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
Nas: The 53-Year Journey from Queensbridge to Illmatic
Born in 1973 to a blues musician and a postal worker, Nas rose from Queensbridge to release Illmatic in 1994. The album now sits in the Library of Congress.
· 5 min read
Harry Connick Jr.: How a Child Prodigy Became a Vinyl Icon
From performing Beethoven with the New Orleans Symphony at age nine to multi-platinum records and Grammys, Harry Connick Jr. became one of jazz's most recognizable figures.
· 6 min read
Roxy & Elsewhere: The Stitched-Together Live Album
A live album recorded in a Hollywood club, then surgically altered in the studio — except for the tracks that weren't. Frank Zappa's Roxy & Elsewhere landed on …
· 5 min read
How Michael Bublé Learned From Grandpa's Vinyl
Three independent albums before anyone was listening. The first wasn't cut for radio programmers or label executives — it was a gift wrapped for his grandfather…
· 4 min read
Miles Davis: When the Sextet Broke the Key
When pianist Red Garland missed a Columbia session in 1958, Miles Davis covered both trumpet and piano. The resulting album Milestones turned jazz's harmonic rules inside out.
· 3 min read
Yvonne De Carlo: The Dancer Who Became a Monster
A major Hollywood producer once crowned her "the most beautiful girl in the world," yet the role that immortalized her demanded a long black wig shot with a whi…
· 5 min read
Art Pepper: The Sound of a Razor’s Edge
Art Pepper was born into chaos on September 1, 1925. He turned the Central Avenue club district into his classroom before emerging as the defining alto voice of West Coast jazz.
· 4 min read
Van Morrison: The 81-Year-Old Knight Who Won't Rehearse
George Ivan Morrison was born in Belfast on August 31, 1945. He grew up to fuse raw garage rock with complex jazz improvisation, creating a body of work that resists easy categorization.
· 5 min read
Three Minutes That Rewired Jazz
Charlie Parker's 1945 session for Savoy Records produced 'Ko-Ko', a three-minute bebop landmark. It rewired jazz and gave the revolution its first definitive document.
· 4 min read
Danny Seraphine's Drumming Defined Chicago's Brass Rock
Danny Seraphine's jazz-inflected drumming on Chicago Transit Authority's 1969 debut double album defined brass rock. It set a new standard for ambitious first releases.
· 4 min read
Branford Marsalis: The ECM Instinct Inside Sting’s Arena
By any orthodox logic, a jazz purist who spent his early twenties absorbing the hard-bop commandments of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers should never have become t…
· 4 min read
Leonard Bernstein: The Maestro Who Snuck a Sax
The baton was missing — and that was the whole point. Leonard Bernstein stood before the New York Philharmonic radiating a kinetic charge that seemed to bypass …
· 4 min read
Strange Fruit: How Billie Holiday Changed a Song’s Weight
In 1939 Billie Holiday recorded 'Strange Fruit,' a song born from a photograph of a lynching that Columbia refused to touch and radio stations banned.
· 5 min read
The Stratocaster and the Symphony: Terje Rypdal at 79
Born in Oslo in 1947, Terje Rypdal abandoned the piano for a Fender Stratocaster. His career made the violin bow, the symphony orchestra, and the long sustain of ECM a single, uncooperative sound.
· 4 min read
Terje Rypdal's ECM Chill: Fusion Records That Freeze Time
Born the son of a military bandleader, Terje Rypdal forged a desolate guitar language on ECM. His records turned cold climates and long winters into a musical language all his own.
· 5 min read
Count Basie: The Atomic Space That Swung Harder
William James Basie, born August 21, 1904, built a big band that redefined swing with space and restraint. From Kansas City to the Savoy Ballroom and beyond, his sound changed jazz.
· 5 min read
Ginger Baker and the Double-Kick Rebellion
Ginger Baker, born August 19, 1939, became the volatile engine of Cream. He pulled rock drumming out of its adolescence and straight into a storm.
· 4 min read
Two Chords and a Japanese Calligrapher: Kind of Blue at 67
Miles Davis handed out rough sketches and let the tape roll. Five tracks captured mostly on the first take became Kind of Blue, the most famous work of his career.
· 4 min read
Patti Austin’s 1981 Qwest Debut Every Home Should Have One
A five-year-old signs with RCA Records in 1955. That single detail — a child under contract before she could read it — opens the story of Patti Austin, born Aug…
· 4 min read
The Day Zappa Handed George Duke a Synth and Changed Fusion
In a cramped rehearsal room sometime around 1970, Frank Zappa pointed at a bulky ARP Odyssey and told George Duke to figure it out. Duke, a classically trained …
· 5 min read
Fillmore East – June 1971: The Mud Shark and Groupie Standards
A mud shark dangling from a fishing line out of a hotel window — that’s not a scene from a surrealist film, but the real-life seed of one of rock’s strangest co…
· 5 min read
How Fela Kuti Made Afrobeat After Trinity College
Olufela Ransome-Kuti abandoned medicine in 1958 to enrol at Trinity College of Music. That choice rerouted West African music and created Afrobeat.
· 5 min read
Tommy Bolin: The Fender, the Echoplex, and the Legend
The wah-wah pedal wails, the Echoplex trails a ghost note into the void, and a Fender Stratocaster screams through a fuzz box in a Miami hotel room. It is the s…
· 5 min read
How Charlie Christian Rewired a Century of Sound
In the late 1930s, Charlie Christian built a homemade pickup to be heard over a loud band. His self-taught engineering rewired the role of the instrument and the course of popular music.
· 6 min read