Previous episodes of Ken Burns’s JAZZ showed how jazz symbolized hope, relief, or escape for Americans during the Great Depression, but the seventh episode, “Dedicated to Chaos” shows jazz as a symbol of something else during the Second World War: defiance. This is one episode that is self-contained enough and good enough that I recommend…
Read more
Last Wednesday, May 29, the music world lost someone very special. Mulgrew Miller, a warm-hearted jazz pianist with a sweet and bouncy touch on the keys, died at age 57 after suffering a stroke the previous week. As a bandleader, Miller was most well-known for his group Wingspan, made up of piano, vibraphone, saxophone, and…
Read more
It seems natural to follow last week’s post about Women in Jazz Day in New York and the many women in jazz festivals out there with a post on the fifth and sixth episodes of Ken Burns’ film JAZZ. For the first time in the series, these episodes give us biographies of influential women in…
Read more
Recent Comments