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 […]
There’s a South African jazz album that’s easily as important as John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, but hardly anybody in North America knows about it. And if not for a white, 37-year-old Canadian man, it might have stayed that way for years. One day, Seton Hawkins, the director of public programs and education resources at […]
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 […]
Dave Brubeck nearly broke down in tears in front of Ken Burns. While discussing racism on camera for Burns’ 2001 series Jazz at his Wilton, Connecticut, home, he swerved into a childhood memory about his father taking him to meet a Black cowboy by the Sacramento River. The cowboy opened his shirt to reveal a […]
Early in college, the alto saxophonist Darius Jones checked out a VHS of Cannonball Adderley from the library. As he watched the European concert, one of Adderley’s sidemen struck him as peculiar. “He was standing next to this other guy who looked like a professor or something,” Jones tells Discogs. “I had never seen 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, […]
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 […]
