Jazz

Kansas City bandleader Bennie Moten in 1925(Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons) Listen to the story above or read the script below: You may know New Orleans style jazz or Chicago blues but Kansas City, geographically situated as a working town on the road from the birthplace of jazz to the windy city, was where the music shifted away from structured big bands to a more improvisational style. Black-led bands of the ’20s and ’30s embodied the Midwestern big band sound. Bands led by Count Basie, Andy Kirk and Bennie Moten. The first band from Kansas City to get a national notice was the Coon-Sanders Original Nighthawk Orchestra, a white group which broadcast nationally in the 1920s. But the Kansas City jazz style made the national jazz scene in the mid-’30s when record producer John Hammond heard the Count Basie orchestra on the radio broadcasting from Kansas City, and shortly after, brought them to New York. It was fast and swinging…the kind of music that would keep dancers working up a sweat for hours! And hours they played. One of the defining factors in the Kansas City sound was the hours spent playing all night. The reason for that, political boss Tom Pendergast enabled clubs to sell liquor and stay open all-hours which fueled the live jazz scene – even in the prohibition era of the day. It was in those late night musical free-for-alls that led to friendly competition which sparked a new style of improvisational music. Variations on just one song could last for hours. Bandleader Jay McShann said: “You’d hear some cat play, and somebody would say ‘This cat, he sounds like he is from Kansas City.’ It was Kansas City’s style. The scene was so well known, it even inspired song writers who had never been to the city. The actual corner of 18th Street and Vine was the center of the Kansas City jazz universe. Clubs like Amos ‘n’ Andy, Chocolate Bar and Old Kentucky Bar-B-Que, all hosted the swinging jams. What were the differences that made a “Kansas City” jazz sound?  A 4-beat feel – like walking – instead of the 2-beat feel found in other styles which gave the music a more relaxed, fluid sound. The KC big bands played from memory rather than sight-reading as other big bands of the time. Composing and arranging the music collectively. A heavy blues influence often based around a 12-bar blues structure, rather than the 32-bar format, made the Kansas City sound loose and spontaneous! Perfect for that nonstop nightlife. One of Basie’s signature tunes show the memorized arrangements punctuated with solos. By the late 1930s, the style had ‘rubbed off’ on the larger musical world including the renown, Glenn Miller. “In the Mood” closely follows this Kansas City pattern of riffing sections. Eventually the city cracked down on the clubs which largely ended the era. But big band swing and improvisational jazz continued to capture the heart and dancing feet of Kansas Citians as well as the rest of the world! Even today – The annual “Kansas City Blues and Jazz Festival” attracts top jazz stars and large out-of-town audiences and The American Jazz Museum is a jazz museum in the historic 18th and Vine district of Kansas City. The museum preserves the history of American jazz music. Copyright 2024 KNKX Public Radio

Roy Haynes, performing at the North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague, Netherlands, in 2002. Roy Haynes, the pioneering jazz drummer who performed with legends like Charlie Parker, Lester Young and Sarah Vaughan, died Tuesday at the age of 99. His death was confirmed by his daughter, Leslie Haynes-Gilmore, to WRTI’s Nate Chinen. To listen to any part of Roy Haynes‘ drumming individually is to confront something important about jazz and what it can contain. The light and shifting ride-cymbal patterns, the uneven bass-drum accents, the crisply organized breaks or context-smashing disruptions on snare, the clarifying semaphore of the high-hat: Each of these is worth following on its own. But who does that? Better to hear all the parts functioning together as a complex, swinging organism. And Haynes played in such a way that all his startling musical details conjoined with human qualities: grace, humor, excitement, cool, confidence, vitality. He got up toward the front of the stage and tap-danced during his gigs, sometimes as an integral part of a drum solo. If you weren’t conditioned to pay close attention to the drummer in a group, he could be the one to make you start. No matter the group, he wasn’t just part of the rhythm section. He was — as per Sarah Vaughan‘s introduction on her 1954 track “Shulie a Bop,” in alternation with his snare-drum hits — [crack!] Roy. [rat-tat-tat!] Haynes. Haynes absorbed new styles in the jazz tradition. Yet it was often the older elements of his style, originating in the 1940s and ’50s — the strut and bounce and swing and dance in his beat — which kept him current, even in recent times. “I’m only happy when I’m moving forward,” as he explained it to the writer Burt Korall. “Some musicians play the same songs the same way every night. That’s impossible for me. My fundamental style may not really be different. But there have been so many things added.” Born March 13, 1925, Haynes grew up within a remarkable family in the culturally integrated Boston neighborhood of Roxbury; he described his block as a mixture of French Canadian, Jewish, Irish and Black families from the South. His parents, Gustavus and Edna Haynes, both came from Barbados, and his father worked for the Standard Oil company. (Both sang, and Gustavus played the organ in church.) Roy studied violin for a year, knew percussion would be his focus. He became a voracious learner — although apart from an early lesson from a Roxbury drummer named Herbie Wright and a short stint at Boston Conservatory, he mostly learned on his own by watching and practicing and performing, which he was doing so often by his middle teenage years that he dropped out of Roxbury Memorial High School. He gravitated toward the best: He learned much about playing the high hat from the drummer who was perhaps his greatest hero, the Count Basie drummer Jo Jones, whom he first met as a teenager by talking his way backstage at a Basie gig at the RKO Boston Theatre, claiming to be Jones’ son. His earliest jobs included stints with the Boston-based musicians Mabel Robinson Simms, Peter Brown and Sabby Lewis, then was summoned to New York in 1945 by the bandleader Luis Russell. And this is where his artistic story really begins, for a couple of reasons. One is because he could never be a regional outlier, in talent or temperament. And the other is because Haynes came to New York at a point of rhythmic revolution, near the beginning of the forward and artfully fractured style known as bebop. Other drummers may have had more of a hand in its creation — particularly Kenny Clarke and Max Roach. But Haynes was among those who pushed bebop drumming forward and refined it. Whatever else there is to say about Haynes as an individual talent and a bandleader, it must also be understood that he worked with an astonishing number and range of important figures in jazz; those figures form both one musician’s curriculum vitae and a large part of an entire cultural tradition. Here is a partial list of them, roughly in the order of when Haynes played with them, starting in 1946: Louis Armstrong; Lester Young (1947 to ’49); Bud Powell; Miles Davis; Parker (on and off from 1949 to 1953, including on the opening night of the legendary 52nd Street club Birdland); Stan Getz; Ella Fitzgerald; Sarah Vaughan (1953-’58); Sonny Rollins; Billie Holiday (during some of the last performances of her life, in 1959); Thelonious Monk (1957-’58); Phineas Newborn Jr.; John Coltrane; Andrew Hill; Chick Corea; Archie Shepp; Gary Burton; Alice Coltrane; Stanley Cowell; Pat Metheny; Danilo Pérez. What about Duke Ellington? Ellington offered Haynes a job in 1952, while Haynes was working with Parker. He turned it down respectfully, sensing that his style would be too disruptive for the older musicians in the band. Haynes was involved in crucial recorded moments in jazz. His single-day session with Bud Powell — on Aug. 8, 1949 — resulted in the permanent standards “Bouncing with Bud,” “Wail” and “Dance of the Infidels.” His recordings with Sarah Vaughan, including In the Land of Hi-Fi, Swingin’ Easy, and At Mr. Kelly’s, are basic to the canon of jazz vocals. (Haynes had the utmost respect for Vaughan; he called her a “pure genius.”) He can be heard with Thelonious Monk on Thelonious in Action and Misterioso, both recorded live at New York’s Five Spot Cafe in 1958, during one of Monk’s greatest periods. He is on Getz’s Focus, Oliver Nelson’s The Blues and the Abstract Truth, and Ray Charles‘ Genius + Soul = Jazz, three marvels of jazz arrangement released in 1961, and on Coltrane’s trenchant Impressions and Newport ’63. He played on two of the more influential records of the 1960s period that came out soon after the death of Coltrane, Gary Burton’s “Duster” and Chick Corea’s “Now He Sings, Now He Sobs.” And he was on Sonny Rollins’ Grammy-nominated

Bennie Maupin, Eddie Henderson, Julian Priester perform at the 13th annual “A Great Night in Harlem” gala concert, presented by The Jazz Foundation of America to benefit The Jazz Musicians Emergency Fund, at The Apollo Theater on Friday, Oct. 24, 2014, in New York.(Mark Von Holden / Invision/AP) We’ve all heard about musicians who grew up in households where jazz sounds were in the air, either in the background – or maybe in heavy rotation on their respective stereos. Less common are those youngsters who had connections with the actual musicians who performed jazz. Eddie Henderson fits into an even rarer percentile, in that he not only had access to the music in general and many musicians who made it – in Henderson’s case, he got to know legendary jazz stars when he was really young. A combination of factors created this environment: his mother, Vivian Brown, was one of the top dancers of her day, a mainstay at the original Cotton Club; his father was a member of Billy Williams’ singing group The Charioteers. After his biological dad passed away, his mom remarried and his stepfather turned out to be a doctor to jazz icons like Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Duke Ellington. Eddie’s first lesson on the trumpet came at the age of nine. The instructor? Louis Armstrong. But Henderson didn’t immediately gravitate toward jazz. He studied classical trumpet at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and excelled academically – to the point where he went to medical school to become a doctor. Along the way, it was Miles Davis who recognized Henderson’s talent and potential, and encouraged him to pursue music – if not full-time, then at least in addition to his other pursuits. Miles admired Henderson’s tone and musicality, which you can immediately appreciate whether on trumpet: …the muted trumpet: …or the flugelhorn: So… Henderson did have it both ways. He chose music and medicine. In the late ‘60s, while simultaneously finishing his last two years at Howard University Medical School, Henderson lead the house band at Washington, D.C.’s Bohemian Caverns. He’d travel to New York on the weekends to study at Freddie Hubbard’s house on Saturdays and Lee Morgan’s on Sundays. While Henderson absorbed many lessons from those two trumpet icons, it was Miles Davis who had the greatest impact. Davis passed on a few more words of wisdom to Eddie: it’s OK to emulate, but don’t copy, and when it comes to finding your voice: create music, don’t get hung up on how to play the particular instrument in your hands. Both lessons stuck with the young Eddie Henderson, who, despite having his medical degree, was ready to hit the music scene in earnest. For a three-year stretch in the early ‘70s it was with Herbie Hancock’s band Mwandishi, then later the Latin group Azteca, as well as releasing material under his own name. In the liner notes of his 1998 album Reemergence, Henderson said he likes to write in sketches, allowing the group to finalize the entire painting – rather than making self-portraits; that “the collective effort far supersedes any individual effort.” No surprise then that for more than a decade Henderson has been one of the members in a super-group of veterans known as The Cookers: a septet of major players primarily in their 70s and 80s who sound as good now as they ever have. Truly a dream team of artists with plenty more to share as a collective unit – but it doesn’t hurt having an all-star in the lineup like Henderson. This article was originally published April 24, 2023 on KNKX.org. Copyright 2024 KNKX Public Radio

Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie between 1946-1948 in New York City(William P. Gottlieb / The Library of Congress, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons) Listen to the story above or read the script below: Bebop, known as “modern jazz” to musicians who made it, was an innovation that still defines the genre today. The radical overhaul of rhythm and harmony, a new jazz vocabulary developed in New York City in the late 30s and early 40s. Derived from the advanced soloing of swing age masters Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins and others, bebop was characterized by complex harmonies, asymmetrical phrasing, melodic rhythm techniques and mostly fast tempos. I asked Seattle jazz icon, multi-instrumentalist and bebop lover Jay Thomas to tell me about what this change meant for jazz musicians: “So many breakthroughs in the technical harmonic language happened with bebop,” said Thomas. “It’s the method of coming up with lines and melodies, and including all the Western harmony that came up from people like Debussy and Chopin, and people like that. But it still had blues going through it, because it was African American. It was like, on the shoulders of that big Harlem Renaissance.” Countless musicians were part of the bebop revolution, but the music was largely defined by a handful of unique artists who helped create it. One of bebop’s earliest innovators, Charlie Christian was a member of the Benny Goodman band from 1939 to 1941, and he helped make the electric guitar a soloing instrument in big bands. Christian was influenced by horn players, and using tension & release, and an unending series of single note phrases, he cleared a path for the great bebop players to come. Often playing alongside Charlie Christian at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem was pianist Thelonious Monk. His music emerged from stride piano and church organ, developing a uniquely percussive technique, and unconventional melodic ideas. Monk’s compositions didn’t catch on right away, though his style and many of his songs were fully formed by the mid-40s. Perhaps no other figure claims the bebop throne. Charlie Parker was a jazz virtuoso, an icon to musicians and fans alike, including the emerging poets of the Beat Generation. His almost endless hours of practicing led to complete control of his horn, and the time to explore the furthest reaches of harmonic structure. Yardbird’s incredible skill was matched by a knack for melody and a love of the blues. Though one of the earliest of the bebop inventors, Dizzy Gillespie’s mastery of the style took years. His charming personality and hip character may have helped raise the profile of bebop more than any other player in jazz. His Latin jazz and big bands led to expanded rhythmic possibilities and sound colors. His sense of humor and a great hook created some of the standards of the bebop era, like “Salt Peanuts”: Other major contributors to bebop include drummer Kenny Clarke, and pianist Bud Powell, and on the West Coast: Dexter Gordon, Charles Mingus, and there were many more. There was a backlash: Louis Armstrong didn’t get it, calling the music “weird”, saying “you got no melody to remember and no beat to dance to.” Bebop eventually came into its own, though early exposure still took the music less-than-seriously. Here’s Dizzy Gillespie in the 1947 musical film “Jivin’ in Bebop”, joking with MC Freddy Carter before launching into his song “Oop Bop Sh’bam” (listen in audio version of this story). Jazz musicians of all ages are still playing bebop today. The expansion of the language changed jazz forever. The complexity, the beauty and the indefinable coolness of the music will always challenge and thrill musicians… and jazz fans, too. Copyright 2024 KNKX Public Radio

Quincy Jones, whose decorated music career ran from the early 1950s through the best-known works of Michael Jackson and beyond, died Sunday. He was 91. His death was confirmed by his publicist in a statement to NPR that did not mention the cause of death. The statement said that Jones died peacefully at his home in Bel Air, California, surrounded by his family. “Tonight, with full but broken hearts, we must share the news of our father and brother Quincy Jones’ passing,” the family said in the statement provided by Jones’ publicist, Arnold Robinson. “And although this is an incredible loss for our family, we celebrate the great life that he lived and know there will never be another like him.” In the 1980s, Jones helped oversee some of music’s biggest and most widely loved moments: He produced or co-produced three of Michael Jackson’s best-selling albums, including 1982’s record-setting Thriller, and was heavily involved in crafting USA for Africa’s 1985 charity single “We Are the World.” But his career extended for decades in each direction. Jones long held the record for most Grammy nominations with 80, before Jay-Z and Beyoncé surpassed the total earlier this decade, and his 28 wins rank him third behind Beyoncé (32) and conductor Georg Solti (31). Born Quincy Delight Jones in 1933, Jones got his start in jazz — at 19, he played trumpet in Lionel Hampton’s band — and soon performed on stages with some of the world’s best-known stars: Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley. In the 1960s, Jones became a decorated film composer — he collected three of his seven career Academy Award nominations in 1968 and ’69 — as well as a high-profile music-industry executive, arranger and producer. On albums like The Great Wide World of Quincy Jones and Quincy Jones Plays Hip Hits, he was the headliner, but he also worked behind the scenes, producing (among many others) a string of bestselling hits for Lesley Gore. In the ’70s, Jones remained in the spotlight as a performer and executive, expanding his reach with high-profile projects such as the soundtrack to The Wiz. But the 1980s found his name attached to a remarkable string of successes, from “We Are the World” and Thriller to his first foray into film production: 1985’s The Color Purple, which made movie stars of Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg. Jones’ star-packed Back on the Block, released in 1989, won the Grammy for album of the year in 1991. Jones’ successes extended well beyond music and film. Shortly after launching Quincy Jones Entertainment in 1990, he was presiding over long-running TV hits such as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and MADtv. His 2001 book Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones detailed his many intersections with music’s biggest moments and stars, as well as his mental-health battles and rocky upbringing in Chicago. Jones’ philanthropic works extended well beyond USA for Africa and benefited causes such as music preservation, arts education and aid for underprivileged youth. Jones’ tumultuous personal life included three marriages and seven children, including actresses Kidada and Rashida Jones — his daughters with actress Peggy Lipton — and Kenya Kinski-Jones, a fashion model whose mother is German actress and model Nastassja Kinski. NPR’s Ayana Archie contributed reporting. Copyright 2024 NPR

Baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, 1980s(William P. Gottlieb / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons) Listen to the story above or read the script below: Before we get into West Coast cool, I want to play you something else for comparisons sake. What we’re hearing now is NOT West Coast cool jazz—but it’s a good example of what that music isn’t. This is Phil Woods’ version of Dizzy Gillespie be-bop rouser, ‘Shaw ‘Nuff.’ It comes in like a wired dervish and pretty much stays that way throughout. It’s great fun but it ain’t what we think of as West Coast jazz. THIS is West Coast cool. It’s a little laid-back, kinda bouncy, kinda…well….sunny. The song is called ‘Tricklydidler,’ and you’ll hear no more from me on that. And it’s done by a group of West Coast mainstays—trumpeter Shorty Rogers leading a group that includes reedman, Jimmy Giuffre, Pete Jolly on piano, bassist, Curtis Counce, and drummer, Shelly Manne—five guys are cool jazz in a nutshell. Nobody here seems to be in a hurry to show off their improvisational chops—they’re more into the song’s melody, its harmonies and its groove. But they get around to improvising after spending some quality time together. And if you’re thinking, “You know, if you sped this up a little, it’d kinda sound like a theme song for a 1950s sit-com or game show,” you’re be pretty much on the money. A lot of these Los Angeles players paid their bills by working in recording studios and network TV bands, so some TV theme songs were much cooler than discerning viewers had any right to expect. For example, here are two more West Coast mainstays, Bud Shank and Bob Cooper with their 1958 version of the theme to the Steve Allen Show. And, yes, that’s the same Bud Shank who would later in life move from Los Angeles to Port Townsend, Washington and help create the annual world-class jazz festival now known as Centrum’s Jazz Port Townsend. I guess I haven’t said it outright, but Los Angeles is the town that folks think of when talking about West Coast jazz, and to a lesser degree, San Francisco. So let’s bop up to “Baghdad By the Bay” and listen to some cool jazz by two of the only West Coast jazz players who were actually from California: Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond. This is the Brubeck Quartet’s stunning version of ‘Stardust,’ recorded live at Oberlin College in 1953. It’s certainly one of Paul Desmond’s loveliest excursions into improvisation, as he and Brubeck never actually play the melody of Stardust—though they keep hinting at it from time to time. If you haven’t heard it, spend six and a half minutes of your life with it. It’ll lighten your load. I guess if I had to pick one recording to be the definitive West Coast cool song, it would be this one. It’s called ‘Bernie’s Tune,’ recorded in 1952 by the somewhat experimental piano-less quartet led by baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan and trumpeter, Chet Baker. It’s got the West Coast uplift, the harmonies and later in the song, some very tasteful counterpoint which was also a hallmark of the West Coast sound. Detractors of that sound say it was more interested in composition than improvisation and that it didn’t swing. To which I say, “Phooey.” Copyright 2024 KNKX Public Radio

Image Credit: John Westbrook – JS Media 1 Lou Donaldson, a celebrated jazz saxophonist with a warm, fluid style who performed with everyone from Thelonious Monk to George Benson and was sampled by Nas, De La Soul and other hip-hop artists, has died. He was 98. Donaldson died Saturday, according to a statement on his website. Additional details were not immediately available. A native of Badin, North Carolina and a World War II veteran, Donaldson was part of the bop scene that emerged after the war and early in his career recorded with Monk, Milt Jackson and others. Donaldson also helped launch the career of Clifford Brown, the gifted trumpeter who was just 25 when he was killed in a 1956 road accident. Donaldson also was on hand for some of pianist Horace Silver’s earliest sessions. Over more than half a century, he would blend soul, blues and pop and achieve some mainstream recognition with his 1967 cover of one of the biggest hits of the time, “Ode to Billy Joe,” featuring a young Benson on guitar. His notable albums included “Alligator Bogaloo,” “Lou Donaldson at His Best” and “Wailing With Lou.” Donaldson would open his shows with a cool, jazzy jam from 1958, “Blues Walk.” “That’s my theme song. Gotta good groove, a good groove to it,” he said in a 2013 interview with the National Endowment for the Arts, which named him a Jazz Master. Nine years later, his hometown renamed one of its roads Lou Donaldson Boulevard. Copyright 2024 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Eddie Jefferson, Half Moon Bay CA 10/1/78(Brian McMillen / Brianmcmillen, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons) Listen to the story above or read the script below: Have you ever found yourself listening to piece of instrumental jazz music you love and humming along – or maybe even specifically with that great trumpet or sax solo? If you know that experience, you are one-step away from performing vocalese. This may sound familiar: That’s pioneer of vocalese – King Pleasure. Vocalese is a style of jazz singing in which words are added to an otherwise instrumental song and more specifically to an instrumental soloist’s improvisation. Here’s Coleman Hawkins saxophone solo on the song “Body and Soul.” And here’s Eddie Jefferson singing his lyrics to the same solo. This was the first wave of vocalese – and carried forward in time could also be an example of early foundations for rap and hip hop. It’s different from scat singing which uses nonsense words like “do bee do bee do.” The word “vocalese” is a play on the musical term “vocalise”; the suffix “-ese” indicates a language. Vocalist Jon Hendricks coined the term “vocalese” to jazz critic Leonard Feather using the word to describe the first Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross album, Sing a Song of Basie released in 1957. Swinging right? Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, consisting of Jon Hendricks, Dave Lambert and Annie Ross are the best-known practitioners of vocalese who popularized the style. Other performers known for vocalese include Bob Dorough, Kurt Elling, Al Jarreau, and New York Voices. Joni Mitchell recorded lyrics to Charles Mingus’s tunes, with “The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines” and “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” on her album, Mingus, in 1979. So maybe – the next time you find yourself humming along to a saxophone solo, try putting some words to it and play along in creating your own vocalese. Copyright 2024 KNKX Public Radio

Members of the North Fork Community Choir in Paonia, Colo., aim to set aside their opinions on big topics when they sing. When differences arise, they figure out creative solutions to stay in harmony. (Image credit: Luna Anna Archey for NPR)