Sarah Vaughan was a great jazz vocalist, as talented as Ella Fitzgerald or Billie Holiday. What made Vaughan stand out was the broad range of colour in her voice. With a four-octave range, she could reach inside a song and make it her very own.
Vaughan was a singer’s singer. She understood jazz because she was [...]

If you ever want a quick understanding of what jazz-rock sounds like, then the music of Return to Forever is a good place to start. It was, in its early years, a hugely innovative and influential jazz fusion group.
Return to Forever was the brainchild of Chick Corea, who has built his reputation on never being [...]

John Coltrane is one of the two most accomplished saxophonists in the history of jazz, the other being Charlie Parker. Coltrane blazed new sonic trails on his alto sax in songs that still sound fresh and timeless. He wrote and recorded numerous masterpieces, such as “Giant Steps,” “Naima,” “Central Park West,” and “A Love Supreme,” [...]

Art Blakey was a dynamic leader and a volcanic drummer whose hard-bop band, the Jazz Messengers, was a finishing school for young jazz musicians for almost forty years. His graduates include Hank Mobley, Chuck Mangione, Wayne Shorter, Branford Marsalis, Kenny Dorham, Freddie Hubbard, Wynton Marsalis, Benny Green, Geoff Keezer, John Hicks, Mulgrew Miller, Terence Blanchard, [...]

One of the most productive relationships in music, let alone jazz, was the one Duke Ellington had with his musical alter ego, Billy Strayhorn. It is a collaboration that started in 1938 and ended when Strayhorn died in 1967. Their work led to such classics as “Take the A Train,” which Stayhorn wrote after listening [...]