Blog - Jazz Spectrum

The Permanence of Mary Lou Williams: Dave Douglas’s Soul on Soul

October 16, 2026

Duke Ellington said Mary Lou Williams was “perpetually contemporary.” He should know. And he did. In describing Mary Lou, he also coined the phrase that gave this week’s Jazz Spectrum Friday featured album its title: she was, he said, like “soul on soul.” Dave Douglas’s album, Soul on Soul, is an unusual and illuminating tribute to Mary Lou. Often, a tribute album tries to make its claim by looking backward. Read More

Meeting the Jazztet

October 9, 2026

Jazz Spectrum

When Fritz proposed featuring the debut album of Art Farmer and Benny Golson’s new band, Meet the Jazztet, he included a comment that warranted a pause for thought. He texted: “I’m not sure I have anything I can cite to prove the point, but they strike me as an underappreciated pairing.”I agree but have even less to cite. I will, though, test my genuine appreciation to see if it is adequate to their accomplishment.Read More

Stanley Cowell — A Toledo Inheritance

October 2, 2026

Jazz Spectrum

In 1992, I sat in the Toledo Peristyle, rapt and awestruck, along with the rest of the full house, listening to the Toledo Symphony Orchestra play a new piece by a Toledo native, a piano concerto written in honor of another Toledo native. At the piano was the composer, Stanley Cowell. The pianist being honored, Art Tatum, had been dead for thirty-five years. I have a recording of the performance, and I’ve listened to it now and again over the nearly thirty-five years — a symmetrical thirty-five years, now that I think about it — since that memorable night. Read More

John Coltrane at 100: Part 4 — The Matter of Meaning

September 25, 2026

Jazz Spectrum

We’ve spent the week trying to see John Coltrane clearly. Tuesday, I proposed to think about the arc of his career as one, long unbroken search rather than as a series of reinventions. Wednesday, the focus was his two indispensable apprenticeships, looking at what he took from his time from Miles, and, more decisively, what he carried forward from Monk. Yesterday, a handful of records that deserve your attention alongside the more usual suspects. Now it’s Friday. The occasion for all this is Coltrane’s centenary. Read More

John Coltrane at 100: Part 3 — A Few of My Favorite Things

September 24, 2026

Jazz Spectrum

The Essential Coltrane. If you go looking for that, whether by talking to mavens or mining what these days passes for Intelligence, you’ll get variations on the same core of recordings: Giant Steps, A Love Supreme, probably My Favorite Things, maybe the live Vanguard recordings. Nothing wrong about any of that. But “essential” is an interesting word — per the OED, “Absolutely necessary, indispensably requisite.” Sure. Also, “Of or pertaining to essence, specific being, or intrinsic nature.” Right again. Read More

John Coltrane at 100: Part 2 — An Apprentice’s Lessons

September 23, 2026

Jazz Spectrum

John Coltrane came to Miles Davis’s band in the fall of 1955 more or less by default, a result of Miles’s moving to Plan B after Sonny Rollins, Plan A, withdrew from circulation to kick a heroin habit — Sonny would spend part of the next year working construction and boxing in Chicago as a way of staying clean, an application of the same discipline that would lead to his famed self-imposed exile on the Williamsburg bridge, insisting to himself that, despite the widening acclaim from fans and musicians alike, he was falling short of his own lofty standards. Read More

John Coltrane at 100 — One Long Search

September 22, 2026

Jazz Spectrum

On Wednesday, John Coltrane turns 100. He was born September 23, 1926, in Hamlet, North Carolina. He passed on July 17, 1967, in Huntington, New York, of liver cancer. Forty years old. Take a moment with that. Read More

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

September 11, 2026

Jazz Spectrum

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

September 4, 2026

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

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