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In Circuses and Carnivals, Sideshows Brought Black Music To The Heartland
by Arthur R George
Black musicians in circus and carnival sideshow bands from the late 1800s well into the Twentieth Century brought ragtime and what would become jazz and rhythm and blues to white audiences deep into Midwest agricultural regions. Trumpeter Lester Bowie, later known for the avant-garde Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), ...
Honky Tonk at Seventy
by Daniel Gould
Seventy years ago this summer, a group of jazz men made a record that became the genre's first million-seller. The group was the Bill Doggett Combo, and the track was “Honky Tonk, Parts 1 & 2" (King, 1956). It sold 4 million copies worldwide and went to #2 (Pop) and #1 (R&B). While Bill Doggett always ...
That's Club Harlem in West Philly, NOT Club Harlem in Atlantic City
by Richard J Salvucci
History can be a funny thing. The established story--the received wisdom--can be difficult to contest. And yet, there are subtle indications that something is not quite right. The weight of prejudice, self-interest, and or sheer inertia may stand in the way of getting things right. And material circumstances change too, especially over a lengthy period of ...
1502 Ridge Avenue and Other Extinct Philly Jazz Temples
by Richard J Salvucci
So we give Cannonball Adderley the floor. It is late 1955, and Adderley was in Philadelphia at the legendary Blue Note Café--yes, there was a Blue Note in Philly, in Chicago, and in New York, no kin to each other. Adderley was making an initial tour in the North, this after his sensational debut in Café ...
Charlie Parker, Harry "Father" White, and Sweet Lucy
by Con Chapman
While it is undeniably true that formal education is generally a benefit both to the student and to society as a whole, it is equally indisputable that many jazz greats got their best education outside a classroom. Johnny Hodges claimed he got the nickname “Rabbit" from his ability to outrun truant officers. Charlie Parker ...
Vince Guaraldi’s Christmas Sauce: Adding Spice to Charlie Brown Vanilla
by Arthur R George
It's not simply that pianist Vince Guaraldi slipped jazz past the unsuspecting in composing A Charlie Brown Christmas, the evergreen “Peanuts" animation and soundtrack that has become inescapably part of the holiday. First broadcast in 1965, going on to six decades ago, A Charlie Brown Christmas is a tradition unto itself. It returns to television through ...
Tantilla's Majestic Grip on Richmond's Scene
by Troy Hoffman
The “South's most beautiful ballroom," Tantilla Gardens, at 3817 W. Broad Street, in Richmond, Virginia, was an acoustically treated structure built by the Byrd Theatre Group in 1933. The building stretched a block long, featuring nightly dancing, along with the Nation's greatest dance orchestras. This all took place on the second floor, atop Tiny Town Bowling ...
Music as Survival: Trumpeter Louis Bannet's Chilling Ultimatum at Auschwitz
by Joe Alterman
Before the war, violinist and trumpeter Louis Bannet was a celebrated jazz musician in Holland, often called “the Dutch Louis Armstrong." Once, before the war, he heard a knock on his dressing room door. “So you're the Dutch Louis Armstrong?" a deep, raspy voice said. “It's nice to meet you. I'm the American one." And just ...
Jazz in Nazi Germany: The Music That Wouldn’t Die
by Joe Alterman
This article was originally published on Moment Magazine. Music, at its core, is freedom. It cannot be caged by ideology or controlled by propaganda. The Nazis understood that, which is why they tried so desperately to suppress it, to twist it, to erase it. And yet, even in those darkest of times, music found ...
Showboat's-A-Swingin'
by Troy Hoffman
Washington DC's Showboat Lounge hosted a vast array of ground-breaking talent from the '40s, into the late '70s. The establishment was located at the corner of Columbia Road NW and 18th Street, and owned by Pete Lambros, who maintained an all-jazz policy for many years. The DC Showboat built up the reputation as a mad-house type ...
