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Though this song isn’t a Donny Hathaway original, I agree wholeheartedly with Jack Gulielmetti’s sentiment in his earlier piece for NYFOS on “Someday We’ll All Be Free” – I really, REALLY love him, and likely could have made the entire week about him and his songs. I...
The original Rodgers and Hart tune from their mostly-forgettable musical Jumbo (featuring a flightless elephant unlike the one featured some years later in Disney’s 1941 animated film Dumbo) is a lovely tune. Nina Simone made it irreplaceable 23 years later....
“But you promised black artists, Joseph.” Yes, yes, I did. And as much as I love and adore Blue Eyes, he’s not the steam engine of this song – Count Basie is, along with his orchestra and the legendary Freddie Green. The arrangement by Quincy Jones is a match made in...
The original version of this song was called “Death Letter Blues” – it was written and performed by Delta blues artist Son House in 1965. The two versions each give me very different types of chills – the Son House original feels like a declamatory primal sob, whereas...
This week’s selections have a recurrent theme embedded in the lyrics or the music: space. Space in a musical or relational context, and often both at the same time. Back in my 20s, studying in New York, and in the midst of one disastrous relationship after another, I...
I’ve always viewed my journey with jazz and improvisation akin to someone’s journey with the game of golf – each year, I hope to suck just a little bit less than the previous one. And what’s the most common answer I would get when I asked jazz musicians how to get...