News & Updates — blues

The Italian-American composer Henry Mancini has made an impression on my musical sensibilities in my early-eared days.  Ever since I was a little kid one of my favorite tunes was the groovy Pink Panther theme, with that silky sax by Plas Johnson. It was also hard to resist the theme to Peter Gunn (again, sax by Johnson). The soundtrack to Orson Welles' Touch of Evil is another good one, as well as Mancini's great tune "Baby Elephant Walk". Personally, I can do without Moon River and Days of Wine & Roses but you got to hand it to the man...

One of the greatest singers of her time, Bessie Smith and her powerful voice was a major attraction of the 1920s and stood to influence many jazz & blues vocalists, most notably Billie Holiday and Janis Joplin. Bessie came from Chattanooga TN. She had lost both her parents by the age of 9 and her & her siblings busked in the streets for a living. At 18 she found work as a dancer in a traveling company that her brother worked for. Ma Rainey was also in the troupe and helped Bessie learn to handle a stage, as well as...

Here's a birthday nod to the soulful tenor man Gene Ammons. "Jug" was one of the fathers of the soul-jazz genre and was a popular and prolific recording artist before spending most of his last fifteen years incarcerated on drug charges. He was the son of pianist Albert Ammons and he studied with the infamous Captain Walter Dyett in Chicago and joined the Billy Eckstein band in '44, blowing in that group with Charlie Parker and Dexter Gordon. From '47 onward he led his own groups and sessions, which would employ future greats such as John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Donald...

Cosimo Matassa's J&M Recording studio in New Orleans was the home of some of the biggest hits of the early rock & roll era and he helped shape the NOLA sound. A Sicilian-American who was born and raised in NOLA, he was a funky grocer, record & appliance shop owner and a jukebox servicer before he opened the studio in '45, a time when there were few studios in that musical city. Teenaged Allen Toussaint used to hang out there and practice piano, later on often working directly with Matassa. In the '60s he started his label Dover Records to...

Richard Berry was the composer and original 1957 performer of the iconic song "Louie Louie", a ballad which was actually based on "El Loco Cha Cha" by Cuban composer René Touzet that would eventually become a rocking standard after a mega-hit by the Kingsmen in '63. It could make a claim as THE most recorded rock song. Unfortunately, Berry had traded the song's publishing rights for $750 two years after his record came out, thus losing the rewards to come. He came up in Los Angeles, singing doo-wop. He sang in a version of The Penguins, plus you can hear...