Tom Reney
Jazz à la Mode Producer/HostTom was honored by the Jazz Journalists Association with the Willis Conover-Marian McPartland Award for Career Excellence in Broadcasting in 2019. In addition to hosting Jazz à la Mode since 1984, Tom writes the jazz blog and produces the Jazz Beat podcast at NEPM. He began working in jazz radio in 1977 at WCUW, a community-licensed radio station in Worcester, Massachusetts. Tom holds a BA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he majored in English and African American Studies.
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June 15 marks the centennial of the birth of Worcester-born pianist Jaki Byard. -
June 15 marks the centennial of the birth of Worcester-born pianist Jaki Byard.
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Gunther Schuller died on Sunday, June 21, in Boston. He was 89. Schuller was a Renaissance man of the Space Age. He began playing French horn with the New York Philharmonic when he was 16, became principal horn of the Cincinnati Symphony at 17, and for the better part of the next 75 years excelled at more endeavors than virtually anyone else in modern music.
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Only Bob Dylan can say definitively how much his decision to “go electric” was inspired by the buzz swirling around Paul Butterfield that weekend. But as far as I’m concerned, if Butterfield wasn’t there, Dylan’s electric premiere wouldn’t have happened until a later date.
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Jazz critic Gary Giddins talks to Tom Reney about Sonny Rollins.
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No matter how complex and ambitious his music got, Mingus didn’t stray too far or too long from the vernacular of the blues, the music of the Pentecostal churches of his youth, and the swing that fueled his passion to play music in the first place. This is not apparent in everything he composed, but sooner or later he returns to these first principles, and it gives his subjective vision its universal resonance.
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I take note of these patronizing attitudes toward Donaldson, not only with respect to the remarkably sustained quality of the music he’s played over the course of his 65 year-long career, but in light of the continual decline in the audience for jazz.
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Ah, but Pops knew to leave us always wanting a little bit more!
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Tony Bennett included the trumpeter Ruby Braff in a select group of “pure musicians” who have “a sound that’s as precious as a string of pearls or a rare diamond."
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Jazz has known its fair share of charismatic personalities, but few as mythical or colorful as Dexter Gordon.
