News & Updates — jazz

Joe Meek may very well be rock's first independent producer/auteur. He is like an early rock & roll Lee Perry, a man with a strong artistic inclination and a home studio, eccentric tendencies and behaviors, and experimental processes to create otherwordly results. He had a background as an electrician and started cutting his own records in the '50s. He set up perhaps the first home recording studio in rock (he loved to bother his neighbors). He produced "Tornado", a major international hit by the Telstars in '62, becoming the first British group to top the US charts. He utilized separation...

Alfredo "Chocolate" Armenteros is my favorite of the great Cuban trumpeters. He had a powerhouse sound that could be brash and forceful, or sweet and lyrical. He got his professional start while still in Cuba, cutting his first sides in '49 with René Álvarez. The '50s saw him busy with Arsenio Rodriguez and Beny Moré. He also played with Nat King Cole on the pianists' Cuban sessions. He came to NYC in 1960 and got a lot of work doing sessions and playing in several bands. He played consistently with Eddie Palmieri from the late '60s through the '70s. In...

Although he only lived to be 25, Scott LaFaro is one of the most advanced and influential jazz bassists the music had ever seen. His playing brought melodicism, exploration, voice and intuitive interplay to a whole new level and subsequently inspired generations of bassists since. Although best known for his work with Bill Evans and Ornette Coleman, he also played with Hampton Hawes, Booker Little, Stan Getz & Cal Tjader, Elvin Jones, Stan Kenton, John Lewis, Chet Baker and Benny Goodman, among others. He was one of the two bassists (with Charlie Haden) on the classic 1960 Ornette session that...

Today is the birthday of one of my very favorites!! The poet/vocalist/songwriter/novelist Gil Scott-Heron was one of the great lyricists of all time, combining the personal and political, and as a vocalist he would weave his stories into the fantastic soul-jazz tunes he cooked up with Brian Jackson. The music contained elements of blues, jazz, Latin and funk, and he has been justly considered a precursor to hip-hop, with GSH's "rapping" delivery and socio-political consciousness. He was inspired by a performance he saw by the Last Poets and released Small Talk At 125th & Lennox in 1970. He started working...

Blues-boogie piano star Camille Howard was one of the better known female talents of the early R&B and jump-blues years. One of the finest blues piano players of the era, she rocked the Los Angeles scene with her own groups, as well as with her husband Roy Milton's band as pianist and occasional singer (and he drummed on many of her records). Out of Galveston TX, she was performing in the local Texas nightclubs by the mid-'30s. She moved to California in the early '40s and joined Milton's band, making her recorded debut with them in '45 for Lionel Hampton's...