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Jazz Centenaries in The Decade of the 2020's - Louis Armstrong and The Hot...
© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“I don't know who got the idea for the Hot Five records. It may have been Richard M. Jones, who worked for the Okeh company at that...
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Jazz Centenaries in The Decade of the 2020's - The Chicagoans: Part 1
© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.Austin High School Gang in a non-musical moment.L to R, standing Eddie Condon [bjo], Dave Tough [dr], Dick McPartland [gtr]., Dave...
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Jazz Centenaries in The Decade of the 2020's - The Chicagoans: Part 2
© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.Austin, a suburb to the west of Chicago, was an inauspicious setting for a jazz movement. In 1922, a group of students began...
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Jazz Centenaries in The Decade of the 2020's - The Chicagoans: Part 3
© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“Revolutionaries from the SuburbsEddie Condon had it just about right. By the mid-'20s, he wrote, there was so much hot music in...
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Pee Wee Russell - A More Stylized Approach
© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved."I think Pee Wee, with all his nervous playing and without any facility, had more to say in the creative sense than any of the...
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Phil Schaap, Bird-Watcher - David Remnick with The New Yorker
© Copyright ® David Remnick and The New Yorker, copyright protected; all rights reserved.David Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992. He is the author of...
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"B.G." - Whitney Balliett on Benny Goodman
© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.Not always associated with the nascent development of Jazz in the 1920s, Benny Goodman was involved in many aspects of it,...
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Pinnacle 'Pops" Moment - John McDonough
© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.If the 1930s witnessed the rise of the big bands, the 1940s saw their demise. Louis Armstrong was there for both dynamics.The big...
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Michel Petrucciani by Whitney Balliett
© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“Jazz was once a spare, monosyllabic music.… By the sixties, soloists were going on for forty-five minutes, for an hour, for an...
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"Why Duke Ellington Avoided Music Schools" (1945)
© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved."Fascinating.... Full of excellent writing."- The New York Times Book Review"An astounding book. An extraordinary leap in jazz...
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Nueva Manteca - "Varadero Blues" [From the Archives]
© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“Jazz and Latin music have cross pollinated with each other for quite some time. Some trace it back to Jelly Roll Morton's...
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Nueva Manteca - "Bluesongo" [From the Archives]
© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.For many years now, I have been a big fan of the music of Nueva Manteca, a Latin Jazz group based in … wait for it … The Netherlands.With...
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John Coltrane -Three Forms of An Early Original Composition
© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.For someone who would go on to compose blockbuster original tunes like Giant Steps, Moment’s Notice, Blue Trane and the myriad...
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Bill Evans - Romantic Agony - Whitney Baillett
© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.Written as a 1985 New Yorker review upon the issuance of a boxed set of Bill Evans’ Riverside recordings and newly discovered...
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Phineas Newborn, Jr. - The Once and Future Piano Wizard - [From the Archives]
© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“There has always been a tendency among music experts, and by no means only in jazz, to harbor misgivings about technical...
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Stan Getz - 60th Anniversary of "Focus"
© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“From the start of his career, Stan has been a center of activity and attraction. His playing was always fluid and exciting. And as he...
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A Focus Follow-Up with Eddie Sauter
© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“I thought you might like to see the Footnote to the Spotlight review of the album in the 29 March 1962 issue of Downbeat. It's an...
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The Sound of Jazz by Whitney Balliett
© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.Until the publication of Whitney Balliett’s essay “The Sound of Jazz” in the New Yorker [1983], very little of the background...
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Times Remembered - The Final Years of the Bill Evans Trio
© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved."As the drummer with Bill Evans from 1978-1980, author Joe La Barbera recounts stories that take readers into the creative process...
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Sam Jones - Down Home with the Soul Society and The Chant
© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.Recorded from 1960 - 1962 with arrangements by Ernie Wilkins, Jimmy Heath and Victor Feldman these largely forgotten sessions...
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