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Afropop Worldwide
Saturdays at 11 p.m. on 88.5 NEPM

This Peabody Award-winning radio program is dedicated to music from Africa and the African diaspora. Hosted by Georges Collinet from Cameroon, Afropop Worldwide bridges continents and cultures through the power of pop, telling some of the most important stories of our time along the way.

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  • Joe Albany wasn’t the first seeker to find his true voice in jazz, but he was among the more forthright about what the music meant to him. In the 1980 documentary, Joe Albany: A Jazz Life, he puts it in both spiritual and psychological terms.
  • Benny Golson composed “I Remember Clifford” in memory of Clifford Brown, whom he called his “friend forever.” They’d been colleagues in Tadd Dameron’s orchestra in 1953 and had played together on Philadelphia’s thriving jazz scene in the early fifties. This best known of jazz elegies was premiered in January 1957.
  • Toussaint was magisterial and confidently soft-spoken, and he possessed a piano lyricism of great depth and beauty. But he was unduly modest about his vocal abilities.
  • Thank God, and Mr. and Mrs. David Cohn, for bringing Alvin Gilbert Cohn into the world 90 years ago today. It’s hard to measure the value of swing and soul, but I’m certain that jazz would feel considerably less buoyant and exciting if Al had never graced it with his musical ingenuity.
  • Dexter Gordon vies with Duke Ellington as the most charismatic jazz artist I’ve ever seen in person. His horn shook with the same swagger as the Los Angeles native’s 6’5″ gait, and good looks landed him occasional acting roles that culminated in his portrayal of Dale Turner in the movie ‘Round Midnight.
  • I had the pleasure of seeing Tommy Flanagan several times in the 1980s and ’90s at clubs in Hartford, Cambridge, and at the Village Vanguard, his home base in New York. When I introduced him at the Litchfield Jazz Festival in 1998, I mentioned that he’d played on landmark recordings by Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald, and Wes Montgomery. Tommy took the mic and said, “That’s true, but they made all the money!”
  • Billie Holiday and Ben Webster were lovers for a brief stretch in the mid-’30s. A classic photograph taken by the Danish jazz fan Timme Rosenkrantz behind the Apollo in 1935 pictures them together, but in between the playful pettin’ and pokin’, there was at least one instance of the brutality that occurred all too often in Billie’s life.
  • With all due respect to the great records he made as a leader, whenever Duke Jordan comes to mind, I think first of the intro he played on Charlie Parker’s “Embraceable You.”
  • Mark Murphy died on October 22 at the age of 83. Born March 14, 1932 to a musical family in Syracuse (one with deep roots in my hometown of Worcester), he seemed to dig and draw on everything he’d ever heard, from opera to show tunes; classic blues to r&b; scat to vocalese; bebop to bossa nova to the Beats.
  • Thank God, and Mr. and Mrs. David Cohn, for bringing Alvin Gilbert Cohn into the world 90 years ago today. It’s hard to measure the value of swing and soul, but I’m certain that jazz would feel considerably less buoyant and exciting if Al had never graced it with his musical ingenuity.