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.
Besides touring with Bon Iver and Arcade Fire, Colin Stetson does solo gi… more »
It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-… more »
Growing up in New York City, Sonny Rollins was addicted to cowboy movies.… more »
Growing up in New York City, Sonny Rollins was addicted to cowboy movies.… more »
Once upon a time, tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins — still riding hi… more »
In a more perfect world, Julius Hemphill (1938-95) would be better rememb… more »
Drummer Art Blakey to the audience at Birdland, one night in 1954: "I… more »
No Blue Note musician personified the home of hard bop's response to … more »
When mainstream jazz roared back after 1980, a few distinguished elders f… more »
Tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins was entering his peak decade in 1957, and… more »
Trumpeter Freddie Hubbard followed Lee Morgan onto Blue Note's roster… more »
By the time Monk recorded these quintet and sextet dates for Blue Note in… more »
Jazz's most famous expat saxophonist didn't live in Paris in 1963… more »
The most acclaimed jazz singer of her time gets back to her Mississippi r… more »
Hill was a pianist of no party or clique: a little too outside to be a ha… more »
Blue Note had a thing for visionary composer/pianists like Thelonious Mon… more »
Around 1960 or so, the pocket-trumpeter was every radical saxophonist… more »
The alto saxophonist/bass clarinetist/flutist had been on a hot streak wh… more »
Hoagy Carmichael wrote (or co-wrote) some great songs jazz musicians love… more »
As bop piano goes, Thelonious Monk had the ideas and tunes, but Bud Powel… more »
By 1960, "soul jazz" was a big trend — music to eat greens and corn… more »
Pianist Horace Silver always had the knack for writing funky tunes that g… more »
Jazz is co-operative music: Everyone pulls together, in a little model so… more »
Years before Lee Morgan's jazz boogaloo "The Sidewinder" made hip Blu… 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 »
