“Summertime.” The incomparable George Gershwin created it. Here are a few of the stars who have covered it. Billie Holiday. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. Willie Nelson. Janis Joplin. Johann Sebastian Bach. Not really, but check Billy Preston’s version at about...
“Samuel Carthorne Rivers Jr. creates scenes, has done everywhere he’s parked himself during a 50-year-plus career in music devoted to embracing the unknown.” That’s how a DownBeat writer described Sam Rivers (1923-2011), the jazz innovator born in El Reno, Oklahoma,...
Count Theodore “Fats” Navarro among the gone too soon. Considered one of the great jazz trumpeters, he was born in Key West, Florida, on this day in 1923. He was just 26 when he died of tuberculosis and heroin addiction in New York City on July 6, 1950, less than a...
Coltrane. Springsteen. Charles. Here’s a musical selection a piece from three artists who bopped into existence on This Day in Music History. Jazz sax superstar John William Coltrane (1926-1967) was born in Hamlet, North Carolina, on this day in 1926. Here are a few...
Not everyone will remember jazz-soul singer and Chess Records recording artist Marlena Shaw, born in New Rochelle, N.Y., on this day in 1942. But you may have heard her best-known recording (silky smooth “California Soul”) in ads for Dockers, KFC and Dodge Ram. Here...
