Trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, admired within jazz circles but little known outside them, has received tangible recognition for his work as a player and a teacher. Belgrave left Ray Charles in the early 1960s ago to settle in Detroit. In today's Detroit Free Press, Mark Stryker reports on the award and on Belgrave's contribution to the city's cultural life. Stryker writes: For 46 years, Belgrave's world-class musicianship, charisma, swing and commitment to mentoring young musicians -- many of whom … [Read more...]

Marc Myers, the resourceful and indefatigable king of the verbatim interview, posts a JazzWax conversation with Sonny Rollins about one of Rollins's most unusual and successful albums. An excerpt: JW: How did you pick the songs?
 SR: All the songs I knew. By going to the movies so much as a child in the 30s, I was tuned in to Western popular music themes. Even today, people credit me for having an encyclopedic knowledge of what's called the American Songbook. Included in there are Western … [Read more...]

Brand New: In Brief Joe Martin, Not By Chance (Anzic). Martin is a versatile and rounded bassist who has collaborated with a wide range of musicians at the heart of the 30-something generation of jazz players in New York. Here, he enlists two fellow members of that generation's elite, pianist Brad Mehldau and saxophonist and clarinetist Chris Potter. The drummer, several years younger, is Marcus Gilmore, an accompanist who listens, reacts and adjusts. All of the tunes but Jaco Pastorius's "The … [Read more...]

Graham Collier, directing 14 Jackson Pollocks (GCM). Long before he wrote his recent book, Graham Collier's music made it plain that Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and Gil Evans were profound influences on his work. Collier followed Ellington's and Mingus's lead in fashioning pieces with his soloists in mind rather than the common concept of arrangements into which a leader could plug whatever soloist was at hand. As for Evans, I must say that I heard in Collier's earlier recordings more of the … [Read more...]

From the Wikipedia entry about the saxophonist known as Kenny G: In 1997, Kenny G earned a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for playing the longest note ever recorded on a saxophone. Kenny G held an E-flat for forty five minutes and 47 seconds in the Hopkins-Bright Auditorium (named after his two friends) at J&R Music World in New York City. What a treat that must have been. We'll have to settle for a minute and twenty seconds of A-flat from Harry Carney. The interested onlooker was … [Read more...]

This is the worst day of my life. Now I have nothing to live for. - Harry Carney on the death of Duke Ellington Harry Carney died of bereavement. - Whitney Balliett … [Read more...]