News & Updates — Video

Happy 4/20 birthday shout-out to the iconic Tito Puente! Best known as a Simpsons charact...haha just kidding! Among the Nuyorican musical greats, there has never been a dull moment with El Rey's brand of fiery and entertaining Latin jazz. His first notable pro gig was with Machito during WW2, before serving his own tour. After receiving medals as a "war hero" he started a nonet, The Piccadilly Boys, in '47. He led one of the great orchestras of the classic mambo era, often featuring percussion battles with Tito and top players on the scene. In 1960, his band was just...

Classically-trained keyboardist Bernie Worrell has his place established as a major innovator in the Funk with Parliament-Funkadelic, with whom he played from about 1970 into the early '80s, and contributing to projects of other members of the mob. He brought the Bach to the Funk. He spent the '80s as a member of the Talking Heads and beyond that found an incredible amount of creative work with superproducer Bill Laswell. In his later years he was a staple on the jamband scene with Les Claypool, Govt Mule and others. A musical prodigy from New Jersey, he was playing piano by...

The recently-deceased Clyde Stubblefield, along with Jabo Starks, was one of the drummers in the James Brown band from '65-'70, powering "Cold Sweat", "Ain't It Funky Now", "Say It Loud - I'm Black & I'm Proud", "There Was A Time", "Sex Machine", "I Got The Feelin", "Mother Popcorn", "Get Up Get Into It Get Involved", Bobby Byrd's "If You Don't Work, You Can't Eat", Marva Whitney's "It's My Thing", Vicki Anderson's "Message From The Soul Sisters" and many more. "Starks was the Beatles to Clyde's Stones. A clean shuffle drummer to Clyde's free-jazz left hand"--Questlove Of course, it's his drums...

When I was a teenager I was into all this crazy free jazz stuff (which I am still REALLY into, FYI) and someone like Herbie Mann seemed like a joke to me. His awful hairy-chested nudie album cover on Push Push was disgusting to me and when a girl I knew (who was into the Grateful Dead...another band I hated in those years) expressed her fondness for both Herbie's "physique" and his music I gave her the album to take it off my hands. (I had bought it in a collection of jazz & blues albums). But the problem with...

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...