Kim Parker is spinning a yarn about her stepfather, Charlie Parker, when a hummingbird swings by to greet her. “It’s a beautiful thing to see them,” the jazz singer tells Discogs from her garden in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. One year, she says, Kim and her neighbor, Bud, who she describes as “a very interesting and […]
When CDs hit the market in the mid-1980s, almost everyone took the bait. Much of the listening public curbed their record collections and spent fistfuls of cash on what was seen as a durable, futuristic improvement on crackly old vinyl. Chad Kassem, then a minimum-wage cook with a music obsession, was one of the few […]
I originally met Thelonious Monk’s son and estate representative, T.S. Monk, way back in 1991 when I was an 18-year-old production coordinator for the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz (now called the Hancock Institute of Jazz). I’ve been a fan of Monk’s music as far back as I can remember and that was a magical […]
Blue Note Records is arguably the definitive jazz label. It championed the style from day one, rarely straying from it over the next 80 years even while enduring the inevitable mergers and acquisitions experienced by most record companies, thus proudly standing by their slogan: “The Finest in Jazz Since 1939.” Alfred Lion was a German […]
