News & Updates — blues

The Harlem-born entertainer, composer, vocalist and percussive stride pianist Thomas Fats Waller was the writer of great tunes like "Aint Misbehavin", "Honeysuckle Rose", "Squeeze Me", "Jitterbug Waltz", "What Did I Do (To Be So Black & Blue" and about four hundred others. He played piano, pipe organ and Hammond organ, and studied with James P. Johnson. He was a composer by 12 and cut his first records in '22 at the age of 18 after working early on in Vaudeville. He was a notable comic storyteller and composer of novelty tunes & piano rolls, and a playful presence on the...

The cult jazz artist Rufus Harley started out like any other Philly kid, taking lessons from Dennis Sandole, playing saxophone and other reeds, jamming with Philly scenesters like John Coltrane and Philly Joe Jones and gigging as a professional tenor player in his teens. But hearing the Scottish bagpipes during JFK's funeral procession got him really obsessed and he became the first bagpiper of jazz. After months of practicing the instrument (he even held them "wrong") to the dismay of his neighbors who would call the pigs (to which he would say "Officer, do I look Scottish to you?"--Harley was...

The Boss of the Blues, Big Joe Turner was one of the strongest voices one could ever hear. A great blues shouter, he could be heard and felt unamplified over the brass and beat. A Kansas City icon, he got his start as a singing bartender before ripping up that city's famed music scene, singing in jazz big bands and with boogie-woogie pianists, such as his successful partnership with Pete Johnson. He started making appearances in NYC in the mid '30s and recorded sessions all over the country. In the '40s he spent some time in LA singing on/for films...

One of the early solo stylists of jazz, Sidney Bechet ripped it up in his native New Orleans, marching in parade bands, playing parties and as clarinetist with the Eagle Band and others before joining King Oliver's band in 1913. That band did some heavy touring, including a residency in Chicago. In 1919 he joined the Syncopated Orchestra in NYC and that band went to Europe and became a sensation, even attracting positive attention from the classical music world. In London he started playing the soprano saxophone and became the early standard on that instrument (greatly influencing John Coltrane). His...

Perhaps best known to casuals as the bassist of Cream, the Scottish virtuoso Jack Bruce in fact had a long and varied career that included rock, blues, jazz, classical, third stream, Latin, world music and fusion. He could play electric & upright bass, cello, piano, harmonica and was a singer/songwriter as well. Growing up listening to jazz, he studied classical cello and was kicked out of music school for playing jazz on the side. In the early '60s he toured Europe in a big band and joined the legendary Blues Incorporated in '62, which splintered off into the Graham Bond...