Take a moment to learn more about some of the women of jazz who revolutionized instrumentation and performance during the height of the genre’s popularity. Mary Osborne Mary Osborne (1921-1992) is a celebrated guitarist who regularly performed and recorded with her fellow jazz greats of the era. She would go on to co-found the Osborne […]
When it comes to learning the mechanics of bebop, there’s no more monumental tome than the Charlie Parker Omnibook, which Jamey Aebersold and Ken Slone compiled in 1978. One educator described this 60-page landmark in Charlier Parker transcription as “the Bible for anyone serious about learning improvisation.” However, given its subject, the Omnibook isn’t for […]
Decades before the dark glasses and the wide-brimmed hat and the shock of black hair; before he produced Van Morrison, Ringo Starr, and the Rolling Stones; Don Was was a 19-year-old music obsessive with no clear prospects. “I dropped out of music school, but the only gig I could get was playing bass with a […]
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 that many consider vinyl to be the ideal medium for jazz, that last detail is especially surprising. “As far as I’m concerned, good riddance. I’m glad to see the LP go,” Rudy Van Gelder, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Article by Eduardo Rivadavia 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 […]
Despite Ellis Marsalis, Jr. being the paterfamilias of jazz’s most elite dynasty, he never ruled his house with an iron fist. “My father never put pressure on me,” Wynton Marsalis, one of four jazz-practitioning sons along with Branford, told The New York Times Magazine in 2004. “The house could fall down and everyone would be […]
