Ella Fitzgerald Songs from what came to be known as the Great American Songbook, have been part of jazz perhaps since The Original Dixieland Jazz Band began recording Irving Berlin compositions. In the 1940s, singer Lee Wiley recorded several collections of 78s, known as “albums” – a name that stuck into the LP era, focused […]
Charlie Parker
-
-
Jazz at 100 Hour 36: Bebop Pioneers in the 1950s (1949 – 1960)
Jazz at Massey Hall Bud Powell-p, Charles Mingus-b, Max Roach-d, Dizzy Gillespie-tp, Charlie Parker-as Bebop had its roots in the big bands of the late 1930s and was nurtured in jam sessions during the war and the musician’s strike of the 1940s. By 1950, the prescient Coleman Hawkins, and the pioneers – Charlie Parker, Dizzy […]
-
Jazz at 100 Hour 34: Miles and Friends – The “Birth” of the Cool (1947 – 1950)
Miles Davis – Lennie Tristano – Gerry Mulligan The torrid pace of bebop improvisations reached a point in the late 1940s that prompted a musical reconsideration and Miles Davis was there at the conception. Davis had been with the Charlie Parker Quintet since 1945, when he began to woodshed with composer/arrangers John Lewis, Gerry Mulligan […]
-
Jazz at 100 Hour 29: Tadd Dameron – Fats Navarro – Sonny Stitt – JJ Johnson (1946 – 1950)
Tadd Dameron – Fats Navarro In the past several hours of Jazz at 100, we have featured the music of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, and Max Roach. In this hour, we will continue to present bebop innovators – pianist/composer Tadd Dameron and his frequent (but short-lived) collaborator Fats Navarro, […]
-
Jazz at 100 Hour 28: The Genius of Modern Music – Thelonious Monk on Blue Note (1947 – 1950)
Thelonious Monk In 1940, Minton’s Playhouse on West 118th Street hired drummer Kenny Clarke as a bandleader. For the house band, Clarke hired trumpeter Joe Guy, bassist Nick Fenton, and an eccentric pianist named Thelonious Monk. Although Monk recorded with Coleman Hawkins in 1944, he didn’t record with his own group until 1947. Despite these […]
-
Jazz at 100 Hour 26: That Dizzy Cat – Dizzy Gillespie (1945 – 1948)
Dizzy Gillespie Dizzy Gillespie grew up professionally playing in the big bands of Teddy Hill, Cab Calloway, Earl Hines and Billy Eckstine and writing for Woody Herman and Jimmy Dorsey. The wartime economy with its shortages and the musician’s strike of the early 1940s led Gillespie to focus on small combos for his own projects, […]
-
Jazz at 100 Hour 25: Yardbird – The Savoy and Dial Recordings of Charlie Parker (1945 – 1948)
Charlie “Yardbird” Parker – Miles Davis Emerging from the Jay McShann Orchestra from Kansas City and relentlessly curious about how to play the new music he heard in his head, Charlie Parker found sympathetic players in New York, especially Dizzy Gillespie. In November of 1945, Bird, as he was universally known, began to record with […]
-
Jazz at 100 Hour 23: Birth of Bebop (1939 – 1945)
Charlie Parker – Dizzy Gillespie “By the early 1940s … a new approach to small-combo jazz playing was developing, characterized by a more flexible approach to rhythm, a more aggressive pursuit of instrumental virtuosity, and an increasingly adventurous harmonic language.” – Scott Deveaux “Because its loose, improvisatory format offers an obvious point of contrast to […]