The Unlikely Story of Cannonball Adderley's Rise to the Top

by Alan Bryson
August 13, 2025

For me, the most gripping music stories are the tales of “overnight sensations." In the jazz sphere, we have our share. There is the story of an eighteen-year-old Billie Holiday, discovered by producer John Hammond while she was a hostess in a Harlem club. There is the tale of a seventeen-year-old Ella Fitzgerald, whose triumphant debut ...

Bob Dylan: A Complete Unknown

by Doug Collette
January 10, 2025

Bob Dylan A Complete Unknown Searchlight Pictures2024 As with so many artistic efforts related to Bob Dylan, James Mangold's biopic A Complete Unknown may work best simply as the means to an end (and not just as inspiration to revisit the Nobel Prize winner's music). The film certainly benefits from ...

Bear's Sonic Journals: You're Doin' Fine - Blues at the Boarding House, June 2 & 3, 1973 (3CD)

By John Hammond Jr.

Label: Owsley Stanley Foundation
Released: 2024
Track listing: CD 1: Wang Dang Doodle; Gambling Blues; I Can't Be Satisfied; Hitchhiking Woman; Shake For Me; Honeymoon Blues; Rag Mama; Sweet Home Chicago; I Wish You Would; King Bee; Help Me; Death Bells; Honeymoon Blues. CD 2: You're So Fine; Look On Yonder's Wall; Traveling Riverside Blues; Little Rain Truckin' Little Baby; It's Too Late, She's Gone; You Don't Love Me; Ridin' In The Moonlight; Malted Milk; I Can't Be Satisfied; It Hurts Me Too; Boogie Chillen'; She Moves Me; Rag Mama; Ask Me Nice; Love Changing Blues; Preachin' Blues. CD 3: Go On To School; Ride 'Til I Die; Drunken Hearted Man; Look On Yonder's Wall Terraplane Blues; No Money Down; Truckin' Little Baby; Ground Hog Blues; Junco Partner; I'm Leaving You; From Four Until Late; Traveling Riverside Blues; Hitchhiking Woman; Shake For Me; It's Too Late, She's Gone.

John Hammond Jr.: Bear's Sonic Journals: You're Doin' Fine - Blues at the Boarding House, June 2 & 3, 1973 (3CD)

by Doug Collette
December 28, 2024

John Hammond Jr. was perhaps the first white musician to gain some measure of recognition for his devotion to the blues. The offspring of the famed Columbia Records mogul never relied on his name or rested on his laurels. On the contrary, the son of the man who signed Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Bruce Springsteen ...

The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts: January 1943

by Chuck Lenatti
November 20, 2024

Duke Ellington was one of the most popular and successful jazz musicians of the first half of the 20th century and according to composer Gunther Schuller and musicologist and historian Barry Kernfeld, “the most significant composer of the genre." Radio broadcasts from his residency at New York's Cotton Club beginning in 1927 extended Ellington's ...

The Blues According To Rory Block

by C. Michael Bailey
October 20, 2024

Being a household name depends as much on the household as it does the name. Not all reading this will know who Rory Block is, but in the households with fans of the rural blues, slide guitar and innovative women in music, to not know would be criminal. Born in Princeton, New Jersey, Block grew up ...

One of the Boys in the Band: Discovering my Dad

by George Gozzard
July 21, 2023

George Gozzard was the baby of a pretty large family the jazz trumpeter Harry Roy Gozzard raised. Harry was one of those great working musicians we heard about in the 1930s and through the 1950s who played jazz and dance band gigs interchangeably. These were the days of months long (if not longer) engagements musicians would ...

The Archive of Contemporary Music

by Karl Ackermann
March 24, 2020

In Lower Manhattan, sits a musical gold mine. It's the motherlode of recorded music though the small, brightly colored sign above a grey steel door provides only a cryptic clue. The dusty window display of rare 78 RPM records, broken into erratic pie charts serves as a vestige of the past and a cautionary tale about ...

John Hammond Jr.

Jerry Wexler e Aretha Franklin: quando la Soul Music conquist�� il pianeta

by Angelo Leonardi
October 8, 2018

Nei giorni successivi il 16 agosto, tutti i media del mondo hanno commentato la morte di Aretha Franklin, la straordinaria soul singer e una delle massime voci del Novecento. Una scomparsa avvenuta in singolare coincidenza di quella di Jerry Wexler dieci anni prima. Il 15 agosto 2008 se n'era andato quel produttore dell'Atlantic Records che fece ...