Jazz and Blues

The advent of bebop added a fresh sound to American music. It also added new voices to some metropolitan radio stations: the late-night jazz DJs who specialized in presenting this new music to their fellow hipster nightflies. To recognize the work of the groundbreaking DJs who lent them critical exposure, jazz musicians of the period would occasionally write songs in their honor. Here are five of those songs.

Charles Mingus was a virtuoso bass player, accomplished pianist, bandleader and composer.  Influenced both by church choirs and Duke Ellington, he studied double bass and composition with classical masters.

A Seattle all-star group played this month's Art of Jazz concert at The Seattle Art Museum.  Co-led by Chuck Deardorf on bass and Dave Peterson on guitar, the group also includes Rich Cole on tenor sax, Bill Anschell, piano, and John Bishop on drums.   Highlights from the concert aired on Jazz Northwest, 88.5 KPLU on Sunday, April 20 at 2 PM PDT.

Canadian vocalist, Holly Cole, is one of greatest song interpreters alive. 

She can take a song you think you know and bring something out of it that you’ve never heard before. 

For example, her latest CD, Night, contains Holly’s inventive re-imagining of a James Bond theme (You Only Live Twice), as well as songs by Danny O’Keefe, Tom Waits, Captain Beefheart, Rod McKuen and Gordon Lightfoot. 

Repression of African Americans didn’t stop at the end of the Civil War, and prisons and chain gangs were full of black people arrested for minor violations. This song, “Another Man Done Gone”, tells of the death of a man on one of those chain gangs.

Folklorist Alan Lomax recorded Vera Hall singing “Another Man Done Gone” in 1940, and praised her as having the "loveliest untrained voice [he] had ever recorded."

We've been celebrating Jazz April (Jazz Appreciation Month + International Jazz Day April 30) by posting birthday remembrances of the legendary jazz artists who were born this month.

Latin Jazz innovators, percussionists and bandleaders are well-represented in April too: