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Linked Jazz: A Huge Data Visualization Maps the Relationships Between...
Having watched the development of interactive data visualizations as a writer for Open Culture, I’ve seen my share of impressive examples, especially when it comes to mapping music. Perhaps the oldest...
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Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew Turns 50: Celebrate the Funk-Jazz-Psych-Rock...
I shouldn’t have to tell you that Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, released fifty years ago this month, is a groundbreaking record. The funk-jazz-psych-rock masterpiece has been handed that award in “best...
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How Jazz Helped Fuel the 1960s Civil Rights Movement
Oh, Lord, don’t let ‘em shoot us! Oh, Lord, don’t let ‘em stab us! Oh, Lord, don’t let ‘em tar and feather us! Oh, Lord, no more swastikas! Oh, Lord, no more Ku Klux Klan! —Charles Mingus, “Fables of...
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In 1968, a Teenager Convinced Thelonious Monk to Play a Gig at His High...
In 1964, Thelonious Monk appeared on the cover of TIME. He had been chosen for an extensive profile, his biographer Robin D.G. Kelley tells Terry Gross, because the magazine thought Miles Davis or Ray...
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How Cannonball Adderley Shared the Joy of Jazz
Jazz has always had big personalities. In the mid-20th century, an explosion of major players became as well known for their personal quirks as for their revolutionary techniques and compositions....
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How Ornette Coleman Freed Jazz with His Theory of Harmolodics
The term free jazz may have existed before Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come arrived in 1959. Yet, however innovative the modal experiments of Coltrane or Davis, jazz still adhered to its...
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Jazz Typefaces Capture the Essence of 100 Iconic Jazz Musicians
In the 1950s and 60s, one record label stood “like a beacon,” writes Robin Kinross at Eye, among a host of Civil Rights era independents that helped jazz “escape the racial-commercial constraints...
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Watch Jaco Pastorius: The Lost Tapes Documentary, the Fan-Made Film on the...
People do not understand how hard a jazz musician works for a living. I’m not putting nobody down, but I’m telling you nobody understands how hard jazz musicians work. Jazz is not big in the US,...
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Jazz Virtuoso Oscar Peterson Gives Dick Cavett a Dazzling Piano Lesson (1979)
Duke Ellington once called Oscar Peterson the “Maharaja of the Keyboard” for his virtuosity and ability to play any style with seeming ease, a skill he first began to learn as a classically trained...
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Doreen Ketchens’ Astonishing Rendition of “The House of the Rising Sun”: A...
Dirtiness has no description. It is a feeling. — music transcriber George Collier You may be able to read music and play the clarinet, but it’s extremely unlikely you — or anyone — will be able to...
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Great Mixtapes of 1970s Japanese Jazz: 4 Hours of Funky, Groovy, Fusion-y Music
Like American jazz, Japanese jazz started with earlier styles like foxtrot and ragtime. Jazz was an international music, spreading across the Atlantic to London, Paris, and Berlin and across the...
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Watch Cab Calloway Actually Perform “Mr. Hepster’s Dictionary,” His Famous...
Who’s up for a good dictionary on film? Colin Browning, assistant editor of The Bluff, a Loyola Marymount University student newspaper, has some kopasetic casting suggestions for a hypothetical...
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Watch the Original Schoolhouse Rock Composers Sing “Conjunction Junction” and...
At first blush, Schoolhouse Rock!, the interstitial animations airing between ABC’s Saturday morning cartoon line up from 1973 to 1984, may seem like a catchy, educational equivalent of sneaking...
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Watch Nina Simone’s Flawless Tribute to Johann Sebastian Bach on The Ed...
Some 80 years ago, in a small North Carolina town, Eunice Waymon, a musically gifted, nine-year-old black girl, began taking piano lessons in the home of an exacting Englishwoman named Muriel...
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Meet Johnny Costa, the Pianist Who Introduced Millions of Mister Rogers Fans...
Jazz pianist and composer Charles Cornell is not alone in his contempt for the sort of dumbed down musical fare typical of children’s programming. The late Johnny Costa, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’s...
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