Jazz
This section brings together album stories, birthdays, and anniversaries from jazz musicians and bandleaders, along with news of vinyl reissues as they appear. Jazz has one of the deepest collector cultures of any genre on vinyl: original pressings from labels like Blue Note, Prestige, and Verve are prized not only for the music but for the cover photography and design that came with them, and audiophile labels have built entire reissue series around getting those recordings back into print. Expect stories about specific sessions and musicians, plus notes on why a given pressing or reissue matters to jazz collectors.
76 STORIES
Miles Davis's Dingo at 35
Warner Bros. released Miles Davis's Dingo soundtrack, written with Michel Legrand, on November 5, 1991 — the last studio album Davis completed before his death.
· 3 min read
How Kool Moe Dee Ran Over LL Cool J
Kool Moe Dee released How Ya Like Me Now on Jive Records in November 1987, with a cover showing a Jeep crushing LL Cool J's red kangol hat.
· 4 min read
Katie Melua: How a School Show Sparked a Jazz-Blues Hit
Katie Melua's performance of Faraway Voice at the BRIT School caught Mike Batt's attention. That led to her debut album Call Off the Search on Dramatico in November 2003.
· 4 min read
The Voice That Refused to Be Forgotten
Eva Callahan, a little-known Washington club singer, died of melanoma on November 2, 1996 — and within four years her voice was topping the UK chart.
· 4 min read
Stevie Wonder: How Talking Book Changed His Sound
Stevie Wonder released Talking Book on Tamla on October 27, 1972. Robert Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil were associate producers on a sound built on clavinet and synthesizers.
· 4 min read
Why Did Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters Shock Jazz?
Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters arrived on Columbia Records on October 26, 1973, with no guitar and a clavinet up front. It became the biggest-selling jazz record of its time.
· 4 min read
How Sade's Love Deluxe Traded Warmth for Darkness
Sade's Love Deluxe, released by Epic Records on October 26, 1992, replaced the band's easy warmth with programmed beats and a darker, more expensive sound.
· 4 min read
Why Did Joni Mitchell Paint Herself as Van Gogh?
Joni Mitchell's fifteenth studio album, Turbulent Indigo, arrived on October 25, 1994. Its cover recast her own face in the style of Vincent van Gogh.
· 4 min read
How Did Chicago Turn Carnegie Hall Into a Rock Landmark?
Chicago became the first rock group to sell out a full week at Carnegie Hall in April 1971. The resulting four-record live set, Chicago at Carnegie Hall, arrived on October 25, 1971.
· 3 min read
How Jeff Beck Rescued Rough and Ready
Epic Records rejected the vocals on Jeff Beck's third album, so Beck replaced singer Alex Ligertwood with Bobby Tench. Rough and Ready arrived on October 25, 1971.
· 4 min read
Al Di Meola's Land of the Midnight Sun at 50
Al Di Meola released Land of the Midnight Sun on Columbia Records on October 25, 1976, a debut that paired a nine-minute suite with a Bach sarabande.
· 3 min read
How Tom Waits Built a Jazz Club in a Studio
Tom Waits turned a Los Angeles recording studio into a fake nightclub for two nights in July. The result became Nighthawks at the Diner, released on Asylum Records.
· 3 min read
Why Did Miles Davis Trade His Trumpet for a Flugelhorn?
On October 21, 1957, Columbia released Miles Ahead, on which Miles Davis set aside the trumpet. He soloed entirely on flugelhorn in front of sixteen woodwind and brass players.
· 4 min read
Kylie Minogue's Let's Get to It Broke Her Hit Streak
Kylie Minogue's fourth album Let's Get to It arrived on 14 October 1991. It ended her run of thirteen straight UK top-ten hits, with lead single "Word Is Out" stalling at number sixteen.
· 4 min read
Konstrakta: The Architect Who Outweirded Eurovision
Serbian architect Ana Ignjatović, known as Konstrakta, turned a hand-washing routine about health insurance into a Eurovision moment in 2022. She finished fifth in Turin with 'In corpore sano'.
· 4 min read
Santana's Caravanserai: The Album Called Career Suicide
Clive Davis told Carlos Santana that Caravanserai was career suicide, but the 1972 album reached number 8 on the Billboard chart and later went platinum.
· 3 min read
How Marek Grechuta Built Poland's Most Delicate Songbook
Marek Grechuta, the Polish singer and composer, died in Kraków on 9 October 2006 at the age of 60. Trained as an architect, he built a songbook out of poetry and paintings.
· 3 min read
How Bebo Valdés Lost a Dance and Found a Second Life
Bebo Valdés premiered the batanga at the Tropicana in 1952 and lost the floor to the cha-cha-cha. He spent the next six decades proving the bet was right.
· 4 min read
Chucho Valdés and the Sound His Father Left Behind
Chucho Valdés began his first recording sessions in Havana in January 1964, four years after his father Bebo left Cuba and fell silent for three decades.
· 4 min read
Yusef Lateef Played World Music Before It Had a Name
The first instrument Yusef Lateef ever bought was an alto saxophone. He was born William Emanuel Huddleston on October 9, 1920, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and b…
· 3 min read
How Sister Rosetta Tharpe Built Rock and Roll
Sister Rosetta Tharpe cut four songs in a single 1938 afternoon for Decca Records. Those sides made her one of America's first commercially successful gospel performers.
· 4 min read
How Nelson Riddle Found a Second Act with Linda Ronstadt
In 1982 Linda Ronstadt asked Nelson Riddle to arrange an album of jazz standards. The partnership sold more than seven million copies and won him Grammys late in life.
· 4 min read
Art Farmer and the Quiet Trumpet
Art Farmer, the jazz trumpeter who died on October 4, 1999, built a career on a warm, rounded tone instead of speed and flash. His path ran from Council Bluffs to Vienna.
· 4 min read
Buddy Rich: Why His Hands Were Faster Than Thought
Born in Brooklyn in 1917, Buddy Rich went from a vaudeville child act to the drummer whose technique functioned at the speed of thought.
· 6 min read