Jazz

Composer and jazz musician Ornette Coleman and his son, producer Denardo Coleman. They've just collaborated on a new album, "Ornette Coleman & Prime Time: Tone Dialing." It's on a new label that Coleman has founded: Harmolodic (a division of Verve Records). In 1959 Coleman he started the era of "free jazz." Since then Coleman has been one of jazz's most innovative and controversial composers. In 1994 Coleman was a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship Award

The Grammy Award-winning jazz musician Wynton Marsalis. He's been playing the trumpet since he was six, and won his first Grammy at 20. Marsalis is also the cofounder and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. He recently announced that he is breaking up the Septet so he can spend more time with the Lincoln Center. "Sweet Swing Blues on the Road" is his new book, written in collaboration with photographer Frank Stewart.

We talk with jazz critic Kevin Whitehead about singer Carmen McRae, who died last night at age 74. McRae has been called one of the three greatest female jazz singers, along with Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan.

Actor and playwright Vernel Bagneris and pianist Morten Gunnar Larsen perform selections from their show, "Jelly Roll Morton: A Me-morial," with music written by Morton, and a script taken from Library of Congress tapes of Morton from 1938. The New Yorker calls it, "an experimental study, done within a traditional Broadway-musical framework, of the life and death of a black misanthrope. . . a psychomusical." This concert was first broadcast in 1992.

Bandleader and pianist Eddie Palmieri. Through his first band, La Perfecta, labeled "the band with the crazy roaring elephants," Palmieri was credited with originating Latin jazz's trombone sound in New York during the sixties. With the release of "Palmas," (Elektra), many critics feel that this respected 58-year old innovator will finally get the exposure and respect that his sound has long merited. Palmieri's lobbying over the past year culminated in the announcement of a new Grammy Award category for Afro-Carribbean Jazz.

Jazz pianist Fred Hersch. His new solo album is "Fred Hersch at Maybeck." Hersch recently revealed he is HIV positive and appears on several recordings to fund raise for the disease.

Drummer Arthur Taylor. He's played with Sonny Rollins, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk and he's put together a new expanded collection of interviews he's done with fellow musicians: "Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews," (Da Capo Press). It's one of the few books about black jazz musicians by a black man, and because of that Taylor's subjects were able to talk freely about the role of black artists in white society.

Sonny Rollins, tenor saxophonist, is one of the jazz world's greatest improvisational artists. At the tender age of 23, he played with Miles Davis and Charlie Parker. After successfully battling a heroin addiction in the early 1950s, he joined the Clifford Brown-Max Roach quintet. He also began a critically-acclaimed solo career. Now in his sixties, he feels obligated to carry on the vision of his own mentors to today's rising stars. His latest album, "Old Flames" (Milestone), focuses on jazz standards and features Sonny backed by a brass section.

Clarinetist, jazz musician, and klezmer virtuoso Don Byron. He's an unlikely candidate to play klezmer, a product of Eastern European Yiddish culture: Byron is African American and dreadlocked. Byron has become best known for klezmer, but musically he's all over the map: He plays jazz with his Don Byron Quintet, modern classical music with the Semaphore quintet, and he toured Europe last fall with Music for Six Musicians, an Afro-Cuban ensemble. He's also currently writing a classical piece for the avant-garde Kronos Quartet.

Jazz Vibraphonist Gary Burton. He invented a four-mallet grip for the instrument that is used by many contemporary players. Burton left Stan Getz's quartet in the mid 60's (at the age of 24) to form his own combo; a few years later he hired a young guitarist named Pat Metheny, giving Metheny his first taste of big time jazz. Burton has been teaching percussion and improvisation classes at the Berklee School of Music in Boston; in 1985 he was named Dean of Curriculum there. Burton has over fifty albums to his credit and three Grammy award.