Jazz
'Fresh Air' Celebrates The 90th Birthday Of Jazz Improviser Sonny Rollins
Rollins recorded his first sessions in 1949, and played his last live shows in 2012. Kevin Whitehead offers an appreciation, then we listen back to a 1994 interview with the tenor saxophonist.
Charlie Parker, Born 100 Years Ago, Made Jazz Complexities Sound Deceptively Easy
More blues singer than Broadway, the Bird helped introduce bebop to jazz — and along the way redefined jazz velocity with his scrappy sound and pithy melodic figures.
In Defense Of Jazz Biopics: Melodramas And Morality Tales, Set To Music
Many jazz fans hate biopic films, but critic Kevin Whitehead likes noticing which true elements get in — or get left out — as messy lives are squeezed into stock-story formulas.
In Jazz-Movie Endings, Some Story Elements Just Keep Bouncing Back
Over 90-some years of movies about jazz, many films have spun a familiar lick, sometimes falling back on stock standards when inspiration fails, and sometimes knowingly quoting from older works.