Friday, July 31, 2015
Idris Muhammad, legendary New Orleans drummer, is dead at 74 | NOLA.com
What a hard swinging drummer. I was fortunate to see him many times. He could lay down grooves that made your body move as good as anyone. He and the late John Hicks had a special chemistry. He worked for a good while with Ahmad Jamal. He recorded a few albums, of his own, on the CTI Kudu label in the early seventies. He will be missed.
Idris Muhammad, legendary New Orleans drummer, is dead at 74 | NOLA.com
Wednesday, July 22, 2015
Sunday, June 21, 2015
Netflix premieres Nina Simone documentary trailer – watch | Music | The Guardian
"As well as exploring Simone’s dynamism as a performer, the documentary is set to shed light on her mental health issues and struggle with bipolar disorder. Her passion for politics and association with the African-American civil rights movement are also highlighted in the film."
Friday, June 12, 2015
Ornette Coleman, Saxophonist Who Rewrote the Language of Jazz, Dies at 85 - NYTimes.com
"Ornette Coleman, the alto saxophonist and composer who was one of the most powerful and contentious innovators in the history of jazz, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 85.
The cause was cardiac arrest, a family representative said.
Mr. Coleman widened the options in jazz and helped change its course. Partly through his example in the late 1950s and early ’60s, jazz became less beholden to the rules of harmony and rhythm while gaining more distance from the American songbook repertoire.
His own music, then and later, embodied a new type of folk song: providing deceptively simple melodies for small groups with an intuitive, collective musical language and a strategy for playing without preconceived chord sequences. In 2007, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his album “Sound Grammar.”