WGTE Public Media Blog

Wynton Marsalis’s Mr. Jelly Lord: a fitting tribute to Jelly Roll Morton

Self-aggrandizing claims of absurd proportion are all the rage these days, and debunking them is its own parlor industry. (Some people make that so easy.) If the robots don’t kill us, these mirror-in-mirror obsessions might. But then, it’s well to remember that this is nothing new. The pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton famously boasted that he invented jazz in 1902. I’m less skeptical about this than perhaps I should be – my instinctive response is, Well, maybe; I ‘spoze it depends on what you mean by jazz. Read More

Celebrating Wendell Berry (1924-2026) with Jazz

Jazz Spectrum

Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture was published in 1977, coming along as I was finishing college and wondering what to do next. One of the options was to return to the family’s cattle ranch in the Flint Hills of Kansas and resume working and learning the trade. That impulse already aligned with the prevailing values of the back-to-nature, country-and-western branch of the hippie ethos. Read More

Renee Rosnes's "Galapagos Suite"

Jazz Spectrum

In addition to jazz, literature was part of the precocious teenaged and precociously beer fueled conversations Fritz and I had with other friends. Lest you think we were, besides the beer, little saints, don’t worry, there was predictable sophomoric humor and the requisite angst of adolescence. We lived vicariously through the books we read and the words great writers spun for us. I was interested in novels, but Fritz also had an ear for poetry—and not just the great lyrics that went with the anthems of the late 1960s-early 1970s. Read More

Appreciating Thad Jones

Jazz Spectrum

Here’s how I came to properly appreciate the trumpet- (and cornet- and flugelhorn-) playing of Thad Jones, who is featured this weekend on both nights of Jazz Spectrum. Friday night, the featured record is Thad’s 1984 date, Three and One. Read More

Free Spirit: Roy Brooks and The Free Slave

Jazz Spectrum

Forty or so years ago, I was listening to the radio one evening, tuned to the jazz show of Detroit legend Ed Love, which was the nighttime music of that pre-children era of my life. (I didn’t know at the time Ed also grew up in Kansas; maybe that was the source of the bond.) The music I heard that evening was stirring – high-octane trumpet wizardry over the bassist’s searching harmonic undercurrent. But you could hear, you could feel, that the drummer’s funk-tinged polyrhythmic groove was the organizing intelligence that drove everything. I thought, Who is this? Read More

Artemis: The State of the Art

Jazz Spectrum

Virtuosity runs so deep in the music that I instinctively rebel against the idea of a jazz “super group.” Pick a seemingly run-of-the-mill horn-and-rhythm-section recording date for which the group was composed with a flurry of last-minute calls, and you might bump into a real masterwork. Of course there’s something to be said for stable groups that meld and deepen over long stretches of playing together in performance, in the studio, and at practice. We all can name our favorites. Read More

Joe Henderson: So Near, So Far (Musing for Miles)

Jazz Spectrum

One way to think about jazz is as a dialogue between tradition and innovation. Read More

Connections Near and Far: Joe Henderson's Musings for Miles

Jazz Spectrum

Friday evening Jazz Spectrum will showcase Joe Henderson’s So Near, So Far (Musings for Miles). For this avid listener, it will be a chance to return to that record to ask questions once again of the music and its players. This time, I’m curious about the underappreciated (by me) side of Miles Davis that I discussed in this space on May 28 as I joined the world in celebrating the maestro’s centennial. As influential as Miles is, there are broad swaths of his music that I know too poorly. Read More

Andrew Hill’s Book of Compositions

Jazz Spectrum

Among the more audacious album titles in jazz is Genius of Modern Music (Vols. 1 & 2), applied to a pair of separate albums that Blue Note released in 1956, gathering the recordings from 1947 through 1952 of Thelonious Monk. I’ve always been happy the producers avoided leading with either “A” or “The”. “The” would been a smidge too bold, since around that time there were doubtless more than one genius mining the modern vein. But “A” would have been far too pallid – Thelonious was always too singular to be lumped with anyone else. So, “Genius” it was. And it was apt. Read More

WGTE Public Media Blog

Categories