News & Updates — jazz

One of my favorite Caribbean-born artists was master percussionist & composer Henri "Kiké" Guédon. Born in Martinique, he got his career going in the mid '60s with his band La Contesta. He played every style of Latin music, with strong funk & jazz undercurrents, to go with his Antillan and Caribbean musics (zouk, bomba, merengue, beguine, Cuban, etc) and even classical and avant-garde. He was a major Latin music star in France and enlisted world class musicians in his bands. He performed with the percussion front-of-the-stage like his idol Ray Barretto. There are some good collections and reissues of some...

One of the many Jews to contribute immensely to the classic NYC salsa scene, Barry Rogers was a Bronx-bred trombonist who was a first call of many Latin bandleaders, as well as a founding member of the excellent '70s fusion group Dreams (along with Billy Cobham, The Brecker Brothers, John Abercrombie and others). Neighborhood-wise, he came up in mambo & jazz territory. A jazzer at his core, Rogers started playing in Latin bands in the mid '50s. He led the Hugo Dickens group, of which many of the best players of the day (Marty Sheller, Hubert Laws, Bobby Porcelli, Pete...

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...