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 [...]

Stan Getz coaxed the most sorrowful, sentimental sounds from his tenor saxophone. As jazz critic Whitney Balliett once said, he had “a lovely tone, the kind of tone one would want to go home to.”
No doubt about it, Getz was a troubled individual. At seventeen, he was already an alcoholic and, not long afterward, became [...]

The guitar player Lenny Breau is one of the most tragic figures in jazz. He is not widely known, neither today nor in his day, but he should have been an international jazz star. Breau’s playing was extraordinary, and he often left the impression of playing more than one guitar at the same time. His [...]

The piano has played a pivotal role in the development of jazz, and pianists have created many of the genre’s major innovations. Keith Jarrett is one such player. He started playing at age three and studied the classical repertoire until his late teens, when he turned to jazz. He started out playing bebop, first [...]

A perceptive jazz fan once commented that when Ella Fitzgerald sang about her man leaving, you thought he’d gone to the corner store to pick up a loaf of bread and a carton of milk. When Billie Holiday sang that her man had left, you knew he’d packed a suitcase, caught an airplane, and was [...]

Ben Webster’s albums are still among the best in jazz. He was one of jazz’s greatest ballad players, and his well-worn sound on the tenor saxophone only added a sense of melancholy and sorrow to the music he played.
Webster learned the violin as a child and in his teens started performing on the piano, accompanying [...]

Throughout his long career, Charlie Haden has striven for musical excellence and variety. He is one of the world’s best improvisers, and his bass playing has set a standard for several generations of jazz artists.
It is no surprise that Charlie Haden became a musician. His family’s country band, the Haden Family Singers, had a radio [...]

Sonny Rollins is arguably the greatest living improviser in jazz. His muscular, meaty tenor-sax playing and eloquent improvisations have made him an intimidating wonder of jazz.
Rollins is also one of the jazz world’s more interesting people. Three times he has taken a sabbatical from music. His initial break in 1954 was his most desperate, as [...]

Charles Mingus is one of the music world’s true characters and one of its most disturbing. A demanding, even bullying band-leader, a talented composer, and an innovative bassist, Mingus helped to free the bass from its traditional supportive role in jazz and make it an instrument that people listened to.

His unpredictable, volatile personality was cause [...]

Jean Baptiste, or Django, Reinhardt was a nomadic, outlandish, self-taught musician who couldn’t read music or words. His towering contribution to music makes him one of the most influential jazz guitarists of all time and the single most important jazz musician to emerge from Europe.
Those who worked with him say Reinhardt was ingenious, charming, capricious, [...]

Bill “Count” Basie was one of the great leaders in jazz and played one of its biggest instruments, his orchestra. Basie’s big band played so tightly, soloed so imaginatively, and swung so hard it sounded like a small ensemble.
Bill Basie was discovered in Kansas City, but he was born in Red Band, New Jersey, where [...]

Horace Ward Martin Tavares Silver [b. 1928] was exposed to lots of different music from a very early age. His Portuguese father and American mother listened to Portuguese and Cape Verdean folk music, and at church he heard the gospel music his mother sang. Later, he listened to blues records from the 1930s and 19r0s [...]

Diana Krall is possibly the most successful artist in the history of jazz. Her sultry looks, laid-back vocal delivery, prodigious piano chops, and savvy marketing have made her albums consistently top of both the jazz and pop charts. Many jazz critics have reacted negatively to the slick packaging and marketing, but it has helped her [...]

Jane Bunnett is one of the most notable Canadian musicians to emerge in the last ten years. She is an exceptional soprano saxophonist and flautist who has made huge inroads around the world with her Latin-inspired music. Her forays into Cuban music with a series of critically acclaimed recordings with Cuban musicians resulted in her [...]

Earl “Bud” Powell’s life was unhappy and painful, but his piano playing was exceptional, innovative, and very influential. The grandson of a flamenco guitarist and son of a stride pianist, Powell grew up in New York City. Before turning to jazz at age fifteen, when he joined a band led by his brother, a trumpeter, [...]

Home is an idea that most of us are familiar with. I call it an idea because that’s what it is—something intangible, a place we hold in our hearts and our minds. Home defines us, finds us, gives us refuge, solace, and comfort. Home can be made of bricks and mortar, a house or a [...]