A spiritual aura surrounds the legacy of John Coltrane. No other jazz musician has been given the hallowed blank check that was long ago bestowed on the late saxophonist. When his work is considered now, too often it’s treated as one more step in a mystical — rather than a…

It probably never comes up in Tom Brokaw’s franchise, but the men who whipped the Depression at home and fascism abroad and gave us the baby boom, the Cold War and the trillion-dollar military-industrial complex also nurtured a pretty robust appetite for lurid sexuality. Witness the innuendo that seeps through…

A few years back, while interviewing a grizzled musician who called Austin, Texas, home, he mentioned a Nashville-based buddy of his who had recently landed a big-time recording contract. He was going to be a star. “The first thing the record label did,” lamented the Lone Star native, “was sign…

In the lengthy liner notes that introduce the new three-disc collection Thelonious Monk: The Columbia Years, jazz pundit Peter Keepnews is oddly apologetic about the music included in the anthology, at one point confessing that, among his fellow critics, “the notion has taken hold that, all things considered, maybe this…

Art Pepper’s 1977 autobiography Straight Life is still the most disturbing entry in the ever-expanding library of jazz memoirs. Pepper’s warts-and-all recounting of his own days as a topflight alto saxophonist, heroin addict and convict makes for harsh reading. Even fellow sociopath and occasional bandmate Chet Baker dismissed the tome…

Weighing in on Frank Sinatra, critic Gary Giddins concluded: “The generosity he wasn’t always able to summon in life is the very marrow of his gift to music.” The same appraisal could be tacked onto the legacy of Miles Davis. Davis’ public persona and self-made image always hinged on the…

Cool is in the eye of the beholder, and poet/writer Lewis MacAdams has come up with a blueprint charting the development of the elusive, unspoken, Zenlike state of American “cool.” Don’t be misled by the title. Birth of the Cool isn’t a history recounting the famed Miles Davis’ nonet sessions…

The news of a freshly polished version of the “Famous Alto Break” might not mean much to the general public, but it is the kind of event that triggers seismographic tremors among the legions of Charlie Parker fans out there. Although the clumsily titled “Break” lasts less than 40 seconds,…

Berry Gordy may have run a tighter shop over at Motown, but it was Jim Stewart’s Stax Records in Memphis that was the real heart and, well, soul of 1960s and ’70s soul music. Originally a budget-minded operation founded by a failed white country fiddle player, Stax Records evolved into…

Listening to this new collection of John Prine’s sparse, gravel-and-molasses renditions of his own early material, it brings to mind how popular music has changed during the past three decades. When Prine first recorded most of these songs, serious-minded “singer-songwriters” were everywhere, soothing the battered spirits of aging hippies with…

The problem with many of the pioneers of avant-garde jazz was that they approached their music with such grave pretentiousness that no one could mistake it for anything but lofty art. What made Ornette Coleman’s first groundbreaking albums so striking was they sparkled with the sound of sheer talent thumbing…

Sandwiched between his brassy recordings for Blue Note and his breathtaking work for Riverside, Thelonious Monk did a two-year stint with Prestige. Occasionally forgotten, sometimes overlooked, often dismissed, Monk’s work as a sideman for the label and the three albums he recorded under his own name there have always gotten…

Pianist Bill Evans spent the first week of September 1980 in San Francisco performing a series of live shows at a local night spot. Following the gig, he headed to New York, checked into a hospital and was dead within days. Officially, the death was attributed to a bleeding ulcer,…

Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue occupies a lofty place in the eyes and ears of most jazz lizards. Many believe — make that know — it to be the greatest record of all time. But the 1959 album’s exalted status reaches far beyond goatee-sporting, cappuccino-sipping, finger-popping white hipsters. The famous…

Wild, raunchy and brimming with chip-on-the-shoulder attitude, rockabilly — real rockabilly — was a musical sucker punch delivered to the button-down Eisenhower years. As unrefined as moonshine but packing twice the kick, here was homespun, hard-driving nose-thumbing aimed right at Mitch Miller, Kate Smith, Perry Como and everything else bland…

The life of musician and composer Charles Mingus is the stuff of legends. Bursting with energy and ideas, Mingus’ peak creative output during the late 1950s and early 1960s dwarfed that of many of his colleagues in the jazz world. His best work wove together musical ideas drawn from gospel,…