Kevin Whitehead is the longtime jazz critic for NPR’s “Fresh Air” and author of Why Jazz? A Concise Guide (2011), New Dutch Swing (about improvised music in Amsterdam), and Instant Composers Pool Orchestra: You Have to See It (with photographer Ton Mijs). He has written about jazz for umpteen publications, and his essays have appeared in such collections as Traveling the Spaceways: Sun Ra, the Astro-Black and Other Solar Myths and The Cartoon Music Book.
It’s strange, the ways the arc of jazz history can bend. Twenty yea… more »
Around 1960, a bass-playing sophomore at Yale got a call to do a concert … more »
It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-… more »
Few modern jazz debuts have been as audacious and confident as 23-year-ol… more »
In most any genre, there are times when musicians develop similar ideas i… more »
ESP-Disk’ might be the most revered and reviled of historically imp… more »
In the later 1930s, when swing bands ruled American pop, Woody Herman … more »
Craig Taborn is a famously voracious listener, equally at home with 19th-… more »
The adventurous, lyrical, soulful San Francisco clarinet improviser Ben G… more »
It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-… more »
Indian-American saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa sometimes looks for ways … more »
Naturally enough, obituary writers focused on the milestones in Dave Brub… more »
Michael Formanek is one of jazz’s formidable bassists: fast and lim… more »
Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar’s 1963 classic Rayuela … more »
Capsule jazz histories tell us European harmony and African rhythm came t… more »
It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-… more »
Almost since its inception in 1969, Germany’s ECM Records has featu… more »
It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-… more »
It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-… more »
Ethan Iverson is a polymath: a jazz pianist equally comfortable playing C… more »
Masabumi Kikuchi is one of the oddest modern jazz pianists. As the Bad Pl… more »
There was always more to Impulse than John Coltrane. As part of the label… more »
It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-… more »
Sam Rivers, who died at 88 the day after Christmas 2011, covered so much … more »
As they age, extreme metal merchants often inject various non-metallic styles into their songs in order to hasten their musical growth. Sometimes, as with Alcest and Jesu, they develop to the point where their original… more »
