JAZZ A LA MODE

We're feeling good... well? We find out with the Word Nerd. Plus, we chat with Jazz great and Jazz à la Mode host Avery Sharpe before his upcoming performance, and hear music and words from local artist Kimaya Diggs.

We dance with BCUC for Live Music Friday, wrap up our collaboration with the Media Lab Fellows and their series "Books for Young People", celebrate Dare Bottleshop & Provision's 2nd birthday with a tour of Beaujolais, and introduce you to a new voice in jazz here at NEPM.

By now you’ve probably heard about the silly web post that The New Yorker ran purportedly quoting Sonny Rollins (In His Own Words) on his career in jazz. I was alerted to it by readers wondering…

Mait Eady, the host of this 1962 broadcast on WBAI, says he's "feeling evangelical" about the interview he's about to conduct with Herbie Nichols. I dare say that's how virtually everyone feels once they've made their own discovery of Nichols, a highly original composer and pianist who recorded three albums for Blue Note yet came close to being completely overlooked during his 44-year-long life, which ended in 1963.

I assume the Danes who filmed Louis Armstrong in 1933 knew what a service they were providing humanity. There’s no shortage of film on the great trumpeter later in his career, but this is the first footage we have of Pops in his early prime.

My favorite version of the Louis Armstrong-Jack Teagarden staple “Rockin’ Chair” is from a 1957 television special seen below. Armstrong had first recorded this homespun lament by Hoagy Carmichael on December 13, 1929, with the composer in the voice of the aging father and Armstrong as the dutiful son.

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.