StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Happy birthday, David Sanborn!

Today, we interrupt our look at this year's poll-winning musicians begun last week to celebrate the birthday of a local favorite, saxophonist David Sanborn, who turned 76 years old yesterday.

Although he was born in Florida, Sanborn grew up and went to school in the St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood, and after 50 years in the music business, he ranks with Miles Davis and Clark Terry as one of the best-known and most successful jazz musicians to come from this area.

So today, as a birthday tribute, here's a collection of clips looking back at various phases in his storied career. Each video is a full show featuring Sanborn with a different lineup of musicians, presented in chronological order starting up above with a performance recorded in 1986 in Baden-Baden, Germany for the TV program Ohne Filter. The band includes the saxophonist's longtime associates, the late Hiram Bullock on guitar and Ricky Peterson on keyboards, along with bassist Steve Logan, drummer Tony Smith, and percussionist Steve Scales. (Since the complete performance video seems to have disappeared from YouTube, there's a playlist of individual tracks now in its place.)

After the jump, you can see Sanborn's complete set recorded in August, 1998 at the Newport Jazz Festival. That's followed by a performance recorded in December of '98 for broadcast on ABC in the early hours of New Year's Day 1999, featuring Sanborn and his band along with guest performers including singers Cassandra Wilson and D'Angelo, hip-hop duo Gang Starr, and guitarist and singer Eric Clapton.

The fourth video features Sanborn with organist Joey DeFrancesco, with whom he made a couple of records around this time, and drummer Gene Lake, serving up a bluesy, stripped-down set at the 2010 Jazzwoche Burghausen festival in Germany.

Next, it's a show from Sanborn's 2013 "Quartette Humaine" tour, co-led with pianist Bob James and also featuring drummer Steve Gadd and bassist Scott Colley, that was recorded in November at the Leverkusener Jazztage festival in Germany.

Last but not least, you can see a full show from the 2015 edition of Sanborn's touring band, recorded in April of that year in Budapest, Hungary. Along with Sanborn and Ricky Peterson, the group features guitarist Nicky Moroch, bassist Andre Berry and drummer Chris Coleman, with German saxophonist Jan Prax sitting in on a couple of tunes.

You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump...

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Memories of Oliver Nelson

The nearly ubiquitous Miles Davis notwithstanding, which jazz musician from the St. Louis area has been heard by the most people throughout the world? It's probably impossible to measure something like that with any degree of exactitude, but one certainly can make an informed guess.

Any short list would have to include trumpeter Clark Terry, famed for nearly seven decades as a high-profile jazz soloist and recording artist, member of the Ellington and Basie big bands, and veteran of television and session work; and saxophonist David Sanborn, who has had a very popular career as a solo artist, as well as being one of the most recorded session players of his era and the host of various radio and television programs.

Another, more unexpected contender for the title would have to be saxophonist, arranger and composer Oliver Nelson, who packed a lot of music into his all-too-brief 43 years on planet Earth. Born in St. Louis on June 4, 1932, Nelson was working with local bands by age 15 and joined saxophonist Louis Jordan's big band at 18, playing alto sax and arranging.

After serving in the Marine Corps and attending Washington University in St. Louis and Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Nelson moved to New York, where he established himself as a soloist, bandleader and arranger/composer. His big breakthrough came with the album The Blues and the Abstract Truth, which featured his tune "Stolen Moments," now a standard played by musicians everywhere.

Nelson went on to record many big-band albums and to work as an arranger for a number of well-known jazz musicians, including Cannonball Adderley, Sonny Rollins, Johnny Hodges, Wes Montgomery, Buddy Rich, and Jimmy Smith. In 1967, he moved to Los Angeles, where, along with his old pal Quincy Jones, he became one of the first African-American composers to get significant amounts of work scoring television and films.

Nelson wrote music for hugely popular TV shows such as Ironside, Night Gallery, Columbo, The Six Million Dollar Man, and The Bionic Woman, reaching tens of millions of people every week. He also wrote the score for the film Death of a Gunfighter, arranged Gato Barbieri's music for the movie Last Tango in Paris, and produced and arranged popular music for singers including Nancy Wilson, James Brown, the Temptations, and Diana Ross.

Tragically, Nelson died of a heart attack on October 28, 1975. Given the vast quantity and generally high quality of the music he wrote during his short life, one can't help but wonder how much more he could have accomplished had he lived longer.

Even so, Nelson's legacy is quite impressive - his recordings still hold up well today; his film and TV music remains emblematic of its era; and "Stolen Moments" likely will continue to be played forever. Moreover, the path he helped to pave in Hollywood has been well-utilized by subsequent generations of musicians; for example, it's hard to imagine someone like Terence Blanchard getting the chance to write all those film scores absent the pioneering work of Nelson and Jones.

Today, as a tribute to this under-appreciated St. Louis jazz great, we've got what seem to be the only videos online of Nelson in live performance. The first three videos show of Nelson performing and conducting the multi-national Berlin Dream Band playing his arrangements for a TV program recorded in 1970 in Berlin.

The first video, "Black Brown and Beautiful," is a Nelson original that also features him as the soloist, while the second, "Milestones" has solos by Leo Wright and Klaus Marmulla on altos and Rolf Roemer on tenor. The third video shows the band playing Nelson's arrangement of the gospel standard "Down By The Riverside."

Those clips are followed by two short excerpts of a performance of Nelson's composition "Swiss Suite," recorded in 1971 at the Montreux Jazz Festival. The existence of these excerpts suggests there might be more video out there, but until and unless something else surfaces, these clips would seem to be the only film or video recordings of any Nelson performances.

(This is an edited version of a post originally published in June 2009.)

You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump...

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Celebrating the birthday of Miles Davis

This coming Wednesday, May 26 will be the 95th anniversary of the birth of Miles Davis, and so it's time once again for StLJN's annual tribute to the most famous and influential jazz musician ever to come from this area.

Here are nine videos from throughout Davis' career, selected as personal favorites of yr. editor and first posted here with annotations in 2016.

The first, embedded up above the text, is the by-now-at-least semi-famous live version of "So What," the leadoff track from Kind of Blue, seen here as recorded by Davis and his quintet for the 1959 TV special The Sound of Miles Davis.

After the jump, you can see Davis and the Gil Evans Orchestra performing "The Duke" and "Blues for Pablo" from that same TV special.

The next two clips show Davis' so-called "Second Great Quintet" - with Wayne Shorter (tenor saxophone), Herbie Hancock (piano), Tony Williams (drums) and Ron Carter (bass) - in 1967, performing "I Fall In Love Too Easily" in Karlsruhe, Germany, and then doing "Footprints" in Stockholm, Sweden.

Davis was on the precipice of his "electric period" at that point, and in the next clip, a full set recorded in 1969 in Copenhagen, you can see him taking the leap with help from Shorter plus Chick Corea (keyboards), Dave Holland (bass), and Jack DeJohnette (drums).

This relatively short-lived band, which years later was dubbed the "Lost Quintet," led directly to the group seen in the next video, an entire set recorded on August 18, 1970 at the Berkshire Music Center, Tanglewood, MA. The band here is Davis, Corea, Holland and DeJohnette along with Gary Bartz (alto and soprano sax), Keith Jarrett on organ, and Airto Moreira on percussion, and at this point, Miles has gone full-on electric.

By the time the seventh clip was recorded, in 1973 at the Montreux Jazz Festival, Davis had changed the entire band again, and the version of "Ife" offers an even more jagged soundscape than the previous clip, courtesy of David Liebman (soprano sax), Pete Cosey (guitar, percussion), Reggie Lucas (guitar), Michael Henderson (bass), Mtume (congas, percussion), and Al Foster (drums).

The final two videos are both from the 1980s, well after Davis' comeback from the period of self-imposed exile in which Don Cheadle's film Miles Ahead is set. "Time After Time," Davis' cover of a hit originally recorded by Cyndi Lauper, was a staple of his live sets for several years, and is heard here in a version recorded in 1985 in Tokyo, Japan.

The last clip is a version of "Tutu," recorded in 1988 in Stuttgart, Germany, which unfortunately does not feature Marcus Miller, the song's composer and producer of the album of the same name. But it does show off one of Davis' more interesting and idiosyncratic late-period bands, with Kenny Garrett on saxophone and flute, Robert Irving III and Adam Holzmann on keyboards, Joseph "Foley" McCreary on six-string "lead bass" plus Benjamin Rietveld on electric bass, percussionist Marilyn Mazur, and the great drummer Ricky Wellman, who Davis plucked from Washington DC go-go godfather Chuck Brown's band, the Soul Searchers.

You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump...

StLJN turns 16

Sixteen years ago today, on April 24, 2005, the first post went up on St. Louis Jazz Notes.

Being 16 years old makes StLJN positively ancient in Internet time, and the past year definitely has been a challenge with almost all of the live music industry shut down. Nevertheless, after nearly 5,500 posts, the site continues to, in the words of St. Louis’ own Clark Terry, “keep on keepin’ on."

StLJN still is one of the longest continuously operating jazz blogs in the world and one of the longest running music websites in St. Louis, and it remains the city’s most complete and regularly updated source devoted to news about jazz.

Thanks once again to all the readers, commenters, musicians, music students and educators, presenters, club owners, publicists, tipsters, media people, record label employees, and others who have taken an interest in the site over the years. Your time and continued attention are much appreciated.

As usual, if you have any anniversary wishes, congratulations, questions, suggestions, or complaints, the comments are open.

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Riding the "Night Train" with Jimmy Forrest

What's the most performed song ever written by a St. Louis jazz musician? While it's probably impossible to ever know with absolute certainty, at first one might guess that it's something from Miles Davis' Kind of Blue.

After all, it is the best-selling jazz album of all time, and tunes from it such as  "All Blues" and "So What" frequently get played at jam sessions and on cover gigs, and have been recorded by various other musicians besides Davis.

However, the popularity of Davis and Kind of Blue notwithstanding, further investigation suggests that the most likely candidate for most-performed song probably is "Night Train," first recorded in 1951 by saxophonist and St. Louis native Jimmy Forrest. A #1 R&B hit for Forrest, "Night Train" over the years has spawned dozens of cover versions recorded by well-known artists, as well as countless live performances by assorted jazz, rock, R&B, country and variety bands.

Forrest (pictured) was born on January 24, 1920 in St. Louis, making tomorrow the 101st anniversary of his birth. To celebrate, we're taking an in-depth look at "Night Train," a song that's interesting for a number of reasons beyond its sheer popularity.

Recognized by the Grammy Hall of Fame as one of the top jazz singles of all time, "Night Train" may be just a 12-bar blues in Ab, but it has taken a trip through American culture that also helps to illuminate certain aspects of the nature of musical composition; the malleability of the blues; and the flow of musical ideas between black and white musicians and audiences in the middle of the 20th century.  The whole story is after the jump...

Celebrating 100 years of Clark Terry

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of trumpeter and educator Clark Terry, who remains one of the most famous and significant jazz musicians to be born in St. Louis.

For those who don't know, the brief biography of Terry at AllAboutJazz.com offers a summary of some of his career highlights:

Clark Terry's career in jazz spans more than sixty years. He is a world-class trumpeter, flugelhornist, educator, and NEA Jazz Master. He performed for seven U.S. Presidents, and was a Jazz Ambassador for State Department tours in the Middle East and Africa. More than fifty jazz festivals in all seven continents still feature him. He received a Grammy Award, two Grammy certificates, three Grammy nominations, thirteen honorary doctorates, keys to cities, lifetime achievements and halls of fame awards. He was knighted in Germany and is the recipient of the French Order of Arts and Letters. Clark's star on the Walk of Fame, and his Black World History Museum's life-sized wax figure can both be visited in his hometown, St. Louis, Missouri.

Clark composed more than two hundred jazz songs, and his books include Let's Talk Trumpet: From Legit to Jazz, Interpretation of the Jazz Language and Clark Terry's System of Circular Breathing for Woodwind and Brass Instruments.

He recorded with The London Symphony Orchestra, The Dutch Metropole Orchestra, The Duke Ellington Orchestra and The Chicago Jazz Orchestra, at least thirty high school and college ensembles, his own duos, trios, quartets, quintets, sextets, octets, and two big bands — Clark Terry's Big Bad Band and Clark Terry's Young Titans of Jazz. His career as both leader and sideman with more than three hundred recordings demonstrates that he is one of the luminaries in jazz.

As impressive as that list of achievements is, it omits a couple of yr. StLJN editor's favorite facts about Terry - namely, that he was one of a very few musicians to work with both Duke Ellington and Count Basie, both of whom called Terry the best trumpeter they ever employed; and that he was the first African-American musician to be a regular member of the orchestra led by Doc Severinsen on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, integrating that ensemble in 1962.

StLJN has been paying tribute to Terry this year with a series of Saturday video posts:

Clark Terry plays Duke Ellington
Remembering Clark Terry's Big Bad Band
More from Clark Terry's Big Bad Band
Clark Terry and his famous friends
The further adventures of Clark Terry
Clark Terry speaks!

Also here in his hometown, presenting organization Jazz St. Louis staged their own tribute to Terry, featuring an ensemble of local musicians playing songs written by or associated with the trumpeter. The performance was streamed last Thursday night, and has been archived on YouTube.

After the jump, you can see some of the birthday tributes shared online by fans, DJs, critics, and fellow musicians including Quincy Jones and Herbie Hancock. (This portion of the post will be updated several times throughout the day and evening.)

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: A birthday tribute to Miles Davis

This coming Tuesday, May 26 will be the 94th anniversary of the birth of Miles Davis, and so it's time once again for StLJN's annual tribute to the most famous and influential jazz musician ever to come from this area.

Here are nine videos from throughout Davis' career, selected as personal favorites of yr. editor and first posted here with annotations in 2016.

The first, embedded up above the text, is the by-now-at-least semi-famous live version of "So What," the leadoff track from Kind of Blue, seen here as recorded by Davis and his quintet for the 1959 TV special The Sound of Miles Davis.

After the jump, you can see Davis and the Gil Evans Orchestra performing "The Duke" and "Blues for Pablo" from that same TV special.

The next two clips show Davis' so-called "Second Great Quintet" - with Wayne Shorter (tenor saxophone), Herbie Hancock (piano), Tony Williams (drums) and Ron Carter (bass) - in 1967, performing "I Fall In Love Too Easily" in Karlsruhe, Germany, and then doing "Footprints" in Stockholm, Sweden.

Davis was on the precipice of his "electric period" at that point, and in the next clip, a full set recorded in 1969 in Copenhagen, you can see him taking the leap with help from Shorter plus Chick Corea (keyboards), Dave Holland (bass), and Jack DeJohnette (drums).

This relatively short-lived band, which years later was dubbed the "Lost Quintet," led directly to the group seen in the next video, an entire set recorded on August 18, 1970 at the Berkshire Music Center, Tanglewood, MA. The band here is Davis, Corea, Holland and DeJohnette along with Gary Bartz (alto and soprano sax), Keith Jarrett on organ, and Airto Moreira on percussion, and at this point, Miles has gone full-on electric.

By the time the seventh clip was recorded, in 1973 at the Montreux Jazz Festival, Davis had changed the entire band again, and the version of "Ife" offers an even more jagged soundscape than the previous clip, courtesy of David Liebman (soprano sax), Pete Cosey (guitar, percussion), Reggie Lucas (guitar), Michael Henderson (bass), Mtume (congas, percussion), and Al Foster (drums).

The final two videos are both from the 1980s, well after Davis' comeback from the period of self-imposed exile in which Don Cheadle's film Miles Ahead is set. "Time After Time," Davis' cover of a hit originally recorded by Cyndi Lauper, was a staple of his live sets for several years, and is heard here in a version recorded in 1985 in Tokyo, Japan.

The last clip is a version of "Tutu," recorded in 1988 in Stuttgart, Germany, which unfortunately does not feature Marcus Miller, the song's composer and producer of the album of the same name. But it does show off one of Davis' more interesting and idiosyncratic late-period bands, with Kenny Garrett on saxophone and flute, Robert Irving III and Adam Holzmann on keyboards, Joseph "Foley" McCreary on six-string "lead bass" plus Benjamin Rietveld on electric bass, percussionist Marilyn Mazur, and the great drummer Ricky Wellman, who Davis plucked from Washington DC go-go godfather Chuck Brown's band, the Soul Searchers.

You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump...

StLJN turns 15

Fifteen years ago today, on April 24, 2005, the first post went up on St. Louis Jazz Notes.

Being 15 years old makes StLJN positively ancient in Internet time, but after nearly 5,300 posts, the site continues to, in the words of St. Louis' own Clark Terry, "keep on keepin' on."

It's still one of the longest continuously operating jazz blogs in the world and one of the longest running music websites in St. Louis, and remains the city's most complete and regularly updated source devoted to news about jazz.

Thanks once again to all the readers, commenters, musicians, music students and educators, presenters, club owners, publicists, tipsters, media people, record label employees, and others who have taken an interest in the site over the years. Your time and continued attention are much appreciated.

As usual, if you have any anniversary wishes, congratulations, questions, suggestions, or complaints, the comments are open.

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: A Miles Davis birthday celebration

Tomorrow is the 93rd anniversary of the birth of Miles Davis, and so it's time once again for StLJN's annual tribute to the most famous and influential jazz musician ever to come from this area.

Here are nine videos from throughout Davis' career, selected as personal favorites of yr. editor and first posted here with annotations in 2016.

The first, embedded up above the text, is the by-now-at-least semi-famous live version of "So What," the leadoff track from Kind of Blue, seen here as recorded by Davis and his quintet for the 1959 TV special The Sound of Miles Davis.

After the jump, you can see Davis and the Gil Evans Orchestra performing "The Duke" and "Blues for Pablo" from that same TV special.

The next two clips show Davis' so-called "Second Great Quintet" - with Wayne Shorter (tenor saxophone), Herbie Hancock (piano), Tony Williams (drums) and Ron Carter (bass) - in 1967, performing "I Fall In Love Too Easily" in Karlsruhe, Germany, and then doing "Footprints" in Stockholm, Sweden.

Davis was on the precipice of his "electric period" at that point, and in the next clip, a full set recorded in 1969 in Copenhagen, you can see him taking the leap with help from Shorter plus Chick Corea (keyboards), Dave Holland (bass), and Jack DeJohnette (drums).

This relatively short-lived band, which years later was dubbed the "Lost Quintet," led directly to the group seen in the next video, an entire set recorded on August 18, 1970 at the Berkshire Music Center, Tanglewood, MA. The band here is Davis, Corea, Holland and DeJohnette along with Gary Bartz (alto and soprano sax), Keith Jarrett on organ, and Airto Moreira on percussion, and at this point, Miles has gone full-on electric.

By the time the seventh clip was recorded, in 1973 at the Montreux Jazz Festival, Davis had changed the entire band again, and the version of "Ife" offers an even more jagged soundscape than the previous clip, courtesy of David Liebman (soprano sax), Pete Cosey (guitar, percussion), Reggie Lucas (guitar), Michael Henderson (bass), Mtume (congas, percussion), and Al Foster (drums).

The final two videos are both from the 1980s, well after Davis' comeback from the period of self-imposed exile in which Don Cheadle's film Miles Ahead is set. "Time After Time," Davis' cover of a hit originally recorded by Cyndi Lauper, was a staple of his live sets for several years, and is heard here in a version recorded in 1985 in Tokyo, Japan.

The last clip is a version of "Tutu," recorded in 1988 in Stuttgart, Germany, which unfortunately does not feature Marcus Miller, the song's composer and producer of the album of the same name. But it does show off one of Davis' more interesting and idiosyncratic late-period bands, with Kenny Garrett on saxophone and flute, Robert Irving III and Adam Holzmann on keyboards, Joseph "Foley" McCreary on six-string "lead bass" plus Benjamin Rietveld on electric bass, percussionist Marilyn Mazur, and the great drummer Ricky Wellman, who Davis plucked from Washington DC go-go godfather Chuck Brown's band, the Soul Searchers.

You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump...

StLJN turns 14

Fourteen years ago today, on April 24, 2005, the first post went up on St. Louis Jazz Notes.

Being 14 years old makes StLJN positively ancient in Internet time, but after more than 5,000 posts, the site is still going strong.

It's still one of the longest continuously operating jazz blogs in the world and one of the longest running music websites in St. Louis, and remains the city's most complete and regularly updated source devoted to news about jazz.

Thanks once again to all the readers, commenters, musicians, music students and educators, presenters, club owners, publicists, tipsters, media people, record label employees, and others who have taken an interest in the site over the years. Your time and continued attention are much appreciated.

As usual, if you have any anniversary wishes, congratulations, questions, suggestions, or complaints, the comments are open.

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Happy birthday, Miles Davis!

Today is the 92nd anniversary of the birth of Miles Davis, and so it's time once again for StLJN's annual tribute to the most famous and influential jazz musician ever to come from this area.

Here are nine videos from throughout Davis' career, selected as personal favorites of yr. editor and first posted here with annotations in 2016.

The first, embedded up above the text, is the by-now-at-least semi-famous live version of "So What," the leadoff track from Kind of Blue, seen here as recorded by Davis and his quintet for the 1959 TV special The Sound of Miles Davis.

After the jump, you can see Davis and the Gil Evans Orchestra performing "The Duke" and "Blues for Pablo" from that same TV special.

The next two clips show Davis' so-called "Second Great Quintet" - with Wayne Shorter (tenor saxophone), Herbie Hancock (piano), Tony Williams (drums) and Ron Carter (bass) - in 1967, performing "I Fall In Love Too Easily" in Karlsruhe, Germany, and then doing "Footprints" in Stockholm, Sweden.

Davis was on the precipice of his "electric period" at that point, and in the next clip, a full set recorded in 1969 in Copenhagen, you can see him taking the leap with help from Shorter plus Chick Corea (keyboards), Dave Holland (bass), and Jack DeJohnette (drums).

This relatively short-lived band, which years later was dubbed the "Lost Quintet," led directly to the group seen in the next video, an entire set recorded on August 18, 1970 at the Berkshire Music Center, Tanglewood, MA. The band here is Davis, Corea, Holland and DeJohnette along with Gary Bartz (alto and soprano sax), Keith Jarrett on organ, and Airto Moreira on percussion, and at this point, Miles has gone full-on electric.

By the time the seventh clip was recorded, in 1973 at the Montreux Jazz Festival, Davis had changed the entire band again, and the version of "Ife" offers an even more jagged soundscape than the previous clip, courtesy of David Liebman (soprano sax), Pete Cosey (guitar, percussion), Reggie Lucas (guitar), Michael Henderson (bass), Mtume (congas, percussion), and Al Foster (drums).

The final two videos are both from the 1980s, well after Davis' comeback from the period of self-imposed exile in which Don Cheadle's film Miles Ahead is set. "Time After Time," Davis' cover of a hit originally recorded by Cyndi Lauper, was a staple of his live sets for several years, and is heard here in a version recorded in 1985 in Tokyo, Japan.

The last clip is a version of "Tutu," recorded in 1988 in Stuttgart, Germany, which unfortunately does not feature Marcus Miller, the song's composer and producer of the album of the same name. But it does show off one of Davis' more interesting and idiosyncratic late-period bands, with Kenny Garrett on saxophone and flute, Robert Irving III and Adam Holzmann on keyboards, Joseph "Foley" McCreary on six-string "lead bass" plus Benjamin Rietveld on electric bass, percussionist Marilyn Mazur, and the great drummer Ricky Wellman, who Davis plucked from Washington DC go-go godfather Chuck Brown's band, the Soul Searchers.

You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump...

StLJN turns 13

Thirteen years ago this week - on April 24, 2005, to be precise - the first post went up on St. Louis Jazz Notes. While 13 may be adolescent in real-world years, it's positively ancient in Internet time.

Nevertheless, nearly 4,800 posts later, StLJN is still going, still one of the longest continuously operating jazz blogs in the world and one of the longest running music websites in St. Louis, and it's still the city's most complete and regularly updated source devoted to news about jazz.

Thanks once again to all the readers, commenters, musicians, music students and educators, presenters, club owners, publicists, tipsters, media people, record label employees, and others who have taken an interest in the site over the years. Your time and continued attention are much appreciated.

As usual, if you have any anniversary wishes, congratulations, questions, suggestions, or complaints, the comments are open.

StLJN turns 12

Twelve years ago today, the first post went up on St. Louis Jazz Notes. More than 4,500 posts later, StLJN is one of the longest continuously operating outposts of what's left of the jazz blogosphere and one of the longest running music websites in St. Louis, and it remains the city's most complete and regularly updated source devoted to news about jazz.

Thanks once again to all the readers, commenters, musicians, music students and educators, presenters, club owners, publicists, tipsters, media people, record label employees, and others who have taken an interest in the site over the years. Your time and continued attention are much appreciated.

As usual, if you have any anniversary wishes, congratulations, questions, suggestions, or complaints, the comments are open.

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Celebrating Clark Terry

Today, let's celebrate the memory of one of our city's all-time jazz greats, the late trumpeter Clark Terry, who was born December 14, 1920 right here in St. Louis.

Although Terry departed this planet in February of last year, his vast catalog of audio and video recordings remains for all to enjoy, and today you can check out some of StLJN's favorite videos featuring him.

The first clip up above, recorded in 2001, pairs Terry and the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, in an extended version of the trumpeter's best-known song, the comedic blues "Mumbles." They're backed by a band featuring Herbie Hancock on piano, Russell Malone on guitar, Ron Carter on bass, Roy Haynes on drums, and James Carter on saxophone.

After the jump, you can see Terry doing two songs recorded around 1980 in a guest appearance with NBC's Tonight Show band, a group that he integrated as its first African-American member in the early 1960s and remained with for much of that decade. In this video, he's featured soloing on an uptempo blues, and then plays and sings Fats Waller's "Squeeze Me."

After leaving the Tonight Show, Terry led his own orchestra, the Big Bad Band, intermittently through the 1970s and early 1980s, and the next clip shows just over 19 minutes of that group in action.

Below that, you can see Terry playing "Stormy Monday" with another American musical icon, blues singer and guitarist Muddy Waters. This clip was recorded in July, 1977 in Nice, France, with Muddy's band, which at the time included Bob Margolin (guitar), Guitar Junior (guitar), Pinetop Perkins (piano), Calvin Jones (bass), and Willy "Big Eyes" Smith (drums).

The next clip shows Terry with a small group drawn from the Count Basie Orchestra, with whom he got his first big break in 1948, performing "Royalty in Rhythm." That's followed by a 1958 video of the Duke Ellington Orchestra playing "El Gato," which featured the band's trumpet section of Terry, fellow St. Louis native Harold "Shorty" Baker, Ray Nance, and Cat Anderson, for whom the piece was named.

Finally, you can see an example of Terry's showmanship and good humor as he instructs and conducts an audience to sing along with "Bye Bye Blackbird." This recording was made on April 19, 1998 by an audience member attending the concert at Ohio State University in Columbus, OH.

For more on Clark Terry's life and career, see the previous StLJN posts here and here.

You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump...

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: 90 years of Miles Davis

The 90th anniversary of Miles Davis' birth was this past Thursday, May 26, and although StLJN shared a variety of tributes from others on social media, there was no "happy birthday" post here that day as in many years past, for a couple of reasons.

First, the "Miles On Monday" feature, which has been a fixture here for more than a year now, serves as a regular tribute to the trumpeter every week. (And in case you missed them, some of those birthday items shared this week definitely will be linked and/or summarized in this coming Monday's post.)

Second, and more important, is that the plan all along was to mark 90 years of Miles Davis with today's video post, which contains some of yr. editor's favorite performances from various stages of his career that are available as online videos. There are nine videos in all, one for each decade since Davis' birth.

The first, embedded up above the text, is the by-now-at-least semi-famous live version of "So What," the leadoff track from Kind of Blue, seen here as recorded by Davis and his quintet for the 1959 TV special The Sound of Miles Davis.

After the jump, you can see Davis and the Gil Evans Orchestra performing "The Duke" and "Blues for Pablo" from that same TV special.

The next two clips show Davis' so-called "Second Great Quintet" - with Wayne Shorter (tenor saxophone), Herbie Hancock (piano), Tony Williams (drums) and Ron Carter (bass) - in 1967, performing "I Fall In Love Too Easily" in Karlsruhe, Germany, and then doing "Footprints" in Stockholm, Sweden.

Davis was on the precipice of his "electric period" at that point, and in the next clip, a full set recorded in 1969 in Copenhagen, you can see him taking the leap with help from Shorter plus Chick Corea (keyboards), Dave Holland (bass), and Jack DeJohnette (drums).

This relatively short-lived band, which years later was dubbed the "Lost Quintet," led directly to the group seen in the next video, an entire set recorded on August 18, 1970 at the Berkshire Music Center, Tanglewood, MA. The band here is Davis, Corea, Holland and DeJohnette along with Gary Bartz (alto and soprano sax), Keith Jarrett on organ, and Airto Moreira on percussion, and at this point, Miles has gone full-on electric.

By the time the seventh clip was recorded, in 1973 at the Montreux Jazz Festival, Davis had changed the entire band again, and the version of "Ife" offers an even more jagged soundscape than the previous clip, courtesy of David Liebman (soprano sax), Pete Cosey (guitar, percussion), Reggie Lucas (guitar), Michael Henderson (bass), Mtume (congas, percussion), and Al Foster (drums).

The final two videos are both from the 1980s, well after Davis' comeback from the period of self-imposed exile in which Don Cheadle's film Miles Ahead is set. "Time After Time," Davis' cover of a hit originally recorded by Cyndi Lauper, was a staple of his live sets for several years, and is heard here in a version recorded in 1975 in Tokyo, Japan.

The last clip is a version of "Tutu," recorded in 1988 in Stuttgart, Germany, which unfortunately does not feature Marcus Miller, the song's composer and producer of the album of the same name. But it does show off one of Davis' more interesting and idiosyncratic late-period bands, with Kenny Garrett on saxophone and flute, Robert Irving III and Adam Holzmann on keyboards, Joseph "Foley" McCreary on six-string "lead bass" plus Benjamin Rietveld on electric bass, percussionist Marilyn Mazur, and the great drummer Ricky Wellman, who Davis plucked from Washington DC go-go godfather Chuck Brown's band, the Soul Searchers.

You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump...

StLJN turns 11

Eleven years ago today, the first post went up on St. Louis Jazz Notes. More than 4,200 posts later, StLJN remains one of the longest continuously operating outposts of the jazz blogosphere and one of the longest running music blogs in St. Louis, as well as the city's most regularly updated source devoted to news about jazz.

Thanks once again to all the readers, commenters, musicians, music students and educators, presenters, club owners, publicists, tipsters, media people, record label employees, and others who have taken an interest in the site over the years. Your time and continued attention are much appreciated.

As usual, if you have any anniversary wishes, congratulations, questions, suggestions, or complaints, the comments are open.

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: A birthday tribute to Clark Terry

This coming Monday, December 14 would have been the 95th birthday of the legendary trumpeter and St. Louis native Clark Terry. Though Terry passed away in February 2015 after several years of declining health, his spirit continues to inspire and his music lives on, and today StLJN pays tribute to his memory with some online music videos featuring him.

Of course, as one of the most significant jazz musicians to come out of St. Louis, Terry has been featured many times before in this space. If you don't already know about him and his many accomplishments, please check out the video retrospective compiled here after his death earlier this year, as well as last year's birthday tribute.

Today, you can enjoy a collection of clips never seen before here on StLJN. Up top, you can see Terry doing two songs recorded in 1980 or thereabouts with his former employers the "Tonight Show" band, starting with an uptempo blues and then playing and singing Fats Waller's "Squeeze Me," a staple number for him for many years.

After the jump, you can see two clips from a 1972 show in France, in which Terry sings and plays "My Gal Blues" and his signature song "Mumbles."

Below that, there's a video from 1975 in which Terry guests with the Toshiko Akioshi/Lew Tabackin Big Band, playing the intro and several standout solo choruses on a blues-based Akioshi composition called "Henpecked Old Man."

Next, Terry breaks out the muted trumpet to tip his hat to another former employer, playing Duke Ellington's "Mood Indigo" at a performance in 1985 at Jazzhus Montmartre in Copenhagen, Denmark with the help of pianist Duke Jordan, bassist Jimmy Woode, and drummer Svend Nørregaard.

That's followed by a video of Terry sitting in and taking the first solo on "Straight No Chaser" with the Gene Harris Quartet in 1998 at the Internationales Jazzfestival Bern. In addition to Harris on piano, the band includes Frank Wess on flute, Johnny Griffin on tenor, and an all-British rhythm section with Martin Drew on drums, Andrew Cleyndert on bass, and Jim Mullen on guitar.

Last, but certainly not least, Terry displays his characteristic ebullience while conducting the audience singing along with "Bye Bye Blackbird" in a clip recorded by an audience member on April 19, 1998 at Ohio State University in Columbus, OH. That's Columbus native Hank Marr on piano, along with Jim Rupp (drums), Jim Masters (trombone), and Doug Richeson (bass).

You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump...

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Remembering "The Kid from Red Bank"

Longtime StLJN readers know that it doesn't take much prompting to get yr. humble editor to start posting Count Basie videos, and this week, we're using Jazz St. Louis' upcoming "Basie's Birthday Bash" as an excuse for getting down with the Count.

Scheduled for Friday, August 21 and Saturday, August 22 at Jazz at the Bistro, the event will commemorate the 111th anniversary of Basie's birth in Red Bank, NJ with the Jazz St. Louis Big Band performing his music.

As suggested above, this isn't the first time that Basie has been featured in this space. While the 2010 post on Basie, featuring a show recorded in 1965 for the BBC, unfortunately has been gutted by linkrot, last year's "Basics of Basie", posted prior to the Basie "ghost" band's appearance at the Greater St. Louis Jazz Festival, is still intact as of this writing. And since that post featured a half-dozen of Basie's most recognizable songs, today we'll concentrate mostly on some longer performances.

The first video up above captures a full set of the Basie band in 1962, performing what would have been a fairly standard collection of material for them at the time. The lineup still featured many of the players from the famed "New Testament" edition of the group that began in the 1950s, including saxophonists Marshal Royal, Frank Wess, Eric Dixon, Frank Foster, and Charlie Fowkes; trumpeters Al Aarons, Sonny Cohn, Thad Jones, and Snooky Young; trombonists Henry Coker, Quentin "Butter" Jackson, and Benny Powell, plus the rhythm section of guitarist Freddie Green, bassist Eddie Jones, and drummer Sonny Payne and the singer, Irene Reid.

After the jump, you can see Basie in 1968 on the TV program Jazz Casual, performing in a quartet with Green, Payne and bassist Norman Keenan.

That's followed by a complete set recorded in 1975 in Stockholm, at which point the band's featured soloists included trombonist Al Grey s and the one-two tenor saxophone punch of Eddie 'Lockjaw' Davis and St. Louis native Jimmy Forrest.

Up next is another complete show, from 1981 in Paris, and then, a repost in one video of the entire 1965 performance for the BBC that was referenced above, recorded for the rather prosaically named Show of the Week.

Last but not least is a little gem from a 1959 TV appearance in which the Basie band backed up Lambert, Hendricks and Ross on their vocalese version of "Avenue C," which the trio had recorded on their 1957 album Sing A Song of Basie. While most of the band lays out during the portion of the song in which the singers recreate the sectional parts, the whole thing is worth hearing just for Basie's piano fills.

Happy birthday, Miles Davis!

Today is the 89th anniversary of the birth of Miles Davis, the most famous and historically significant jazz musician to come from the St. Louis area and one of our favorite subjects over the years here at StLJN.

It's shaping up to be a big year for fans of the legendary trumpeter, as Miles Ahead, the feature film about Davis directed by and starring Don Cheadle, currently is awaiting release, and the Miles Davis Memorial Project is on track to install a statue of Davis in his birthplace of Alton, IL, later this year.

To keep track of these and other Davis-related developments, for the past six months StLJN has been running a weekly feature called "Miles on Monday," and you can see the archive of all those posts here. To see the rest of StLJN's extensive past coverage of Miles Davis over the past decade, click here.

After the jump, you'll find a YouTube playlist with audio of ten of Davis' greatest albums...

StLJN turns ten

Ten years ago today, the first post went up on St. Louis Jazz Notes. Nearly 3,900 posts later, StLJN remains one of the longest continuously operating outposts of the jazz blogosphere and one of the longest running music blogs in St. Louis, as well as the city's most regularly updated source devoted to news about jazz.

Thanks once again to all the readers, commenters, musicians, music students and educators, presenters, club owners, publicists, tipsters, media people, record label employees, and others who have taken an interest in the site over the years. Your time and continued attention are much appreciated.

As usual, if you have any anniversary wishes, congratulations, questions, suggestions, or complaints, the comments are open.