Tag: Sonny Rollins

JAZZIZ Editors’ Choice: Nubya Garcia, Stix Bones, Sonny Rollins & More

The editors of JAZZIZ have the good fortune of being able to listen to new…

Vinyl Watch, June 2021: Miles Davis, Nina Simone & More

Vinyl is back! Each month on “Vinyl Watch,” we list some of the most noteworthy…

When Giants Strode the Continent: Europeans embraced American jazz legends with open ears

As stellar American jazz musicians traversed Europe, they often took their places onstage among boom…

Getting It Right: ‘Sylvie’s Love’ and ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’ Strive for Jazz Authenticity

Call me nerdy or OCD, but I get aggravated at movies that botch locations imprinted…

Talkin’ Pictures: Jazz musicians discuss their experiences in and at the movies

Feature photo courtesy of Universal Music The fact that musicians love film should come as…

Soundtracks of Our Lives

Back in the pre-CD era, I used to collect movie soundtracks on vinyl. While my…

Frank Zappa, Bonobo, Charlie Parker & More: The Week in Jazz

The Week in Jazz is your roundup of new and noteworthy stories from the jazz…

JAZZIZ Discover Playlist: Week of October 5, 2020

Since the band’s eponymous 1981 debut album, Yellowjackets has consistently forged ahead with innovative and…

JAZZIZ Discover Playlist: Week of September 14

Drummer Cindy Blackman Santana and her husband, guitarist Carlos Santana, make their best music where…

Song of the Day: Sonny Rollins – “Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert”

Sonny Rollins’ Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert was recorded in Boston four days after the terrorist…

Tale of the Tape: ‘Pressed for All’ Time peeks into the studio for jazz’s most important recording sessions

Using a rather primitive recording device — a suction-cup microphone attached to a telephone receiver,…

One Notion Under a Groove: Jazz artists have used concept albums to pay tribute, spin stories and raise hell

In Michael Jarrett’s book Pressed for All Time, excerpted in this article, pioneering producer and…

JAZZIZ Last Call: Saxophonist Joe Lovano

Joe Lovano is a Grammy-winning saxophonist, composer, and arranger. He had long-term collaborations with the…

JAZZIZ Last Call: Celebrating the Village Vanguard with Drummer Billy Hart

Drummer Billy Hart has performed with some of the most important jazz musicians in history,…

Jazz Foundation of America Assembles Industry Leaders to Support COVID-19 Relief Efforts

The Jazz Foundation of America, the country’s foremost charitable foundation dedicated to the support of…

Six Artists Influenced By Charlie Parker

From 1941, when Charlie Parker’s first commercially recorded solos (“Hootie Blues” and “Jumpin’ the Blues,”…

Dinner and a Playlist: Sautéed Salmon, Garlic Mashed Potatoes and a Side of Cool Jazz

For a jazz fan, there’s almost nothing better than heading out to a jazz club…

Song of the Day: Sonny Rollins – “Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert”

Sonny Rollins’ Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert was recorded in Boston four days after the terrorist…

Art Appreciation: A 100th-Anniversary Celebration of Art Blakey

There’s a saying attributed to the drummer Art Blakey: “Music washes away the dust of…

JAZZIZ Time Capsule Playlist: 1959, The Year that Changed Jazz

August 17, 2019, marked the 60th anniversary of the release of Miles Davis’ Kind of…

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August 17, 2019, marked the 60th anniversary of the release of Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, the trumpeter's immortal masterpiece and the best-selling jazz album of all time. For Miles, the album represented the first step in a path toward new ground, with harmonies that broke free from the constraints of bebop and an artistic vision that held creativity and group interplay in as high regard as technical skill. In those ways, the album is a good representative of 1959 as a whole, the year most critics and scholars agree was the start of a new "Golden Age of Jazz." It's a justified notion, given the sheer number of great albums and artistic movements that emerged during those 365 days, and countless investigations have been made into why 1959 was so special. Esquire devoted a feature article to this very phenomenon on New Year's Day in 1959. More recently, the year was the subject of a documentary film, 1959: The Year That Changed Jazz. And today, jazz writer Natalie Weiner maintains a captivating blog dedicated to chronicling every single day of this pivotal year. https://vimeo.com/17677794 Some may argue as to the merit of other years in jazz history, but still, it's hard to deny that 1959 served as some sort of jazz threshold. After all, it's a year that began with the release of Art Blakey's hard-bop landmark Moanin' and ended with Dave Brubeck's groundbreaking Time Out. In between, it saw the release of timeless classics such as John Coltrane's Giant Steps, Bill Evans' Portrait in Jazz, Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz To Come and Charles Mingus' Mingus Ah Um. You'll find tracks from all of those seminal albums in our playlist, but you'll also find a host of tracks from albums of equal import and influence by artists such as Duke Ellington, Abbey Lincoln, Sun Ra, Ella Fitzgerald, Sonny Rollins, Stan Kenton and many more. It would be impossible to show in just 32 tracks the magnitude of 1959's impact on jazz. This is just a taste. Whatever you're preferred vintage, it's clear that 1959 was a good year for jazz.