Our story starts in Pennsylvania coal country, 1962. Jazz singer Sheila Jordan had taken her new friend George Russell to visit the hardscrabble hills where she'd spent her early years. At a local beer garden, Jordan performed an impromptu "You Are My Sunshine" with her grandmother on piano. Russell was an ultramodern composer, and the old song as corny as breakfast flakes - but Sheila's version got to him. Back in New York, he arranged… more »
Ask a jazz fan about Herbie Nichols, and the reaction is likely to be either, "He's a genius," or "Who?" The pianist and composer is the paradigm of a genius neglected in his own time. Nichols's classic mid-'50s sides for Blue Note were all but forgotten when he passed at 44 in 1963. A.B. Spellman memorialized him with a chapter in 1966's Four Lives in the Be-Bop Business, but he didn't get much respect till… more »
New Orleans 'most recent round of hurricane scares - and interview clips of evacuees declaring this time they're really not coming back - make you fear anew for its future. Many of the musicians who carry the city's heartbeat never really returned after Katrina. The diaspora of émigrés (including a few musicians reviewed here) stretches from Texas into Georgia. Still, returnees and exiles alike continue to preserve and extend the city's musical traditions. And they… more »
