A TRIBUTE TO THE UNDERRATED GUITARIST Guitarist Mick Goodrick passed away on November 16, 2002, at the age of 77. Goodrick was born in Sharon, Pennsylvania, on June 9, 1945. He began playing guitar before he was a teenager, and at the age of 16, he became interested in jazz while attending a Stan Kenton […]

Blues singer, guitarist, and bandleader McKinley Morganfield was born April 4, 1913, in Issaquena County, Mississippi. He gained the name of “Muddy” because as a child he loved to play in a nearby stream full of muddy water, and he added Waters to his name after he started to play in public. Waters sang early […]

Electric bassist Paul Jackson passed away on March 18, 2021 at the age of 73 He was born on March 28, 1947 in Oakland, California and was inspired to start on the bass when he was nine after seeing Paul Chambers play with the Miles Davis Quintet. Jackson performed with the Oakland Symphony Orchestra when […]

Singer Mark Murphy was born on March 14, 1932, in Syracuse, New York. He discovered jazz when hearing an Art Tatum record and loved the music of Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee, and Miles Davis. Murphy sang in his church choir, had piano lessons starting when he was seven, and performed in his brother’s dance […]

Arranger, composer, and record producer Quincy Delight Jones Jr. was born on March 14, 1933 in Chicago, Illinois. He took up the trumpet and by high school was playing in groups. Jones left college in 1952 to play with Lionel Hampton, contributing arrangements, sitting in a trumpet section next to Clifford Brown and Art Farmer, […]

One of the great jazz singers of the past few decades, Karrin Allyson has always been versatile, able to stretch from bop to bossa-novas to folk and pop whether singing in English, Portuguese, French or Italian while swinging and making it all look easy. On this version of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Little Boat,” she is […]

Trumpeter Howard McGhee was born on March 6, 1918 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. McGhee started on the clarinet and tenor, not taking up the trumpet until he was 17. He worked in territory bands in the Midwest and with Lionel Hampton (1941) before he became a member of the Andy Kirk Orchestra (1941-42), featured with the […]

Singer, pianist, and songwriter Eunice Kathlee Waymon (“Nina Simone”) was born on February 21, 1933 in Tryon, North Carolina. She began playing piano at the age of four and was considered a child prodigy who was heading towards a career as a classical pianist. However lack of funds to attend Juilliard and the racism of […]

Edward Hammond Boatner Jr. (Sonny Stitt) was born on February 2, 1924 in Boston, Massachusetts. Given up for adoption as an infant, he was adopted by the Stitt family in Saginaw, Michigan, started playing saxophones early on, and while in high school worked locally in the Len Francke Band. By 1943, when he was with […]