Thanks to our Editor-In-Chief, Lori Lakin Hutcherson, for reminding me that it April is Jazz Appreciation Month. So, to that end, I’ve assembled this collection of new and recent Jazz releases.
Most of these track have been released in 2024. None of them is older than five years old. These tracks encompass a wide range of styles and showcase the creativity and artistry of today’s jazz musicians.
This collection features rom compelling compositions to virtuosic performances, by the likes of Ulysses Owens Jr. and Generation Y, Marlon Simon, Lawrence Fields, Kandace Springs and so many others.
Jazz is a most truly American art form, its soulful and rich roots go back to the 1890s. Jazz Appreciation Month (fondly known as “JAM“) was created at Smithsonian National Museum of American History in 2001.
According to their website, “to recognize and celebrate the extraordinary heritage and history of jazz for the entire month of April. JAM is intended to stimulate and encourage people of all ages to participate in jazz – to study the music, attend concerts, listen to jazz on radio and recordings, read books about jazz, and more.” Works for me!!
The roots of jazz can be found in the blues and that is true of this playlist too. The journey of jazz started in the deep south along back roads, spread to nearly every city in America and eventually the world.
The variety and richness of jazz is on full display on with this collection. Enjoy JAM!
Marvin Gaye is known worldwide as a key R&B, soul and pop music innovator from the 1960s on. But what may not be well known about Gaye is that his earliest musical ambitions were to sing and perform jazz.
As it’s #JazzAppreciationMonth in addition to what would have been Gaye’s 83rd birthday, we honor his contributions to the genre in today’s daily drop. To hear it, press PLAY:
You can follow or subscribe to the Good Black News Daily Drop Podcast through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, rss.comor create your own RSS Feed. Or just check it out every day here on the main website. Full transcript below:
Hey, this Lori Lakin Hutcherson, founder and editor in chief of goodblacknews.org, here to share with you a bonus daily drop of Good Black News for Saturday, April 2nd, 2022, based on the format of the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar” published by Workman Publishing.
The incomparable musician and artist Marvin Gaye was born #onthisday in 1939 in Washington D.C.
From the 1960s on, he helped define the sound of R&B, soul and pop music, as well as blazed a trail for singer-songwriter concept albums exploring personal and social issues in depth with his classic 1972 LP What’s Going On.
But what may not be well known about Gaye, even though he started his professional career in the 1950s as a doo wop singer in the New Moonglows with Harvey Fuqua, it’s that his earliest musical ambitions for himself were to be a jazz singer and player in the ilk of Nat King Cole.
When Fuqua moved to Detroit in 1960, Gaye followed and soon signed his own solo contract with Motown subsidiary Tamla Records.
And even though his maiden release was titled The Soulful Moods of Marvin Gaye, as Berry Gordy had other ideas in mind for Gaye than Gaye had, 9 of the 11 tracks on it were, at Gaye’s insistence, jazz standards, such as “My Funny Valentine”:
[Excerpt of “My Funny Valentine”]
“Witchcraft”:
[Excerpt of “Witchcraft”]
and “How High The Moon”:
[Excerpt of “How High The Moon”]
Even though Gaye’s first album and the singles released from it didn’t sell well, the title track of his next album, That Stubborn Kind of Fellow became a Top 10 R&B hit and the trajectory of Gaye’s musical path in the public’s – and Berry Gordy’s — perception was set.
But Gaye, still a lover of jazz, returned right to it on his 1964 release When I’m Alone I Cry, this time with way better production value and input from respected jazz musicians and arrangers Melba Liston and Ernie Wilkins. The album starts with Gaye’s smoldering version of “You’ve Changed”:
[Excerpt of “You’ve Changed”]
The LP also includes Gaye’s takes on “I’ll Be Around”:
[Excerpt of “I’ll Be Around”]
“I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face”:
[Excerpt of “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face”]
And “Because of You”
[Excerpt of “Because of You”]
In 1965, Gaye even did a tribute album to Nat “King” Cole after Cole’s passing called A Tribute to the Great Nat “King” Cole where Gaye covered “Straighten Up and Fly Right”:
[Excerpt of “Straighten Up and Fly Right”]
“Mona Lisa”:
[Excerpt of “Mona Lisa”]
“It’s Only a Paper Moon”:
[Excerpt of “It’s Only a Paper Moon”]
and, of course, “Unforgettable”:
[Excerpt of “Unforgettable”]
After this album, the majority of Gaye’s recordings were contemporary soul, pop and R&B, even though he still managed to include a gorgeous, bluesy remake of “One for My Baby (And One for the Road)” on his 1966 The Moods of Marvin Gaye LP:
[Excerpt from “One for My Baby”]
Only after Marvin Gaye’s untimely passing in 1984, did more of his jazz-influenced recording sessions from the late 1960s and 1970s come to light on the posthumous albums Romantically Yours, which was issued in 1985 and Vulnerable which came out in 1997. On those you can hear Gaye’s takes on “I Won’t Cry Anymore”:
[Excerpt from “I Won’t Cry Anymore”]
His experimental version of “Shadow of Your Smile”:
[Excerpt from “Shadow of Your Smile”]
“Funny, Not Much”:
[Excerpt from “Funny, Not Much”]
And the arresting “I Wish I Didn’t Love You So” which seems to capture every nuance of Marvin Gaye’s voice, style and innovations across all the genres he loved:
[Excerpt from “I Wish I Didn’t Love You So”]
Even though Gaye’s indelible legacy was forged from different genres of music entirely, Gaye also gave us much to appreciate about him in the realm of jazz.
To learn more about Marvin Gaye and his jazz leanings, check out the “Standards of Marvin Gaye” episode of WFIU’s weekly music show Afterglow hosted by Mark Chilla, read Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gayebiography by David Ritz and of course, stream or buy all of the albums mentioned during this drop to hear even more of Marvin Gaye’s forays into jazz.
Links to these sources are provided in today’s show notes and in the episode’s full transcript posted on goodblacknews.org.
This has been a bonus daily drop of Good Black News, based on the format of “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar for 2022,” published by Workman Publishing. Intro and outro beats provided by freebeats.io and produced by White Hot.
All excerpts of music from Marvin Gaye are included under fair use.
If you like these Daily Drops, please consider following us on Apple, Google Podcasts, RSS.com,Amazon, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Leave a rating or review, share links to your favorite episodes, or go old school and tell a friend.
For more Good Black News, you can check out goodblacknews.org or search and follow @goodblacknews anywhere on social.
No fooling, in the U.S. April 1st denotes the start of Jazz Appreciation Month (aka “JAM”), where the art form born out of Congo Square in New Orleans became a unique and true African American and American musical expression that continues to evolve across the decades and centuries.
Started by the Smithsonian Museum of American History in 2001, “JAM is intended to stimulate and encourage people of all ages to participate in jazz – to study the music, attend concerts, listen to jazz on radio and recordings, read books about jazz, and more.”
To hear our Drop about it, press PLAY:
You can follow or subscribe to the Good Black News Daily Drop Podcast through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, rss.comor create your own RSS Feed. Or just check it out every day here on the main website. Full transcript below:
Hey, this Lori Lakin Hutcherson, founder and editor in chief of goodblacknews.org, here to share with you a daily drop of Good Black News for Friday, April 1st, 2022, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar” published by Workman Publishing.
No fooling, April 1st in the United States also kicks off Jazz Appreciation Month. It’s a time to savor the musical gumbo first cooked up in early 20th century New Orleans by master chefs including Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, King Oliver, and Louis “Pops” Armstrong.
During the 1930s and ‘40s, bandleaders such as Lionel Hampton, Chick Webb, Count Basie and Duke Ellington swung the nation and defined the sound–as did singers Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and Billy Eckstine.
Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus and John Coltrane were the vanguard through the 1950s and 60s, leading to the free jazz of Ornette Coleman, Taj Mahal, the Jazz Messengers and today’s pot stirrers Kamasi Washington, Esperanza Spalding and MacArthur “genius” Cecile McLorin Salvant.
To quote Wynton Marsalis, the most famous trumpet player in modern times and the managing and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center:
“Jazz is the nobility of the race put into sound; it is the sensuousness of romance in our dialect; it is the picture of the people in all their glory.”
Links to these sources and more are provided in today’s show notes and in the episode’s full transcript posted on goodblacknews.org
This has been a daily drop of Good Black News, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar for 2022,” published by Workman Publishing.
Intro and outro beats provided by freebeats.io and produced by White Hot.
“Dippermouth Blues” by King Oliver’s Jazz Band and composed by Oliver and Louis Armstrong is used with permission under Public Domain.
If you like these Daily Drops, please consider following us on Apple, Google Podcasts, RSS.com, Amazon, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Leave a rating or review, share links to your favorite episodes, or go old school and tell a friend.
For more Good Black News, you can check out goodblacknews.org or search and follow @goodblacknews anywhere on social.
Happy Music Monday, you all. As promised a couple of weeks ago, this collection is devoted to live jazz performances.
April is also Jazz Appreciation Month, so this playlist is arriving not a moment too soon. For many of us, live jazz is the best way to enjoy jazz. The unbridled spontaneity of top-notch musicians at the very top of the game, improvising and spurring each other on to greater creative heights is the essence of the art form.
I’ve gathered performances from nearly 100 years of jazz music. Big band, Be-Bop, Avant Garde, Soul Jazz, and so many other styles are present. There are recordings from Massey Hall, the Village Vanguard, the Newport Jazz Festival, Birdland, and many other iconic venues.
Nina Simone, Miles Davis, Eric Dolphy, Duke Ellington, Art Blakey, Geri Allen, and dozens of other greats are included in this over 13-hour collection of stunning performances. While the sound quality in some venues isn’t as good as that of a state-of-the-art recording studio, and post-production is not on the table, the improvisatory nature of jazz makes live performance the quintessential way to experience the music. Do enjoy!
And as always, stay sane, safe, and kind. “See” ya next week.
PS: This is another one to set that crossfade, on Spotify, at 12 seconds if you are listening on a computer.
GBN Contributor Marlon West is back again this week with his excellent curation of a sub-genre known as “Soul Jazz.”
In Marlon’s words:
“Heavily influenced by funk, gospel, and R&B, Soul Jazz emerged in the late 1950 and ‘60s. Artists like Jimmy Smith, Shirley Scott, and Art Blakey were not going to take the popularity of soul music laying down. They created music designed for jukeboxes of the time, and is still endlessly sampled and influential today.”
Ella Fitzgerald, who would have turned 100 today, was one of the most beloved and versatile singers of the 20th century. In a career that spanned six decades, Fitzgerald recorded hundreds of songs, including definitive versions of many standards. Along the way, she influenced generations of singers.
But the first thing that strikes you about Fitzgerald is that voice. Cécile McLorin Salvant, who won a Grammy last year for Best Jazz Vocal Album, says a combination of qualities made Fitzgerald’s voice unique. “When you hear the tone of her voice — which has kind of a brightness, kind of a breathiness, but it also has this really great depth, and kind of a laser-like, really clear quality to it — it hits you,” she says.
Salvant, 27, says she learned to sing jazz standards by listening to Fitzgerald’s versions.
“I remember being 17 and living in France and feeling really homesick and wanting to go back to Miami, and listening to Ella Fitzgerald singing ‘I Didn’t Know What Time It Was,’ ” Salvant says. “And I would listen to that all day. All day. For, like, weeks. And it felt — it created a home for me.”
Fitzgerald had perfect pitch, impeccable diction and a remarkable sense of rhythm. And it all came naturally to her, as she told the CBC in 1974. “What I sing is only what I feel,” she said. “I had some lady ask me the other day about music lessons and I never — except for what I had to learn for my half-credit in school — I’ve never given it a thought. I’ve never taken breathing lessons. I had to go for myself, and I guess that’s how I got a style.”
That style was an immediate hit. Fitzgerald was discovered at an amateur contest and began her professional career when she was only 16, singing with the Chick Webb Orchestra at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom. When she was 21, she became internationally famous with a hit record based on a nursery rhyme, “A-Tisket, A-Tasket.” Tony Bennett says that when he was starting out as a young singer, Ella Fitzgerald was his idol. “She was a complete swinger,” he says. “She just understood the whole art of jazz phrasing.”
Thursday nights at Hotoke are a part of a resurgence of the New Brunswick jazz scene. Instrumentalists performing there have included the drummer Rudy Royston and his quartet. (BEN SOLOMON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
This month’s cold snap did not deter the drummer Rudy Royston, a fixture on the New York jazz scene, from making his way to New Brunswick, where on a particularly frigid Thursday night, he could be found burning up the bandstand at Hotoke, a restaurant and lounge on George Street.
Mr. Royston had a hole in his schedule to fill, and fill it he did, his drumming a polyrhythmic whirlwind propelling a quartet through war horses like “On Green Dolphin Street” and “Autumn Leaves.” Mr. Royston said he relished getting back to basics out of the glare of Manhattan.
“These gigs are foundation gigs,” he said, before launching into his set. “We play tunes, play the room, deal with management. They are at the root of jazz.”
But the larger significance of the set was that it was happening at all. The George Street of old, hollowed out by postwar suburbanization, was a dark and lonely place after 5 p.m., save for the odd prostitute prowling the stretch leading to Albany Street. The mere existence of a jazz room was something of a miracle.
After fits and starts, however, New Brunswick has now become a destination for jazz. The coming months will see established instrumentalists on Thursdays at Hotoke; singers on Wednesdays at the Hyatt Regency Hotel on Albany Street; aspiring artists on Tuesdays at Tumulty’s Pub, a holdover from George Street’s bad old days; and a funk-fusion band on the first Friday of the month at Destination Dogs, on Paterson Street. Festivals and one-off concerts at museums, art galleries and the like will fill out the schedule as the year unfolds.
Historically, New Brunswick’s native sons have contributed to jazz, from the stride pianist James P. Johnson, a Jazz Age innovator, to the avant-garde bassist Mark Helias, who came out of Rutgers University’s groundbreaking jazz studies program in the 1970s.
But jazz as a commercial enterprise didn’t gain a toehold in New Brunswick until Johnson & Johnson built its new headquarters there. Opening in 1983, it spawned redevelopment, like the Hyatt lounge and other cultural hot spots catering to a new, wealthier crowd.
By the 1990s, those spots included theaters, like the George Street Playhouse and Crossroads Theater Company, and music spaces, like the Raritan River Club on Church Street, where the influential pianist Kenny Barron, then a Rutgers professor, offered full sets of solo playing rarely heard when he performed in Manhattan clubs. Another establishment with new owners, Steakhouse 85, now operates at the River Club’s former address.
Outside Hotoke. (BEN SOLOMON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Despite the general improvement in New Brunswick’s fortunes, the city’s night life suffered during the 2008 recession, according to Virginia DeBerry, a writer and local jazz enthusiast.
“Everybody’s pocket was strained,” she said. “Jazz just wasn’t happening in town.”
But the downturn had an upside. It spurred Ms. DeBerry, along with fellow enthusiasts Michael Tublin, a New Brunswick city employee, and Jim Lenihan, an engineer, to form the New Brunswick Jazz Project. In the spring of 2010, the three started knocking on doors, brokering deals with local businesses interested in hosting jazz. This year, the project, which once booked two shows a month, will book three or four a week.
The late Miles Davis (1926-1991) was an icon who changed the world of jazz and music forever. This Memorial Day, also the birthday of the beloved trumpeter, New York City will honor his legacy with a block party celebrating the official unveiling of “Miles Davis Way” (West 77th Street between Riverside Drive and West End Avenue). This location is the site of Davis’ infamous, former brownstone, where he lived for nearly a quarter of a century and created some of his best music.
I recently had the opportunity to chat with Miles Davis’ son Erin and nephew Vince Wilburn, Jr. for my podcast Whine At 9. The cousins shared their feelings about this special upcoming honor, their own music careers, and their family’s role in keeping the Miles Davis legacy alive.
When it comes to New York City’s block party celebration of his father, Miles’ son Erin admits, “We couldn’t be more excited–we’re just trying to wrap our heads around the whole situation.” He and cousin Vince, along with sister Cheryl Davis oversee Miles Davis Properties LLC and are intimately involved with maintaining the integrity and creativity of the music great’s legacy. The family plans to be in New York City to participate in this special honor.
(Photograph: Eddie Adams/AP)
On October 31, 1965, Louis “Pops” (or “Satchmo”) Armstrong gave his first performance in New Orleans, his home town, in nine years. As a boy, he had busked on street corners. At twelve, he marched in parades for the Colored Waif’s Home for Boys, where he was given his first cornet. But he had publicly boycotted the city since its banning of integrated bands, in 1956. It took the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to undo the law. Returning should have been a victory lap. At sixty-four, his popular appeal had never been broader. His recording of “Hello, Dolly!,” from the musical then in its initial run on Broadway, bumped the Beatles’ “Can’t Buy Me Love” from its No. 1 slot on the Billboard Top 100 chart, and the song carried him to the Grammys; it won the 1964 Best Vocal Performance award. By the time the movie version came out, in 1969, he was brought in to duet with Barbra Streisand.
Armstrong was then widely known as America’s gravel-voiced, lovable grandpa of jazz. Yet it was a low point for his critical estimation. “The square’s jazzman,” the journalist Andrew Kopkind called him, while covering Armstrong’s return to New Orleans for The New Republic. Kopkind added that “Among Negroes across the country he occupies a special position as success symbol, cultural hero, and racial cop-out.” Kopkind was not entirely wrong in this, and hardly alone in saying so. Armstrong was regularly called an Uncle Tom.
Detractors wanted Armstrong on the front lines, marching, but he refused. He had already been the target of a bombing, during an integrated performance at Knoxville’s Chilhowee Park auditorium, in February, 1957. In 1965, the year Armstrong returned to New Orleans, Malcolm X was killed on February 21st, and on March 7th, known as Bloody Sunday, Alabama state troopers armed with billy clubs, tear gas, and bull whips attacked nearly six hundred marchers protesting a police shooting of a voter-registration activist near Selma. Armstrong flatly stated in interviews that he refused to march, feeling that he would be a target. “My life is my music. They would beat me on the mouth if I marched, and without my mouth I wouldn’t be able to blow my horn … they would beat Jesus if he was black and marched.”
When local kids asked Armstrong to join them in a homecoming parade, as he had done with the Colored Waif’s Home in his youth, he said no. He knew the 1964 Civil Rights Act was federal law, not local fiat. Armstrong had happily joined in the home’s parades in the past, but his refusal here can be read as a sign of the times. The Birmingham church bombings in 1963 had shown that even children were not off limits.
And yet little of what Armstrong said about the civil-rights struggle registered. The public image of him, that wide performance smile, the rumbling lilt of his “Hello, Dolly!,” obviated everything else. “As for Satchmo himself,” Kopkind wrote, “he seems untouched by all the doubts around him. He is a New Orleans trumpet player who loves to entertain. He is not very serious about art or politics, or even life.”
* * *To be fair to Kopkind, and many others who wrote about Armstrong, they did not know much of what Armstrong thought, because, at the time, Armstrong’s more political views were rarely heard publicly. To the country at large, he insisted on remaining a breezy entertainer with all the gravitas of a Jimmy Durante or Dean Martin. Fortunately, that image is now being deeply re-examined. This month, the publication of Thomas Brothers’s Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism and the Off Broadway opening of Terry Teachout’s Satchmo at the Waldorf (which follows his 2009 biography, Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, which was reviewed by John McWhorter) provide a rich, nuanced picture of what was behind Armstrong’s public face.
Armstrong’s thoughts were scattered about in uncollected letters, unpublished autobiographical manuscripts, and tape recordings. He brought a typewriter with him on the road, and an inquisitive fan who sent a letter stood a good chance of getting a reply from Satchmo himself. When reel-to-reel tape decks were introduced, he bought one so that he could listen to music, study his own performances, and record conversations with friends and family to get down his own version of events. Scholars and researchers have been studying his writing and recordings for a number of years. Teachout’s play, a one-man show starring John Douglas Thompson, is based on more than six hundred and fifty reels of tape stored at Queens College, all of which reveal an Armstrong who did indeed take art, politics, and life seriously.
GEORGE DUKE | The legendary keyboardist released more than 40 albums during his four-decade-plus career. He memorably collaborated with artists such as Michael Jackson, Jill Scott and Miles Davis. Jean-Christophe Bott, AP
Jazz musician George Duke died Monday in Los Angeles at age 67. A pioneer in the funk and R&B genres, he had been battling chronic lymphocytic leukemia, according to his label Concord Music Group, which confirmed his death. “The outpouring of love and support that we have received from my father’s friends, fans and the entire music community has been overwhelming,” said his son, Rashid Duke, in a statement. “Thank you all for your concern, prayers and support.” Born in San Rafael, Calif., Duke aspired to a music career from an early age, after his mother took him to a Duke Ellington concert. “I remember seeing this guy in a white suit, playing this big thing, which I later found out was a piano,” Duke told USA TODAY in 1997. “He had all these guys around him, and he was waving his hands conducting, and he spoke very intelligently and seemed to be having a good time. And his name was Duke, and my last name was Duke. I told my mom, ‘I want to be him.’ That moment in time set the stage for me.” Over the course of his four-decade-plus career, the Grammy Award-winning keyboardist put out more than 40 albums and collaborated with artists such as Frank Zappa, Miles Davis, Jill Scott and Michael Jackson. His music was also sampled by Kanye West, Daft Punk and Common. “It’s a wonderful thing that has happened under the banner of jazz,” Duke told USA TODAY of his career longevity. “In R&B and rock, when you are over a certain age, they say goodbye to you. But in jazz, you just kind of level off and continue to gain respect, so long as you keep your integrity.” Duke’s final album, DreamWeaver, was released July 16 and made its debut at No. 1 on Billboard‘s contemporary jazz chart. It was his first new music since the death of his wife, Corine, last year. To learn more about Duke’s life and music, click here. Also, watch a video of Duke recording his classic “Dukey Stick” below:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CT2ZBoWtNes&w=420&h=315] article by Patrick Ryan via usatoday.com
