The days when drummers were the people in the background who just kept time are way past. With men like Art Blakey, the percussionist...

It is a few weeks since I got the news of Booker Ervin's death. It was very depressing, bad piece of news indeed. Booker,...

The Melody Maker provided an interesting forum in recent issues for complaints and refutations about the Jazz Centre Society, the non-profit making organisation meagrely...

Previously published here in the lamented Jazz Book Club, 1966, 'Negro Folk Music U.S.A.' was first published in 1963 and is now in its...

The music of Ornette Coleman has produced some of the most violent reac­tions, both for and against, seen on the jazz scene in some...

Bill Basie told me not too long ago that Mr. "Lockjaw" Davis was un­doubtedly the greatest "gutbucket" tenor playing anywhere today; and I have...

It is a pity that Miss Connor ever heard Sarah Vaughan, for she has neither the voice control nor the imagi­nation to copy her...

Six decades ago Peter Welding met guitarist Bill Harris when he played in Philadelphia and found him exploiting the potential of the guitar itself rather than following the 1950s trend of emulating jazz horns. Ten years later Hendrix got rather more physical with the instrument, but this was an interesting early observation. Welding also sagely drew comparisons with flamenco and classical guitar

Sixty years ago, Wynton Kelly, pianist with Gillespie, Miles Davis and Wes Montgomery, reacted to music by Art Tatum, Benny Carter, Thelonious Monk, Count Basie, Jelly Roll Morton and others

Those fortunate enough to make a living from the “liberal” professions such as journalists, artists, actors and musicians are dependent upon many factors, one...

Back in the mid-eighties, when John Scofield and Allan Holdsworth still seemed well ahead of their imitators, the emergence of Scott Henderson (marked by...

On his somnolently cautious Blue Note debut last year, Edinburgh's local boy made good seemed to have gone off the boil, overawed perhaps by...