Hope you can tune in for the next broadcast of All This Jazz, beginning at 10pm on Saturday the 26th -- right here on Public Radio 89.5 (KWGS-FM)...and online via "live stream" at PublicRadioTulsa.org.
For our second-hour theme, we'll celebrate the 75th Anniversary of Blue Note Records. The legendary jazz label was established in 1939 by Alfred Lion, a German immigrant who'd arrived in America in '37 and had first heard the music as a boy in Berlin; the first-ever Blue Note recording session captured sides by the "boogie woogie" pianists Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis in a one-day taping at a rented studio.
The Blue Note Records catalog, of course, is one-of-a-kind and absolutely unbeatable: Jimmy Smith, Horace Silver, Dexter Gordon, Freddie Hubbard, Lee Morgan, Art Blakey, Grant Green, Hank Mobley, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Joe Henderson, Donald Byrd, and Jackie McLean were among the label's leading artists in its Fifties and Sixties heyday. (Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and Bud Powell also made landmark Blue Note albums.) And more recently, many of today's leading jazz players -- among them Jason Moran, Joe Lovano, Don Byron, Norah Jones, Terence Blanchard, Stanley Jordon, Robert Glasper, and (again) Wayne Shorter -- have made important, widely acclaimed recordings for BN.
We'll therefore hear wonderful tracks from several of the standout performers cited above -- including, without question, some can't-miss cuts from the vast and ongoing (and fantastic!) Blue Note Records 75th Anniversary Vinyl Initiative...as well as a sampling or two from what longtime NPR music critic Tom Moon calls "the 75 greatest solos in Blue Note history."
Please join us, if you can. You'll undoubtedly dig it.
(The fine print: ATJ airs every Saturday night on Public Radio 89.5, from 10pm until midnight. We always thereafter offer a 7pm re-airing of the program on Sunday evening, on Jazz 89.5-2, which is our station's all-jazz HD Radio channel. Each week, we spin modern jazz, both recent and classic, across a range of styles. And the second half of our two-hour program, beginning at 11pm, invariably carries a theme. Also, for those of you so inclined: All This Jazz now maintains a Facebook page.)
