Jazz

Barnes and Osborne would both be 100 on July 17. Barnes grew up in Chicago and went on to play on Bob Dylan's first single. Osborne turned up on records by Mel Tormé , Wynonie Harris and others.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tyner, who died on March 6, placed thundering piano chords under fast, right-hand melodies. He led his own groups for decades, but was frequently associated with one early employer, John Coltrane.

On what would have been Blanton's 100 birthday, jazz critic Kevin Whitehead recounts the ways in which the bassist revolutionized his instrument during his brief time on the music scene.

The jazz legend would have turned 100 today. Critic Kevin Whitehead says Monk's music is "universally beloved, by jazz musicians across the stylistic spectrum who might agree about little else."

Fitzgerald, who died in 1996, had her first hits with Chick Webb's big band before going out on her own in the 1940s. Critic Kevin Whitehead says Fitzgerald at her best is as good as it gets.