Joe Henderson: So Near, So Far (Musing for Miles)
August 6, 2026
One way to think about jazz is as a dialogue between tradition and innovation. Read More
Blog - Jazz Spectrum
Connections Near and Far: Joe Henderson's Musings for Miles
August 6, 2026
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
July 31, 2026
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
Sasha Berliner – The State of the Vibraphone
July 24, 2026
I came to the vibraphone early in my jazz listening, and I’ve been there ever since, as the Jazz Spectrum archives document. And in this decade, the instrument has become ever more prevalent on the show, as it is on the current scene. Read More
Finding Sasha Berliner
July 24, 2026
In that winter of Lockdown, the Smalls/Mezzrow livestreams were my way of accessing at least some kind of live music performance. I hit a jackpot (on a pretty safe bet) with a band called Palladium promising to play Wayne Shorter’s Speak No Evil on Christmas Eve 2020, 56 years to the day after its original recording. This was also the first time I heard Nicole Glover who met the responsibility of playing tenor saxophone by being a fresh voice, very much her own, respectful but not too deferential. Read More
So Many Lovely Things
July 16, 2026
In 1992, I was drawn to a show at the Regatta Bar in Cambridge featuring Joe Henderson and Freddie Hubbard on the front line. With his 1985 recording, The State of the Tenor, Joe had reestablished himself as a not-to-be-missed musician and one of the inarguable occupants of jazz’s vaunted tenor-saxophone. And Freddie, a wunderkind trumpeter who rose to heady prominence in the early 1960s, had reliably returned from his fusion digressions to produce a series of notable records in the mid-to late 80s. Read More
The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery
July 6, 2026
Wes Montgomery recorded The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery (featured on a recent Jazz Spectrum Friday) for the Riverside label over two days in January 1960, his second date as a leader and the first to fully chart the new territory he was defining for the instrument. The boastful title, so at odds with Wes’s mild and modest nature, came from the producer, Orrin Keepnews, who during those years was both an incisive judge of talent and an astute marketer. Read More
For Abdullah Ibrahim (1934–2026)
June 19, 2026
In 2005 I traveled with my oldest daughter to South Africa for a bit of work and a lot of what Duke Ellington called the “Tourist Point of View.” One afternoon during our interlude in Cape Town we were hosted for tea and dessert at a Cape Malay home. I’ve lost most of the small facts about the visit, but I recall the mood, the laughter, and the warmth of our hosts. This I really do recall: the sensation, as the hours unwound, of having been in that room, or at least having felt its ambience, before. Read More
On Seeing Abdullah Ibrahim in 2018
June 18, 2026
My most recent contribution to this blog was a recollection of seeing Sonny Rollins perform in 2009. Now I return with a memory, now bittersweet due to his own death this week, of seeing Abdullah Ibrahim in 2018. Rollins was 79, old only until the moment when the band and his own playing lit a spark. Ibrahim was 83 and although ever alert and observant, he was less energetic. Read More