I’m sure you’ve seen Jazz on a Summer’s Day, the 1959 documentary directed by Aram Avakian and Bert Stern, and filmed at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. The color feature was a breakthrough for jazz. For the first time, audiences were given a vivid taste of what top jazz talent looked and sounded like in a bucolic setting.

I’m also betting that you’ve …

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If there were a Mount Rushmore honoring jazz tenor saxophonists, you’d likely see the faces of Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane and Ben Webster. Each had a distinct style that changed the personality of the instrument. [Photo above of Ben Webster]

Hawkins had a gruff attack, improvising up and down a song’s chord changes; Young…

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Surf rock influenced garage rock of the 1960s, hard rock of the early 1970s, American punk of the mid- and late 1970s and heavy metal of the 1980s.

The genre was a euphoric, early-’60s instrumental genre born in Southern California that favored twangy electric guitars and galloping beats instead of vocals and romantic themes. The first major surf-rock hi…

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My favorite live Frank Sinatra performance is his April 21, 1962 outdoor concert held in Tokyo. Sinatra had a swinging studio jazz combo behind him on stage: Emil Richards on vibes, Al Viola on guitar, Harry Klee on flute and saxophone, Bill Miller on piano, Ralph Peña on bass and Irv Cottler on drums. [Photo above of Frank Sinatra performing in Tokyo …

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By the late 1960s, psychedelia finally caught up with the big bands. As free love, rock albums and hippie fashion permeated the youth culture, band leaders still touring started feeling groovy. Some experimented with LSD and mushrooms while others limited their embrace of the youth scene to fashion. All commissioned arrangements of new pop-rock hits. [P…

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The year is 1962. It’s a chilly day in early October, John F. Kennedy is in the White House, the Cuban Missile Crisis wouldn’t begin until the 16th, and a train from Stockholm, Sweden, pulls into the København H train station in Copenhagen, Denmark. [Photo still above of Dexter Gordon]

Stepping off is Swedish baritone saxophonist Lars Gullin. On the plat…

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João Donato (1934-2023) was one of Brazil’s most lyrical jazz and bossa nova pianists and composers. He came up in the 1950s at the same time as Antonio Carlos Jobim, who was seven years older than Donato, along with the first generation of bossa nova composer-performers. Once you’ve heard Donato’s piano and seen his smile, you’ll want to own every albu…

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There are many YouTube videos of Jackie Cain and Roy Kral, the husband-and-wife musical duo widely admired by musicians and singers starting in the late 1940s. [Publicity photo above of Jackie Cain and Roy Kral circa 1960]

But most of those clips feature Jackie and Roy later in their career and aren’t of great quality.

So imagine my surprise when I came a…

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Henry Mancini was the most successful American film composer and arranger of the post-war period. Other movie-music maestros were significant, of course, but none became a household name nor did they produce Mancini’s vast number of catchy hit tunes. [Photo above of Henry Mancini courtesy of the Henry Mancini Estate]

But Mancini was much more than an art…

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Wish you could see some of your favorite big band musicians in action? I’m referring to artists such as trumpeter Conrad Gozzo, trombonist Frank Rosolino, tenor saxophonist Dave Pell, bass trombonist George Roberts and alto saxophonist Joe Maini, among others. [Publicity still above of bandleader Ray Anthony in the 1950s]

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Thelonious Monk was probably post-war jazz’s most significant and individualistic pianist. He had a keen sense of the piano’s traditional jazz past, particularly the work of stride pianist James P. Johnson, but his playing was also decades ahead of its time. Today, his cubist piano style is both immediately identifiable and still thought of as abstract…

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The late vocalist Carol Sloane had the grand misfortune of coming up in the ranks of jazz singers at the worst possible time. By the early 1960s, the marketplace was saturated with jazz and pop vocalists who had already made a name for themselves in the 1940s and ‘50s and were coasting through the 1960s and ‘70s based on their established renown.

To mak…

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In 1971, Woody Herman entered the rock era with younger faces and new compositions and arrangements in his Thundering Herd band. The music had a more youthful, hard-driving feel, and the first album to express his new revamped sound was Brand New. The LP also marked the start of his recording relationship with Fantasy. [Photo above of Gregory Herbert in…

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Teddy Edwards was a superb West Coast jazz tenor saxophonist. He’s probably best known for recording The Duel with Dexter Gordon in 1947; being the first tenor saxophonist in a quintet co-led by Clifford Brown and Max Roach, live at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium in Pasadena, Ca., on July 13, 1954; and for composing and recording Sunset Eyes, which beca…

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The 1975 Monterey Jazz Festival ran from September 19 to the 21st. The three-day event in California featured performances by artists such as Bill Evans, Dizzy Gillespie, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Marian McPartland, Chuck Mangione, Paul Desmond and Etta James. Last week, Kurt Kolstad sent along a video of the performances, which includes four pianists on tw…

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Thank goodness for Europe. Without its jazz-curious state-sponsored TV broadcasts and independent documentarians, we’d have almost no footage of several major expatriate artists who lived there. [Photo of Bud Powell in Parisin 1960 by Ole John]

One example is pianist Bud Powell, who had relocated to Paris in 1959 and toured Europe to earn money. Powell i…

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Few jazz quartets were as seductive or better known worldwide as the one led by Dave Brubeck. The magic rested in the ingredients. Brubeck’s piano was commanding and dynamic, Eugene Wright’s bass served up just enough notes underneath Brubeck’s keyboard, and Joe Morello’s drums were complex but remarkably tender. Uniting all of these elements was the br…

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The big band that had the greatest impact on orchestral jazz, swing and dance music in the post-war years was led by Count Basie. In particular, his New Testament band, formed in 1952, revolutionized how virtually all arrangers scored charts to play band sections off of each other and pack a punch in the 12-inch pop LP era starting in 1955. [Photo above…

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Jammin' the Blues was a short film released in 1944. It was directed by Albanian photographer Gijon Mili and produced by record producer and concert promoter Norman Granz. The film featured prominent jazz musicians re-creating an after-hours jam session. In addition to the film being visually beautiful, the music featured was swing before the arrival of…

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In 1983, NRK—the Norwegian Broadcasting Corp.—produced Manhattan Studio, a documentary on jazz pianist Lennie Tristano. All the major Tristano students are in the film , from Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh to Connie Crothers and others. A special thanks to Matt LeGroulx for sending along the links [photo above of Lennie Tristano by William P. Gottlieb]:

Here…

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