The same old thing wasn’t going to cut it in the early 1970s. And just about anything recorded before Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, in other words before 1969, was the same old thing. That wasn’t going to grab the ears of the hip new audience Miles had attracted with his…

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Hugh Hefner may have had dozens of girlfriends over his 83 years, but his life-long love is jazz. Hefner declared his undying devotion to swing and big band music when the Rabbit interviewed him in 2008 for an inside story, “Jazz Playboy Style.” With all the recent attention, good and…

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Jazz-fusion, jazz-funk, jazz-rock…we’ve never been quite sure how to define the music that plugged in around 1969 with Miles Davis’ In A Silent Way and burned out some five years later when “jazz” pretty much left the hyphenate and all the other components—the things that hybridized it—began to short-circuit in…

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Shades of Dizzy in Ankara, Brubeck In Warsaw and Goodman in Moscow. Jazz At Lincoln Center and the U.S. State Department team to again send American music overseas in a program reminiscent of the Jazz Ambassadors.

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The Beats of America’s 1950s stood far apart from the duty-bound, God-and-country, organizational-man times. It didn’t take long for the commercial culture to assimilate them in a wave of berets and bongos. The poetry, novels and art of the true counter-culture known as Beat is an honest reflection of American spirit and independence, commercial culture be damned.

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Saxophonist Phil Woods talks about his 1956 trip with Dizzy Gillespie to the Middle East and his 1962 with Benny Goodman to the Soviet Union.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “jazz age” aside, the relationship between America’s “indigenous” music–as jazz is mistakenly referenced–and American literature is symbiotic but somewhat murky. Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through the Slaughter imagined the hard scrabble beginnings of “jass” through the life of New Orleans progenitor and cornet player Buddy Bolden. Beat-groupie John Clellon…

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The value of the “working band”–the worth of keeping the same group of musicians together over the years –is a commonly accepted positive. The benefits of shared experience are obvious: empathy (sometimes described as “telepathy”), a foreknowledge of what a band mate will do (or how they’ll react) in a…

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You know the rap on baritone sax. It’s “cumbersome,” unwieldy” and requires a typhoon’s worth of wind just to air mezzo piano. These are mainly excuses granted to mediocre baritone players of which there are a very few; guys just don’t want to be heard playing an instrument that controls…

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Charles Lloyd’s latest release, recorded live in 2007 at the Theater Basel in Switzerland, recalls his early live recording, Forest Flower: Charles Lloyd at Monterey. That LP introduced those of a certain generation to the saxophonist-flutist and jazz in general. The similarities between the two recordings, though separated by some…

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