News & Updates — jazz

The original hippy, the mystical eden ahbez wrote a tune called "Nature Boy" and by chance was able to hand it to Nat King Cole who turned it into a mega-hit in 1948. He looked like a hippy long before it was a thing and lived outdoors in Los Angeles. He lived under the "L" of the Hollywood sign and held a job as a piano player in a raw foods store. He was a vegetarian, straight edge and an anti-vaxer and wore a white robe. This lifestyle inspired "Nature Boy", and after the hit by Cole, ahbez became an...

The original hippy, the mystical eden ahbez wrote a tune called "Nature Boy" and by chance was able to hand it to Nat King Cole who turned it into a mega-hit in 1948. He looked like a hippy long before it was a thing and lived outdoors in Los Angeles. He lived under the "L" of the Hollywood sign and held a job as a piano player in a raw foods store. He was a vegetarian, straight edge and an anti-vaxer and wore a white robe. This lifestyle inspired "Nature Boy", and after the hit by Cole, ahbez became an...

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...