Happy Music Monday, you all. It’s your pal and selector, Marlon.
I’m back with “The Essential Quincy Jones”, a comprehensive tribute collection devoted to the legendary Quincy Jones. The tributes and celebrations of this giant have been rolling in from all corners, and I am here to offer this humble tribute to the brotha.
Next Sunday Jones was to receive an Honorary Oscar, for his decades of impactful work in motion pictures. He was nominated in 1967 for his score for “In Cold Blood” and “In the Heat of the Night.”
Quincy Jones would go on to write iconic themes for “The Pawnbroker”, “The Italian Job”, “The Wiz” and others. He was nominated for seven Academy Awards. The Governors Awards will be the first of many star-studded celebrations of the life of one of the most influential figures of the 20th century.
Quincy Jones worked with some of the greatest stars in music history, including Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Nat King Cole, Sarah Vaughn, Dinah Washington, Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, Betty Carter and countless others.
He produced tracks for Lesley Gore, including “It’s My Party”. He produced the huge albums by Michael Jackson: Off the Wall, Thriller, and Bad.
Jones produced and conducted the charity single “We Are the World” to raise funds for victims of famine in Ethiopia.
On the small screen, he’d create memorable themes for “Sanford and Son,” “Ironside,” “The Bill Cosby Show” and “Roots”.
It is nearly impossible to overstate the impact of Quincy Jones on popular culture for six decades. Here are hours of his music across various genres including jazz, film scores, TV show themes, and pop songs.
In continued celebration of #JazzAppreciationMonth, today we drop in on virtuoso vocalist Sarah Vaughan, who hailed from Newark, New Jersey, and was dubbed “Sassy” for her salty conversation and “The Divine One” for the heavenly and serene singing feats she accomplished with her three octave range.
To read about Vaughan, read on. To hear about her, 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 is Lori Lakin Hutcherson, founder and editor in chief of goodblacknews.org, here to share with you a daily drop of Good Black News for Wednesday, April 13th, 2022, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar” published by Workman Publishing.
Today, we offer a quote from one of the finest vocalists and musicians ever to do it, she’s known as “Sassy,” “The Divine One,” she’s Ms. Sarah Vaughan:
“When I sing, trouble can sit right on my shoulder and I don’t even notice.”
Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1924, Sarah Lois Vaughan’s musical talent first revealed itself in church when she would clamor to sit with the organist instead of her mother.
As a teenager Vaughan snuck into local nightclubs to play piano, sing and perform. In 1942, she entered the famed Apollo Theater Amateur Night contest in New York and captivated the audience with her stunning performance of “Body and Soul.”
Here’s a version Vaughan later recorded of the song that was her calling card to her career:=
[Excerpt of “Body and Soul”]
Vaughan’s Apollo contest win lead quickly to a stint singing with the Earl Hines Orchestra before she joined fellow singer Billy Eckstine’s orchestra when he quit Hines to form his own big band.
In Mr. B’s outfit, Vaughan played, sang and improvised with burgeoning bebop innovators Art Blakey, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker before eventually going solo herself.
Vaughan carried the bebop style into her vocals, as can be heard in her version of “Lover Man” with Gillespie’s Septet from 1946:
[Excerpt of “Lover Man” 1946]
From the 1940s through the 1960s, Vaughan recorded with various labels, big and small, including Columbia, Roulette, Mercury, and Mercury’s jazz subsidiary, EmArcy.
Whether singing sweet pop or hot jazz, Vaughan’s vocals remained innovative, impressive and unparalleled. In 1947 she was the first singer to record and release “Tenderly,” establishing the standard for the standard:
[Excerpt of “Tenderly”]
Vaughan literally could sing anything – and did. She scored her first gold record with pop and R&B hit “Broken Hearted Melody”:
[Excerpt of “Broken Hearted Melody”]
And kept her jazz chops tight with her renditions of songs like “Nice Work If You Can Get It”:
[Excerpt of “Nice Work If You Can Get It”]
“Black Coffee”:
[Excerpt of “Black Coffee”]
And turned tunes like Erroll Garner’s “Misty,” which she recorded for her 1959 Vaughan and Violins album orchestrated and arranged by Quincy Jones, into something altogether ethereal:
[Excerpt of “Misty”]
In the 1960s and 1970s however, Vaughan experienced differing troubles with different record labels that didn’t know how to present or frankly even respect Vaughan in the changing musical times.
Just take one look at the clown with an afro photo on the cover of her 1974 Send in The Clowns album on Mainstream Records and you’ll get it.
But if you can’t do that right now, take a listen to the ‘70s vanilla pop/light disco production of the title track to get the point:
[Excerpt of “Send in the Clowns” – 1974]
After Vaughan sued Mainstream over the album cover and other issues, she signed with Norman Granz’s Pablo label and released albums of jazz standards and bossa nova inflected music, two of which were nominated for Grammys.
She also re-arranged and re-recorded “Send in the Clowns,” which went from being lawsuit-worthy to another of her signature songs:
[Excerpt of “Send in the Clowns” 1981]
Vaughan continued to lean into bossa nova-style music in the 1980s, and recorded her last full album, 1987’s A Brazilian Romance, with Sergio Mendes producing. A personal favorite of mine from that LP is the languidly stunning “So Many Stars”:
[Excerpt of “So Many Stars”]
In her lifetime, Vaughan received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, was inducted into the Jazz Hall of Fame and received the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters Award in 1989. Vaughan passed in 1990 and in 1998, her recording of “If You Could See Me Now,”composed specifically for her by Tad Dameron four decades earlier, was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
[Excerpt of “If You Could See Me Now”]
In 2002, Sarah Vaughan’s “Whatever Lola Wants” was a standout on the Verve Remixed2compilation, introducing her timeless voice to a whole new generation:
[Excerpt of “Whatever Lola Wants – Gotan Project Remix”]
In 2012, Vaughan was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame, and for over a decade, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center has held an annual International Jazz Vocal Competition, nicknamed “The SASSY Awards” in honor of the one and only, the incomparable Sarah Vaughan.
Stream or buy on DVD the music documentary of her performing live 1958 and 1964 called Sarah Vaughan: The Divine One in 1958, watch the 1991 biographical American Masters documentary Sarah Vaughan “The Divine One” currently available on YouTube, watch clips of her live performances on YouTube and of course, buy or stream as much Sarah Vaughan music as you can online.
Links to these sources and more are provided in today’s show notes and the episode’s full transcript posted on goodblacknews.org.
And let’s hear Sarah Vaughan’s voice one more time – her speaking voice – from her 1964 live performance in Sweden of “Misty”:
“Thank you very very much ladies and gentlemen. I’m very nervous up here I got a cold today. The day I got to do TV I got a cold. That’s fine. But anyway I do you want to enjoy our show and right now I like to do a little tune that I recorded while I was over here and not in Stockholm but while I was in Paris in ’58. A tune that was written by Erroll Garner. I do hope you enjoy “Misty.”
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.
All excerpts of Sarah Vaughan’s music included are permitted 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, check out goodblacknews.org or search and follow @goodblacknews anywhere on social.
You might know about Hattie McDaniel, Sidney Poitier or Halle Berry being the first Black recipients of Oscars in their respective acting categories, but have you ever wondered who were the first in all the others? Writing? Producing? Hair and Make-Up? Sound?
Today’s GBN Daily Drop podcast is a bonus episode for Sunday, March 27 — the day the 94th Academy Awards ceremony are being held — that takes note of every Black Oscar first:
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.
SHOW TRANSCRIPT:
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 Sunday, March 27th, 2022, based on the format of the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar” published by Workman Publishing.
The 94th Academy Awards ceremony is being held today and with Will Packer producing, Wanda Sykes and Regina Hall among the hosts and Will Smith, Denzel Washington, Aunjanue Ellis and Questlove among the nominees, I thought I’d take a brief look at the talented Black people in film who were the first in their category to ever win an Oscar.
The very very first was Hattie McDaniel, who won in the Best Supporting Actress category for the 1939 film Gone With The Wind.
In 1948, actor James Baskett received a special Academy award for his characterization of Uncle Remus in Song of the South, but the next to win an award in competition was Sidney Poitier in 1963, who won Best Actor for his role in Lilies of the Field.
It took almost a decade after that for the next win, which was Isaac Hayes in the Original Song category for 1971’s “Theme from Shaft.”
[Excerpt from “Theme from Shaft”]
Up next 11 years later was Lou Gossett, Jr. for his Best Supporting Actor win in 1982 for An Officer and a Gentleman.
[Excerpt of “The Beautiful Ones”]
In 1984 Prince won Best Original Song Score for Purple Rain, and he was the first and last Black person to win in that category because after 1984, it was retired as a category from the Academy.
Contrary to popular belief, Prince didn’t win for the actual song “Purple Rain” — the Original Song Oscar that year went to Stevie Wonder for “I Just Called to Say I Love You” from the film The Woman in Red.
[Excerpt of “I Just Called To Say I Love You”]
The following year, in 1985, jazz titan Herbie Hancock took home the Oscar for his Original Score for ‘Round Midnight.
And jazz kept the Gold Guys a coming – in 1988 Willie D. Burton accepted the Best Sound Oscar for his and his team’s work on the Charlie Parker biopicBird, and in 1994, though nominated for several of his scores, the Oscar that Quincy Jones brought home was the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.
In 2001, Halle Berry won the Best Lead Actress Oscar for her work in Monster’s Ball, and 2009 saw Roger Ross Williams win for Best Documentary Short Subject for Music By Prudence and Geoffrey Fletcher won for Best Adapted Screenplay for Precious, which was based on the novel Pushby Sapphire.
In 2012, T.J. Martin won for Best Documentary Feature for Undefeated, and in 2013, Steve McQueen shared his Best Picture Oscar with his producing partners for 12 Years A Slave.
In 2017, NBA legend Kobe Bryant won in the Best Animated Short Film category for Dear Basketball, and Jordan Peele won in the Best Original Screenplay category for Get Out.
The following year, Peter Ramsey won an Oscar in the Animated Feature Film category for co-directing Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. 2018 also saw Ruth Carter win in the Costume Design category for her work on Black Pantherand Hannah Beachler for Production Design for the same marvel of a movie directed by Ryan Coogler.
And for 2020, Travon Free won in the Best Live Action Short Film category for Two Distant Strangers, and Mia Neal and Jamika Wilson took home Oscars in the Make-Up and Hairstyling category for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.
This has been a bonus 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.
Beats provided by freebeats.io and produced by White Hot. And any additional music included is done so 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.
As we sail away from summer into the (hopefully) cooler climes of autumn, a playlist filled with Yacht Soul might just be the perfect accompaniment to those post-Labor Day outdoor gatherings.
In case you’re thinking, “Sounds fun, but what exactly is ‘Yacht Soul’?,” it’s the supercool, sophisticated sibling of the “Yacht Rock” genre, a term coined fifteen years ago to describe 1970s and 1980s adult-oriented rock music infused with jazz and R&B recorded primarily in California by acts such as Steely Dan, The Doobie Brothers, Toto, Kenny Loggins and Christopher Cross.
“Yacht Soul” heightens the soul, R&B and jazz elements of the music while dropping a dollop of funk in the mix.
The following quotes from soultracks.com perhaps illuminate the distinctions best:
…Donald Cleveland says that we have Yacht Soul question entirely backwards. “To be honest, Yacht Rock should have been called Yacht Soul from the start. Anybody with ears knows that. The only thing ‘rock’ about Yacht is the label that was on the albums as originally released, so they could be filed separately from the ‘Soul’ albums. It was just easier for the White people listening to this music with obvious soulful stylings to just keep the White ‘rock’ labeling going, even if the musicians themselves were influenced by and working from a framework of Black Soul.”
Mama’s Gun lead singer Andy Platts agrees. “Really if we’re honest, you don’t get ‘Yacht Rock’ without the evolution of Black music in the first place, from which it borrows heavily, so perhaps this just underscores the issues with appropriating and using terms like the ‘yacht’ label.”
Songs like “Just The Two of Us” by Grover Washington, Jr. and Bill Withers, “Forget Me Nots” by Patrice Rushen, “Give Me The Night” by George Benson, “Rio De Janiero Blue” by Randy Crawford and Joe Sample and “Golden Time of Day” by Maze are strong examples of the style.
As she won her 28th Grammy Award for R&B performance for Black Parade, Beyoncé made history as she surpassed country-bluegrass artist Alison Krauss’ former record of 27 Grammys and became the most honored singing artist of all time.
Beyoncé has also tied legendary producer and musician Quincy Jones for second-most Grammy wins ever.
Jones, who turned 88 on Sunday, has won 28 Grammys during his career. The late Hungarian-British conductor Georg Solti holds the all-time record with 31 Grammy Awards.
Happy Monday, you all. Hope you had a good and safe Thanksgiving. Time will tell though.
While most of these offerings are genre and theme-based, I do like to feature a favorite, and often underrated, artist from time to time. This week, it’s Bobby Womack.
While never a household name, Womack had a long and impactful career. He, like so many in his generation, started in a family gospel group with his brothers.
Womack became the protégé of gospel and R&B/pop star Sam Cooke, a session musician, a successful solo artist with decades of hits, a writer of his own and others’ songs, and along with Mos Def, and surviving members of The Clash, was a core member of Gorillaz.
Quincy Jones arguably stands alone in having a longer and more wide-ranging career. 10-year-old Bobby started touring with his brothers on the midwest gospel circuit as The Womack Brothers.
From “The Color Purple” (photo courtesy J2 Communications)
This year, THE COLOR PURPLE, written by Alice Walker (screenplay by Menno Meyjes), produced by Quincy Jones and directed by Steven Spielberg, celebrates its 35th anniversary. In honor of the occasion, Fathom Events and TCM are presenting this indelible film in theaters for one special day only: tomorrow, Sunday February 23, 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. (local time) on more than 600 U.S. movie screens.
Based on Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel*, THE COLOR PURPLEintroduced movie audiences to Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey, both of whom, along with Margaret Avery, were Oscar nominated for their performances.
Their nods were three of the 11 Academy Award nominations for the film, which was also named 1985’s best film at the NAACP Image Awards and by the National Board of Review.
The movie also stars Danny Glover, Adolph Ceasar, Akosua Busia and Rae Dawn Chong in supporting roles.
This presentation is part of the yearlong TCM Big Screen Classics series, and tickets are available now at the Fathom Events website or at participating theater box offices.
Queen Latifah; Robert Smith (photos via flickr.com)
Musical artist and Academy Award nominee Queen Latifah, acclaimed artist Kerry James Marshall and Robert Smith, founder, chairman and chief executive of Vista Equity Partners are among the honorees being recognized by Harvard University this year with the W.E.B. DuBois Medal for their contributions to black history and culture.
Harvard is set to honor Latifah, Marshall, Smith, poet and educator Elizabeth Alexander, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution Lonnie Bunch III, poet Rita Dove, and Sheila Johnson, co-founder of Black Entertainment Television on Oct. 22, according to Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.
Past recipients of the DuBois Medal include Dave Chappelle, Colin Kaepernick, Bryan Stevenson, Kehinde Wiley, Quincy Jones, Donna Brazile and LLCoolJ.
Producer Quincy Jones, the subject of Netflix’s new documentary “Quincy,” will attend a screening of the film the festival. (Photo: Chris Pizzello/AP/Invision)
More than 80 movies by and about African Americans will be screened in D.C. next week as part of the inaugural Smithsonian’s African American Film Festival.
The four-day festival, which runs from Oct. 24 – 27, includes films ranging from Hollywood hits to experimental shorts. The event is organized by the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
The festival’s goal is to introduce the breadth and depth of African American film to a wider audience, according to Kinshasha Holman Conwill, the museum’s deputy director.
“There’s something for the cinephile who knows film like that back of her or his hand, and there’s something for the person who’s just learning about African American film,” she said. “From the most popular to the most provocative, it is all here.”
Most of the screenings will take place in the museum’s Oprah Winfrey Theater, though the Freer|Sackler and National Gallery of Art will also host some screenings.
The festival kicks off on Wednesday night with Widows, a new film starring Viola Davis that doesn’t hit theaters until mid-November. The director, Steve McQueen, became the first black filmmaker to win an Academy Award for Best Picture for his 2013 film 12 Years A Slave. If you’re interested in attending the Widows screening, you’re unfortunately out of luck – it’s already sold out.
The festival will also give audiences the chance to see films from the museum’s extensive collection. These range from Garden, a five-minute experimental short from 2017, to Black Panthers, a 1968 documentary about the Black Panther Party and its members’ fight to free their imprisoned co-founder Huey P. Newton.
And while the 2017 Marvel superhero movie Black Panther isn’t part of the lineup, attendees of the festival’s “Night at the Museum” celebration on Oct. 25 will be able to see the costume worn by actor Chadwick Boseman in the blockbuster film on display for the first time. The museum acquired the costume and other objects from the film earlier this year.
Netflix will stream its new documentary Quincy on Friday, Oct. 26. The film tells the story of the iconic music producer and singer Quincy Jones; it was co-produced by his daughter, the actress Rashida Jones. The titular Jones will speak on a panel following the screening.
If you’d rather talk than watch, you can attend one of the festival’s free Exchanges forums at the Freer|Sackler. Discussion topics include stop-motion animation and the museum’s home movie digitization project, Great Migration. Under that program, visitors can bring in home videos made on obsolete media (we’re talking eight-millimeter film and cassettes) and get them digitized and preserved.
“What it allows us to do,” said Rhea Combs, the museum’s film and photographer curator, “is tell the American story through the African American lens. Literally.”
The festival also builds upon work started by the D.C. Black Film Festival to highlight lesser-known black filmmakers and actors for the Washington audience. “We don’t ever want to be the all-consuming Smithsonian that comes into a community and takes over,” Conwill said of its role in the broader film festival ecosystem. The D.C. Black Film Festival celebrated its second event this year.
The African American Film Festival’s closing day features an awards ceremony for the juried film competition. Fifteen finalist films are competing in six different categories: Best Documentary Short, Best Narrative Short, Best Documentary Feature, Best Narrative Feature, Best Experimental & Animation, and the Audience Award.
The festival closes Saturday night with a screening of a film adaptation of James Baldwin’s 1974 novel, If Beale Street Could Talk.
You can buy tickets for specific films or events here, and see the full slate of screenings here. The festival is scheduled to recur every other year at the museum.
Apart from giving away more than $1 million dollars in scholarship funds to students across America, The Carters have been working overtime to raise more than $6 million dollars for the City Of Hope charity, Forbes reports.
The organization, which specializes in cancer treatment and research, held a gala earlier this week in Santa Monica, California. The power couple was in attendance to help raise money for the non-profit organization.
JAY-Z and Beyonce partnered with Warner/Chappell Publishing CEO and Chairman Jon Platt to combine their efforts to bring forth a well-rounded event with top-notch industry players. According to Forbes, Dr. Dre, Tiffany Haddish, Usher, Quincy Jones, Wiz Khalifa, Timbaland, Kelly Rowland, and Rita Ora showed up in support of the event.
With more than 1,200 members of the entertainment industry present, Beyonce performed “Halo” and “Ave Maria” for the crowd.
The combined billionaires have greatly given back to their communities over their decades-long careers and constantly prove why they are considered the king and queen of hip-hop and evidently philanthropy.
If you would like to donate to City of Hope’s cancer research and treatment fund or find out more about the organization, click here.
Stream or buy on DVD the music documentary of her performing live 1958 and 1964 called 
To learn more about Black Academy Award winners and nominees, read 
Their nods were three of the 11 Academy Award nominations for the film, which was also named 1985’s best film at the NAACP Image Awards and by the National Board of Review.
Harvard is set to honor Latifah, Marshall, Smith, poet and educator Elizabeth Alexander, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution Lonnie Bunch III, poet Rita Dove, and Sheila Johnson, co-founder of Black Entertainment Television on Oct. 22, according to Harvard’s 
