Podcasts about Milt Jackson

ALEATORIO RANDOM PROJECT 016 1-LUSH LIFE – ZARA LARSSON 2-TRY IT YOU´LL LIKE IT – MASTER PLAN INC 3-EMBRACEABLE YOU – JUDY GARLAND 4-BULLS ON PARADE – RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE 5- COLD BLOODED – AVI KAPLAN 6-I´D LOVE TO CHANGE THE WORLD – TEN YEARS AFTER 7-POINT OF DEPARTURE – IAN DOGOTE 8-S.K.J. – MILT JACKSON & WEST MONTGOMERY 9-ATOM HEART MOTHER – PINK FLOYD 10-ICH RUZ ZU DIR, HERR JESU CRIST – JOAN SEBASTIAN BACH 11-HOPELESSLY DEVOTED TO YOU – OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN

The Jazz Session No.409 from RaidersBroadcast.com as aired in April 2025, featuring a sophisticated album from 1961, “Bags & Trane”, from Milt Jackson & John Coltrane. A treat! TRACK LISTING: Fill Your Heart - David Bowie; Night by Night - Steely Dan ; Quest for Coin - Ezra Collective; Enzo's Theme - The Stanley Clarke Band; The Late, Late Blues - Milt Jackson & John Coltrane; Three Little Words - Milt Jackson & John Coltrane; Organ Grinder Blues - George Melly with Mick Mulligan's Jazz Band; So Do I - Kenny Ball & His Jazzmen; Out of This World - John Coltrane ; Strode Rode - Sonny Rollins; Trevere - Miles Davis; Ostinato (Suite for Angela) - Herbie Hancock; Cryin' Mood - Ella Fitzgerald; Lyin' to Myself - Louis Armstrong & His Orchestra ; Be-Bop - Milt Jackson & John Coltrane; Centerpiece - Milt Jackson & John Coltrane; Teenbeat Reprise - Henry Cow; Sancho - Kenny Wheeler, w. John Dankworth Orchestra; Kathy's Waltz - The Dave Brubeck Quartet ; Port of Call - Cecil Taylor.

Kirk digs into Fiona Apple's breakneck 1999 single "Fast As You Can," a cornerstone in her late 90s collaborations with Jon Brion, as well as her work with drummer Matt Chamberlain.Written by: Fiona AppleProduced by: Jon BrionAlbum: When The Pawn..., 1999Listen/Buy via Album.LinkALSO REFERENCED/DISCUSSED:Jon Brion in Performing Songwriter Magazine, 2000"Criminal" by Fiona Apple from Tidal, 1996"Tymps (The Sick in the Head Song) by Fiona Apple from Extraordinary Machine, 2005"Monday" by Jon Brion from I Heart Huckabees, 2004"Epistrophy" by Thelonious Monk recorded w/ Milt Jackson in 1948Sound Space Studios demonstrating a Chamberlin keyboard----LINKS-----SUPPORT STRONG SONGS!Paypal | Patreon.com/StrongsongsMERCH STORE (NEW STUFF JUST IN!)store.strongsongspodcast.comKIRK'S GEAR & INSTRUMENT LISTkirkhamilton.com/gearSOCIAL MEDIAIG: @Kirk_Hamilton | Bluesky: @kirkhamilton.comKIRK'S NEWSLETTERnewsletter.kirkhamilton.comJOIN THE STRONG SONGS DISCORDhttps://discord.gg/GCvKqAM8SmSTRONG SONGS PLAYLISTSSpotify | Apple Music | YouTube MusicSHOW ARTTom Deja, Bossman Graphics--------------------MARCH 2025 WHOLE-NOTE PATRONSAndyLisa CrottyElizabeth CulverMeryl AllisonRobyn MetcalfeCesarCorpus FriskyBen BarronCatherine WarnerDamon WhiteJay SwartzRushDaniel Hannon-BarryChristopher MillerJamie WhiteChristopher McConnellDavid MascettiJoe LaskaKen HirshMelanie AndrichJenness GardnerNathaniel BauernfeindPaul DelaneySami SamhuriJeremy DawsonAccessViolationDave FloreyMARCH 2025 HALF-NOTE PATRONSRachelAruni JayatillekeRyan GillenTerry AuvenshineTBDaniel KaberonWiggy HashWhit SidenerJulie KellmanSimon HellmanBeaClaudia CartyDaniGlenn JacksonChristopher Selby SpinkPhilip KellyDaniel NervoKevin StaffordLawrenceSy JacobsirritableIan PiddAndrew HoferJordan GatenbyMelissa KuhnsAshleySeattle Trans And Nonbinary Choral EnsembleKevin MarceloSamantha CoatesJamesMark NadasdiJeffDan CutterJoseph RomeroOl ParkerJohn BerryDanielle KrizClint McElroyMordok's Vape PenInmar GivoniMichael SingerMerv AdrianJoe GalloLauren KnottsDave KolasHenry MindlinMonica St. AngeloStephen WolkwitzRand LeShayMaxeric spMatthew JonesThomasAnthony MentzJames McMurryEthan LaserBrian John PeterChris RemoMatt SchoenthalAaron WilsonDent EarlCarlos LernerMisty HaisfieldAbraham BenrubiLee R.Callum WebbLynda MacNeilDick MorganBen SteinGrettir AsmundarsonSean MurphyRandal VegterKellen SteffenKaya WoodallRobert Granatdave malloyAlan MaassNick Gallowayjohn halpinPeter HardingDavidJohn BaumanMartín SalíasStu BakerSteve MartinoDr Arthur A GrayCarolinaGary PierceMatt BaxterLuigi BocciaE Margaret WartonTim SheehanCharles McGeeCatherine ClauseEthan BaumanKenIsWearingAHatJordan BlockAaron WadeJeff UlmDavid FutterJamieDeebsPortland Eye CareRichard SneddonJanice BerryDoreen CarlsonDavid McDarbyWendy GilchristLisa TurnerPaul WayperMiles FormanBruno GaetaKenneth JungZak RemerRishi SahayJeffrey BeanJason ReitmanAilie FraserRob TsukNATALIE MISTILISJosh SingerAmy Lynn ThornsenAdam WKelli BrockingtonVictoria Yumino caposselaSteve PaquinDavid JoskeBernard KhooRobert HeuerDavid NoahGeraldine ButlerMadeleine MaderJason PrattAbbie BergDoug BelewDermot CrowleyAchint SrivastavaRyan RairighMichael BermanLinda DuffyBonnie PrinsenEoin de BurcaKevin PotterM Shane BordersDallas HockleyJason GerryNell MorseNathan GouwensLauren ReayEric PrestemoncbalmainAngela LivingstoneDiane HughesMichael CasnerLowell MeyerStephen TsoneffJoshua HillGeoff GoldenPascal RuegerRandy SouzaClare HolbertonDiane TurnerTom ColemanDhu WikMelmaniacEric HelmJonathan DanielsCaro FieldDave SharpeNaomi WatsonDavidAlexanderAdam GeorgandisChris KGavin DoigSam FennTanner MortonAJ SchusterJennifer BushDavid StroudBrad CallahanAmanda FurlottiAndrew BakerAndrew FairL.B. MorseBill ThorntonBrian AmoebasBrett DouvilleJeffrey OlsonMatt BetzelNate from KalamazooMelanie StiversRichard TollerAlexander PolsonJustin McElroyArjun SharmaJames JohnsonKevin MorrellColin Hodo

MILT JACKSON “+ COUNT BASIE + THE BIG BAND VOL 2” Hollywood, Ca, January 16, 17 & 18, 1978 Moonlight becomes you, Blues for Joe Turner (1), On the sunny side of the street Waymon Reed, Lin Biviano, Sonny Cohn, Pete Minger (tp) Bill Hughes, Mel Wanzo, Fred Wesley, Dennis Wilson (tb) Danny Turner, Bobby Plater (as) Eric Dixon (ts,fl) Kenny Hing (ts) Charlie Fowlkes (bar) Milt Jackson (vib) Count Basie (p) Freddie Green (g) John Clayton (b) Butch Miles (d) ROB GARCIA “NATURAL BOUNCE” Astoria, NY, April 13, 2022Dark blue horse power, Gary song, Fades to blue, Sweet JoeNoah Preminger (ts) Leo Genovese (p) Kim Cass (b) Rob Garcia (d,comp) HORACE SILVER “SERENADE TO A SOUL SISTER” Englewood Cliffs, NJ:February 23, 1968Psychedelic Sally (1), Serenade to a soul sisterCharles Tolliver (tp) Stanley Turrentine (ts) Horace Silver (p) Bob Cranshaw (b,el-b-1) Mickey Roker (d) March 29, 1968Kindred spiritsCharles Tolliver (tp) Bennie Maupin (fl,ts) Horace Silver (p) Johnny Williams (b) Billy Cobham (d) Continue reading Puro Jazz 17 de marzo, 2025 at PuroJazz.

MILT JACKSON “+ COUNT BASIE + THE BIG BAND VOL 2” Hollywood, Ca, January 16, 17 & 18, 1978 Moonlight becomes you, Blues for Joe Turner (1), On the sunny side of the street Waymon Reed, Lin Biviano, Sonny Cohn, Pete Minger (tp) Bill Hughes, Mel Wanzo, Fred Wesley, Dennis Wilson (tb) Danny Turner, Bobby Plater (as) Eric Dixon (ts,fl) Kenny Hing (ts) Charlie Fowlkes (bar) Milt Jackson (vib) Count Basie (p) Freddie Green (g) John Clayton (b) Butch Miles (d) ROB GARCIA “NATURAL BOUNCE” Astoria, NY, April 13, 2022Dark blue horse power, Gary song, Fades to blue, Sweet JoeNoah Preminger (ts) Leo Genovese (p) Kim Cass (b) Rob Garcia (d,comp) HORACE SILVER “SERENADE TO A SOUL SISTER” Englewood Cliffs, NJ:February 23, 1968Psychedelic Sally (1), Serenade to a soul sisterCharles Tolliver (tp) Stanley Turrentine (ts) Horace Silver (p) Bob Cranshaw (b,el-b-1) Mickey Roker (d) March 29, 1968Kindred spiritsCharles Tolliver (tp) Bennie Maupin (fl,ts) Horace Silver (p) Johnny Williams (b) Billy Cobham (d) Continue reading Puro Jazz 17 de marzo, 2025 at PuroJazz.

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“Just keep going.”—Dave ChappelleFeaturing, in order of appearance:Kevin Hart, Questlove, Mo Amer, Bill Burr, Pras, Michelle Wolf, and Jon StewartContains music by:Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Max Roach, Miles Davis, Milt Jackson, and Stevie WonderRecorded in Ohio, Summer 2020Executive Produced by Talib Kweli, yasiin bey, Dave Chappelle, Noah Gersh, Jamie Schefman, Nick Panama, Kenzi Wilbur, and Miles HodgesProduced by Noah Gersh and Jamie Schefman for SALTProduction Manager: Liz LeMayRecording Engineer: Federico LopezRecording Engineer: Adrián Bruque for NPNDAssistant Editors: Danny Carissimi and Noah Kowalski Senior Sound Designer: Russell TopalTranscription Supervisor: Sam BeasleyMixer: Jordan GalvanPodcast Artwork: Rachel EckStill Photography: Mathieu BittonThe Midnight Miracle is a Luminary Original Podcast in partnership with Pilot Boy Productions and SALT.Special thanks to Paul Adongo, Cipriano Beredo, Elaine Chappelle, Ivy Davy, Rikki Hughes, Kyle Ranson-Walsh, Sina Sadighi, Mark Silverstein, and Carla Sims.Photography made available courtesy of Pilot Boy Productions, Inc. Copyright © 2021 by Pilot Boy Productions, Inc., all rights reserved.

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Longer sets, mellow jazz tonight: Gabor Szabo, Autumn Leaves / Speak to Me of Love Gerry Mulligan & Paul Desmond, Body and Soul Johnny Griffin, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes Stan Getz, Kenny Barron, East of the Sun (And West of the Moon) Pharoah Sanders, I Want to Talk About You WDR Big Band Köln & Milt Jackson, Bag's Groove Al Jarreau, We Got By (Live)

Text us about this show.Anyone who has spent any time around the NE Wisconsin music scene knows about John Harmon. John is a world class jazz pianist and composer who studied under the great Oscar Peterson and played with the likes of Ray Brown and Milt Jackson. In the 1970s he formed the progressive jazz band Matrix who turned out six critically accaimed albums and toured the world. John's sons, Noah and Zach, are both extremely talented musicians. Noah, a keyboard player, is part of Kyle Megna and the Monsoons and Zach is a polyrhythmic drummer who has played with a number of artists both in LA and NE Wisconsin. Put them together and you have an incredible jazz trio with some deep musical roots called The Harmon Boyz."The Fly" performed by Matrixwritten by John Harmon℗ 1979 Warner Records Inc. Used with permission of John Harmon."Happy" written and performed by Eric Koppa℗ 2024 Eric Koppa Music. Used with permission of Eric Koppa.Face Your EarsExplore home recording and music creation with Rich and Justin on 'Face Your Ears'!Listen on: Apple Podcasts SpotifySupport the showVisit Into The Music at https://intothemusicpodcast.com!Support the show: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/intothemusic E-mail us at intothemusic@newprojectx.com YouTube Facebook Instagram INTO THE MUSIC is a production of Project X Productions.Host/producer: Rob MarnochaVoiceovers: Brad BordiniRecording, engineering, and post production: Rob MarnochaOpening theme: "Aerostar" by Los Straitjackets* (℗2013 Yep Roc Records)Closing theme: "Close to Champaign" by Los Straitjackets* (℗1999 Yep Roc Records)*Used with permission of Eddie Angel of Los StraitjacketsThis podcast copyright ©2025 by Project X Productions. All rights reserve...

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Tonight's Jazz Feature is this show's usual tribute to The Season and a long standing tradition. It's known as the "Bags' Groove Session". The music is truly classic and always worth hearing. Miles Davis is the nominal leader on trumpet with Milt Jackson on vibes, Thelonious Monk on piano, Percy Heath on bass and Kenny Clarke on drums. A meeting of Jazz Masters indeed. All of this was recorded on December 24,1954 and the whole date has a Christmassy feel to it even though that certainly wasn't the intention. We'll hear the 4 master takes from this timeless date and is our Christmas Jazz Feature. Merry Christmas to all!

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RIP to the legends Lou Donaldson and Roy Haynes, who passed recently. I play a couple of their records on the bookends of this episode. The Lou Donaldson joint that starts things off, a cover of "Everything I Play Gonh Be Funky," reminds of my very early days of digging, finding this at an East Village bookstore in 1997 or so, and always treasuring it. I didn't get hip to Mr. Haynes later on even though I already had some of the hundreds of records that he played on in my collection. In-between, I included some of my recent digs, since it's been a while since I last recorded an episode. Thanks as always to folks tuning in - working on a few things right now, more soon! For now, dig in and go and track down more of these legendary artists' work. Tracklist: Lou Donaldson, Steve Goodman, Luiz Bonfa, Cal Green, Milt Jackson, Jackie McLean, Roy Haynes

**It's The Jazz2Go Show Replay On traxfm.org. Jazz2Go Presented Some Classic & Contemporary/Neo Jazz/Samba/ Be Bop/ Jazz Crackers From Nigel Clark Quintet, Roy Haynes Quartet, Lou Donaldson (RIP), Nueva Manteca, Sergio Bore, Milt Jackson, Thelonious Monk, Negrocan, Zone, Chihiro Yamanaka, John Santos Sextet & More #originalpirates #JazzMusic #jazzfunk #jazzclub #jazzdance #neojazz #sambajazz #bebop Catch Jazz2Go Every Monday From 7PM UK Time Listen Live Here Via The Trax FM Player: chat.traxfm.org/player/index.html Mixcloud LIVE :mixcloud.com/live/traxfm Free Trax FM Android App: play.google.com/store/apps/det...mradio.ba.a6bcb The Trax FM Facebook Page : https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100092342916738 Trax FM Live On Hear This: hearthis.at/k8bdngt4/live Tunerr: tunerr.co/radio/Trax-FM Radio Garden: Trax FM Link: http://radio.garden/listen/trax-fm/IEnsCj55 OnLine Radio Box: onlineradiobox.com/uk/trax/?cs...cs=uk.traxRadio Radio Deck: radiodeck.com/radio/5a09e2de87...7e3370db06d44dc Radio.Net: traxfmlondon.radio.net Stream Radio : streema.com/radios/Trax_FM..The_Originals Live Online Radio: liveonlineradio.net/english/tr...ax-fm-103-3.htm**

Tonight"s Jazz Feature is a tribute to the great arranger/composer/producer and music icon Quincy Delight Jones or simply "Q". Quincy passed away peacefully at his home in Los Angeles at age 91 on November 3, 2024. He was born in Chicago on March 14,1933. Quincy's incredible history is easily accessed on the internet. So we turn to the Jazz feature album and it's a big band recording of Quincy's distinctive arrangements and really put Quincy on the Jazz map. It was done in September of 1956 and titled "This Is How I Feel About Jazz". It got rave reviews and established Jones as a top notch arranger/composer along with his production skills. The band is full o all star players from trumpeters Art farmer and Ernie Royal to saxophonists Phil Woods, Zoot Sims and Lucky Thompson and trombone masters like Jimmy Cleveland and Urbie Green and pianist Hank Jones, vibes master Milt Jackson to bassists Paul Chambers and Charles Mingus. The album is a masterpiece of arrangements and leaves room for so many great soloists too. Enjoy the earlt important music of Quincy Jones.

CHARLIE PARKER “Charlie Parker's Reboppers” – New York, November 26, 1945Ko-ko (2,3), Billie's bounce (1,3), Now's the time (1,3)Miles Davis (tp-1) Dizzy Gillespie (tp-2,p-3) Charlie Parker (as) Argonne Thornton (p-4) “Charlie Parker All Stars” – New York, May 8, 1947Donna LeeMiles Davis (tp) Charlie Parker (as) Bud Powell (p) Tommy Potter (b) Max Roach (d) “CHICAGO RHYTHMDIZZY GILLESPIEKINGS” “Dizzy Gillespie Sextet” – New York, February 28, 1945Groovin' high, Dizzy atmosphereDizzy Gillespie (tp) Charlie Parker (as) Clyde Hart (p) Remo Palmieri (g) Slam Stewart (b) Cozy Cole (d) “Dizzy Gillespie And His All Star Quintet” – New York, May 11, 1945Salt peanuts (dg,ens vcl),Dizzy Gillespie (tp,vcl) Charlie Parker (as) Al Haig (p) Curly Russell (b) Sidney Catlett “Shaw ‘Nuff” – New York, May 15, 1946Oop Bop Sha BamDizzy Gillespie (tp, vo) Sonny Stitt (as) Milt Jackson (vib) Al Haig (p) Ray Brown (b) Kenny Clarke (d) Gil Fuller, Alice Roberts (vo) THELONIOUS MONK “Thelonious Monk Trio” – New York, October 24, 1947Ruby my dear, Well you needn't, Off minorThelonious Monk (p) Gene Ramey (b) Art Blakey (d) “Thelonious Monk Quintet” – New York, November 21, 1947Monk's mood, ‘Round midnight George Tait (tp) Sahib Shihab (as) [aka Edmund Gregory (as) ] Thelonious Monk (p) Bob Paige (b) Art Blakey (d) “BUD POWELL TRIO” Linden, NJ, August 1949I'll remember April, Somebody loves me, I should careBud Powell (p) Curly Russell (b) Max Roach (d) New York, May 1, 1951Un poco locoBud Powell (p) Curly Russell (b) Max Roach (d) Continue reading Puro Jazz 04 de noviembre, 2024 at PuroJazz.

CHARLIE PARKER “Charlie Parker's Reboppers” – New York, November 26, 1945Ko-ko (2,3), Billie's bounce (1,3), Now's the time (1,3)Miles Davis (tp-1) Dizzy Gillespie (tp-2,p-3) Charlie Parker (as) Argonne Thornton (p-4) “Charlie Parker All Stars” – New York, May 8, 1947Donna LeeMiles Davis (tp) Charlie Parker (as) Bud Powell (p) Tommy Potter (b) Max Roach (d) “CHICAGO RHYTHMDIZZY GILLESPIEKINGS” “Dizzy Gillespie Sextet” – New York, February 28, 1945Groovin' high, Dizzy atmosphereDizzy Gillespie (tp) Charlie Parker (as) Clyde Hart (p) Remo Palmieri (g) Slam Stewart (b) Cozy Cole (d) “Dizzy Gillespie And His All Star Quintet” – New York, May 11, 1945Salt peanuts (dg,ens vcl),Dizzy Gillespie (tp,vcl) Charlie Parker (as) Al Haig (p) Curly Russell (b) Sidney Catlett “Shaw ‘Nuff” – New York, May 15, 1946Oop Bop Sha BamDizzy Gillespie (tp, vo) Sonny Stitt (as) Milt Jackson (vib) Al Haig (p) Ray Brown (b) Kenny Clarke (d) Gil Fuller, Alice Roberts (vo) THELONIOUS MONK “Thelonious Monk Trio” – New York, October 24, 1947Ruby my dear, Well you needn't, Off minorThelonious Monk (p) Gene Ramey (b) Art Blakey (d) “Thelonious Monk Quintet” – New York, November 21, 1947Monk's mood, ‘Round midnight George Tait (tp) Sahib Shihab (as) [aka Edmund Gregory (as) ] Thelonious Monk (p) Bob Paige (b) Art Blakey (d) “BUD POWELL TRIO” Linden, NJ, August 1949I'll remember April, Somebody loves me, I should careBud Powell (p) Curly Russell (b) Max Roach (d) New York, May 1, 1951Un poco locoBud Powell (p) Curly Russell (b) Max Roach (d) Continue reading Puro Jazz 04 de noviembre, 2024 at PuroJazz.

Diese Sendung hat Jörg Müller-Jahns zusammengestellt. Das LIVE- Anspiel ist diesmal: „So danco Samba“ – eine Komposition von Joao Gilberto. Folgende Titel sind zu hören: 1. Bouncin' with Bud – Bud Powell 3:00 2. Almost in your Arms – Claire Martin 3:28 3. So danco Samba – J. Gilberto,M.H. del Toledo, L.Bonfa & St.Getz 3:43 4. Satin Doll – Ella Fitzgerald 2:41 5. Tides – Ilja Ruf Trio feat. Nils Landgren 6:02 6. The Sheik of Araby – Quintette du Hot Club de France 3:02 7. Awakening – Lennart Allkemper 5:32 8. Tea for two – Sarah Mckenzie 4:07 9. Ev'ry time we say goodbye – Milt Jackson 2:35 Bei Titelwünsche und Anregungen schreiben Sie gern an: jazztime.mv@ndr.de Keep Swingin' !!!

The Jazz Session No.385 from RaidersBroadcast.com as aired in October 2024, featuring a contemplative, gentle and beautiful 2016 jazz guitar album “The Space Between”, from Stuart McCallum and Mike Walker. TRACK LISTING: Cry Me a River - Julie London; I Can't Give You Anything But Love - Cleo Laine & Dudley Moore; Are You From Dixie? - Wilbur de Paris; Magnolia's Wedding Day - Chris Barber's Jazz & Blues Band; Moment Us - Stuart McCallum, Mike Walker; As the Trees Waltz - Stuart McCallum, Mike Walker; Lost Angeles - Colosseum; Hibou, Anemone and Bear - Soft Machine; Take Five - Sachal Studios Orchestra ; A Blind Man - Shintaro Quintet ; Venus de Milo - Miles Davis; Our Delight - Dizzy Gillespie w. Milt Jackson & Ted Brown; Kin - Pat Metheny Unity Group; I Won't Give Up - Christian Tamburr; Yewfield - Stuart McCallum, Mike Walker; My Ideal - Stuart McCallum, Mike Walker; Solid - Sonny Rollins; Further - Federica Michisanti Trioness; Maxwell's Silver Hammer - Brad Mehldau; Paragon Rag - Joshua Rifkin.

Pallbearer [00:34] "An Offering of Grief" Sorrow and Extinction 20 Buck Spin SPIN048 2012 Full-length debut from this heavy doomy band from Little Rock AR. Easily one of the best records of 2012. Ray Charles & Milt Jackson [09:06] "Soul Meeting" Soul Meeting Atlantic SD 1360 1962 Two great tastes that vibe great together. Featuring Ray on piano, Milt on vibes, Kenny Burrell on guitar, Percy Heath on bass, and Art Taylor on drums. This one was written by Jackson, with illuminating parts from both Milt Jackson and Kenny Burrell. Curtis Harding [16:08] "Freedom" Soul Power Burger Records BRGR600 2014 Debut outing from this Atlanta musician. Describing his sound as "slop 'n soul", this one track has a definite Arthur Lee feel. Lou Rawls [18:49] "A Whole Lotta Woman" Soulin' Capitol Records T 2566 1966 Not a whole lotta love, not a whole lotta Rosie, but a whole lotta woman. John Coltrane with Red Garland [21:27] "Theme for Ernie" Soultrane Prestige 7142 1958 One of Coltrane's showcases for his distinctive sheets of sound style. Joined here by Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and again Art Taylor on drums. Les and Larry Elgart and their Orchestra [26:24] "You're My Thrill" Sound Ideas Columbia CL 1123 1958 Hailing from Pompton, New Jersey, these brothers developed their "Elgart Sound" in 1952 and released over half a dozen albums before parting after this album to pursue their musical interests. Mary Martin et al [30:02] "The Lonely Goatherd" The Sound of Music (Original Broadway Cast) Columbia Masterworks KOL 5450 1959 Now that's what I call yodeling! Pre-Julie Andrews obviously. Mary Martin was perhaps best known as playing the title role in the Broadway production of Peter Pan. Not sure how I knew this, but maybe it was due to living in New York for 20 years naking Broadway trivia inescapable. The Sinceros [33:23] "Take Me to Your Leader" The Sound of Sunbathing Epic EPC 83632 1979 The sticker on the cover says that this track is their featured single, so that's what I'm going with. Power pop-y new wave-y. Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass [37:10] "Casino Royale" Sounds Like... Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass A&M LP124 1967 You know I love a good shaggy dog of a film, and Casino Royale is definitely that. Well, the Daniel Craig version is too, but I'm talking about the 1967 comedy version with David Niven as Sir James Bond. Ravi Shankar [39:47] "An Introduction to Indian Music" The Sounds of India Columbia CS 9296 1968 (originally released in 1958) Re-released to tap into the growing interest thanks to the Beatles' interest in Indian music (specifically George Harrison). Relax! Simon & Garfunkel [43:56] "We've Got a Groovey Thing Goin'" The Sounds of Silence Columbia CS 9269 1966 Helped out here by The Wrecking Crew, including Glen Campbell and Joe South on guitar, Hal Blaine on drums, and Larry Knechtel on the Ray Charles-esque electric piano. Scott Walker + Sunn O))) [47:22] "Brando (Dweller on the Bluff)" Soused 4AD CAD 3428 2014 On the surface, it's an odd pairing, but as the music that fills this album suggests, it's a perfect pairing. Sunn O)))'s Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley had originally reached out to Walker about contributing to their 2009 album Monoliths and Dimensions but were unable to coordinate. Walker subsequently contacted about contributing drones to fill in the silence between his lyrics while working on his epic 2012 release Bish Bosch. Evidently, Sunn O))) brought their full stage equipment to Walker's studio for recording. If you are unfamiliar, it's a wall of Ampeg, Marshall, and HiWatt speakers with Ampeg SVT and Sunn Model T heads. Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass [56:06] "The Girl from Ipanema" South of the Border A&M SP-108 1964 South of the border, down Rio de Janiero way. Music behind the DJ: "If I Fell" by Perry Botkin Jr and his Orchestra

Longtime sax player with Basie's band, Wess was a dependable sideman and section player who was also one of the first great jazz flute players. Here, he displays his tenor sax and flute on three sessions - one with Kenny Clarke for Riverside (with Henry Coker, Charlie Fowlkes and Milt Jackson - on piano!), one for Jazztone with Urbie Green (strange bedfellows - Ruby Braff, Med Flory, Freddie Green, Sir Charles Thompson) and one track from the Joe Newman session for Vanguard with Frank Foster, Matthew Gee and Johnny Acea. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/john-clark49/support

Three great sessions by the pioneering bebop drummer when he was visiting the US from his home in Europe. The first was in Hollywood and features saxophonists Frank Morgan and Walter Benton along with Milt Jackson and Gerald Wiggins. The second is in NY with the Kenny Clarke-Ernie Wilkins Septet featuring the alto and tenor of Wilkins as well as his swinging arrangements and compositions (and Cecil Payne, George Barrow, Eddie Bert and Hank Jones). In between is the last - the 1955 Savoy session that represented the debut of the Adderleys - Cannonball and Nat, along with Jerome Richardson, Donald Byrd and Horace Silver. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/john-clark49/support

TODD MARCUS TRIO+ Silver Spring, MD, May 3 & July 6, 2019Something suite in 4 movements (4), Neophilia (3,4)Sean Jones (tp-1) Todd Marcus (b-cl,cl-2) Jeff Reed (b-3) Ameen Saleem (b-4) Ralph Peterson (d) Eric Kennedy (d-5) KENNY WHEELER GNU HIGH New York, June, 1975HeyokeKenny Wheeler (flhrn) Keith Jarrett (p) Dave Holland (b) Jack DeJohnette (d) MILT JACKSON & COLEMAN HAWKINS BEAN BAGS New York, September 12, 1958Don't take your love from me, Get happy, Indian bluesColeman Hawkins (ts) Milt Jackson (vib) Tommy Flanagan (p) Kenny Burrell (g) Eddie Jones (b) Connie Kay (d) Continue reading Puro Jazz 10 de Julio 2024 at PuroJazz.

Jazz in the Garden, Episode Three: “Return to the Garden” An overwhelmingly popular series of jazz concerts in MoMA's Sculpture Garden in 1985 proved…a little too popular, and it would be nearly a decade before live jazz was once again a regular occurrence at the Museum. In our third and final episode, hear about a new generation of musicians who revived the legacy of jazz at the Museum in the 1990s, and brought it into the 21st century. Writer/producers: Naeem Douglas, Alex Halberstadt, Jason Persse Host: Naeem Douglas Additional readings: Karen Chilton Engineer, mixer, original music: Zubin Hensler Special thanks: Prudence Peiffer, Arlette Hernandez, Ellen Levitt, Kelsey Head, Dore Murphy, Allison Knoll, Tina James, Michelle Harvey, Marc-Auguste Desert II, Omer Leibovitz, Peter Oleksik Music: “Namesake.” Written and performed by Milt Jackson. Courtesy of Universal Music Group. By arrangement with Reecie Music; “Soloscope, Part 1.” Written and performed by Sonny Rollins. Courtesy of Concord Records. By arrangement with Kobalt obo Son Rol Music Company; “Strauss Waltz Medley.” Written by Johann Strauss II. Performed by the United States Air Force Band. Public domain recording; “The Thrill Is Gone.” Written by Ray Henderson and Lew Brown. Performed by Claudia Acuña. Used by permission. By arrangement with Warner Chappell Music; “Mambo Jazz.” Written (as “Titorama”) by Chris Washburne. Performed by Chris Washburne and the Syotos Band. Used by permission. Courtesy Wash and Burne Music; “Moon Bird.” Written by Myra Melford. Performed by Myra Melford's The Tent. Used by permission. Courtesy Myra Melford; “Malinke's Dance.” Written by Marty Ehrlich. Performed by the Marty Ehrlich Sextet. Used by permission. Courtesy Marty Ehrlich

Jazz in the Garden, Episode Two: “One Magic Summer” After a golden age of big names and big crowds throughout the 1960s, by the mid 1970s live jazz at MoMA had become something of an afterthought. But a magical summer of performances in 1985—including landmark concerts by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, “Butch” Morris, and the “saxophone colossus” himself, Sonny Rollins—put the music back at center stage. Join us for our second episode, and hear the story from Rollins and others who were there. Writer/producers: Naeem Douglas, Alex Halberstadt, Jason Persse Host: Naeem Douglas Additional readings: Karen Chilton Engineer, mixer, original music: Zubin Hensler Special thanks: Prudence Peiffer, Arlette Hernandez, Ellen Levitt, Kelsey Head, Dore Murphy, Allison Knoll, Tina James, Michelle Harvey, Marc-Auguste Desert II, Omer Leibovitz, Peter Oleksik Music: “Now's The Time.” Written by Charlie Parker. Performed by Clark Terry. Courtesy of The Orchard. By arrangement with Universal Music Publishing and Sony Music Publishing; “Uncle.” Written and performed by the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Used by permission; courtesy credits pending; “Soloscope, Part 1.” Written and performed by Sonny Rollins. Courtesy of Concord Records. By arrangement with Kobalt obo Son Rol Music Company; “Namesake.” Written and performed by Milt Jackson. Courtesy of Universal Music Group. By arrangement with Reecie Music; “On Green Dolphin Street.” Written by Kaper Bronislaw, Ned Washington. Performed by Sonny Rollins. Courtesy of Universal Music Group. By arrangement with Reservoir Media, BRTS, and BMG

Six longer sets tonight: Red Garland, Soul Junction Jimmy Smith, Midnight Special Art Pepper, You Go to My Head WDR Big Band Köln & Joe Williams, Milt Jackson, Since I Fell For You Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers, One By One Wynton Marsalis, Doin' Your Thing

durée : 00:59:31 - Banzzaï du mercredi 05 juin 2024 - par : Nathalie Piolé -

Jazz in the Garden, Episode One: “In the Beginning” Our story begins on June 16, 1960, when George Wein and the Storyville Sextet played the first jazz concert in MoMA's Sculpture Garden—and launched more than a decade of legendary performances and recordings from some of the leading lights of jazz, including Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, and Sonny Rollins. In this episode, you'll hear about the first era of jazz at MoMA from some of the musicians who were there. Writer/producers: Naeem Douglas, Alex Halberstadt, Jason Persse Host: Naeem Douglas Additional readings: Karen Chilton Engineer, mixer, original music: Zubin Hensler Special thanks: Prudence Peiffer, Arlette Hernandez, Ellen Levitt, Kelsey Head, Dore Murphy, Allison Knoll, Tina James, Michelle Harvey, Marc-Auguste Desert II, Peter Oleksik Music: “That's a Plenty” (Live) (2014 remaster). Written by Lew Pollack. Performed by George Wein and the Storyville Sextet. Courtesy of Bethlehem Records. By arrangement with BMG Rights Management; “Soloscope.” Written and perfrormed by Sonny Rollins. Courtesy of Concord Records. By arrangement with Kobalt obo Son Rol Music Company; “Namesake.” Written and performed by Milt Jackson. Courtesy of Universal Music Group. Bt arrangement with Reecie Music; “September in the Rain.” Written by Al Dubin, Harry Warren. Performed by George Wein and the Storyville Sextet. Courtesy of BMG. By arrangement with WC Music Corp. (ASCAP); “Undecided.” Written by Charles Shavers. Performed by George Wein and the Storyville Sextet. Courtesy of BMG. By arrangement with Universal Music Publishing; “Novamo.” Written and performed by Milt Jackson. Courtesy of Universal Music Group. By arrangement with Hall Leonard; “Take the A Train.” Written by Billy Strayhorn. Performed by Clark Terry. Courtesy of The Orchard. By arrangement with Reservoir Media and WISE; “Take Three Parts Jazz.” Written by Teddy Charles. Performed by the Teddy Charles New Directions Quartet. Courtesy of 43 North Broadway LLC. By arrangement with Raybird Music; “A Night in Tunisia.” Written by John Gillespie, Frank Paparelli. Performed by the Dizzy Gillespie Quintet. Courtesy of Universal Music Group; “On Green Dolphin Street.” Written by Kaper Bronislaw, Ned Washington. Performed by Sonny Rollins. Courtesy of Universal Music Group. By arrangement with Reservoir Media, BRTS, and BMG; “The Quota.” Written by Jimmy Heath. Performed by Milt Jackson. Courtesy of Universal Music Group. By arrangement with Hall Leonard; “Now's The Time.” Written by Charlie Parker. Performed by Clark Terry. Courtesy of The Orchard. By arrangement with Universal Music Publishing and Sony Music Publishing

durée : 00:59:36 - Club Jazzafip - En cette journée de fête des mères, les mamans sont à l'honneur au Club Jazz à Fip, célébrées par Duke Ellington, Jacky Terrasson, Sonny Stitt, Milt Jackson, Greg Foat ou encore Henri Mancini.

Tonight's Jazz Feature is an indirect tribute to my late Mother, whose Birthday Anniversary is today: May 20. This album was one of her favorites. It is a classic by the great vibist and Modern Jazz pioneer, Milt Jackson. Jackson and his co-star here is flutist and tenor saxophonist Frank Wess. Wess of course is one of the great practitioners of Jazz flute. The rhythm section is superb and led by Hank Jones on piano and indeed he's one of the finest. Eddie Jones (no relation to Hank) is solid on bass and Kenny Clarke is his usual masterful self on drums. All of this was recorded for Savoy Records on October 28, 1955 and it's one of Milt Jackson's many gems and is tonight's Jazz feature. Enjoy!

Tomorrow is vibraphonist Walt Dickerson's Birthday Anniversary on April 16. Dickerson was born in Philadelphia on April 16. 1928 and passed away ay age 80 on May 15, 2008. He made his first album in March of 1961 and it is one of the finest debut recordings ever. He did 4 albums for Prestige/New Jazz that are all classics. He was recommended to the label by his friend Eric Dolphy. His debut album was called "This is Walt Dickerson" and was a Jazz Feature years ago on this show. Tonight's album in honor of his Birthday Anniversary is called "A Sense of Direction" and it's his second for Prestige/New Jazz. It is on the same level as his first with slightly different personnel. Dickerson is on vibes with Austin Crowe on piano, Eustis Guillemet Jr. on bass and Edgar Bateman on drums. Dickerson was really the first modern Jazz vibist NOT influenced by Milt Jackson . Walt's style is very original with busy metallic lines governed by his amazing technique yet Dickerson has a warm bell-like sound on his instrument. This album has 8 tunes and 5 by Dickerson and 3 well chosen standards."Sense of Direction"...tonight's Jazz Feature.

MILT JACKSON + COUNT BASIE + THE BIG BAND VOL 2 Hollywood, CA, January 16, 17 & 18, 1978Moonlight becomes you, Blues for Joe Turner (1), On the sunny side of the street Waymon Reed, Lin Biviano, Sonny Cohn, Pete Minger (tp) Bill Hughes, Mel Wanzo, Fred Wesley, Dennis Wilson (tb) Danny Turner, Bobby Plater (as) Eric Dixon (ts,fl) Kenny Hing (ts) Charlie Fowlkes (bar) Milt Jackson (vib) Count Basie (p) Freddie Green (g) John Clayton (b) Butch Miles (d) ROB GARCIA NATURAL BOUNCE Astoria, NY, April 13, 2022Dark blue horse power, Gary song, Fades to blue, Sweet JoeNoah Preminger (ts) Leo Genovese (p) Kim Cass (b) Rob Garcia (d,comp) HORACE SILVER SERENADE TO A SOUL SISTER Englewood Cliffs, NJ:February 23, 1968Psychedelic Sally (1), Serenade to a soul sisterCharles Tolliver (tp) Stanley Turrentine (ts) Horace Silver (p) Bob Cranshaw (b,el-b-1) Mickey Roker (d) March 29, 1968Kindred spiritsCharles Tolliver (tp) Bennie Maupin (fl,ts) Horace Silver (p) Johnny Williams (b) Billy Cobham (d) Continue reading Puro Jazz 01 abril 2024 at PuroJazz.

BEN ALLISON TELL THE BIRDS I SAID HELLO – THE MUSIC OF HERBIE NICHOLS Maggie's Farm, Pipersville PA, April 8-9, 2023Enrapture, Games and Codes, She Insists, Swan SongTed Nash (st) Steve Cardenas (g) Ben Allison (b JUN IIDA EVERGREEN Los Angeles, CA, November 22 & 23, 2022Gooey butter cake, Akatombo, EvergreenJun Iida (tp,comp) Josh Nelson (p,el-p) Masami Kuroki (g) Jonathan Richards (b) Xavier Lecouturier (d) Aubrey Johnson (vcl) MILT JACKSON PLENTY, PLENTY SOUL New York, January 7, 1957HeartstringsJoe Newman (tp) Jimmy Cleveland (tb) Cannonball Adderley (as) [as Ronnie Peters (as) ] Frank Foster (ts) Sahib Shihab (bar) Milt Jackson (vib) Horace Silver (p) Percy Heath (b) Art Blakey (d) Quincy Jones (arr New York, January 5, 1957Sermonette, Blues at twilightJoe Newman (tp) Lucky Thompson (ts) Milt Jackson (vib) Horace Silver (p) Oscar Pettiford (b) Connie Kay (d) Continue reading Puro Jazz 26 febrero 2024 at PuroJazz.

“Just keep going.”—Dave ChappelleFeaturing, in order of appearance:Kevin Hart, Questlove, Mo Amer, Bill Burr, Pras, Michelle Wolf, and Jon StewartContains music by:Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Max Roach, Miles Davis, Milt Jackson, and Stevie WonderRecorded in Ohio, Summer 2020Executive Produced by Talib Kweli, yasiin bey, Dave Chappelle, Noah Gersh, Jamie Schefman, Nick Panama, Kenzi Wilbur, and Miles HodgesProduced by Noah Gersh and Jamie Schefman for SALTProduction Manager: Liz LeMayRecording Engineer: Federico LopezRecording Engineer: Adrián Bruque for NPNDAssistant Editors: Danny Carissimi and Noah Kowalski Senior Sound Designer: Russell TopalTranscription Supervisor: Sam BeasleyMixer: Jordan GalvanPodcast Artwork: Rachel EckStill Photography: Mathieu BittonThe Midnight Miracle is a Luminary Original Podcast in partnership with Pilot Boy Productions and SALT.Special thanks to Paul Adongo, Cipriano Beredo, Elaine Chappelle, Ivy Davy, Rikki Hughes, Kyle Ranson-Walsh, Sina Sadighi, Mark Silverstein, and Carla Sims.Photography made available courtesy of Pilot Boy Productions, Inc. Copyright © 2021 by Pilot Boy Productions, Inc., all rights reserved.

On tonight's show: Earl Bostic, Zoot Sims & Bob Brookmeyer, Frank Sinatra, Eddie Jefferson, Horace Parlan, Ray Bryan with Walter Booker Jr. & Freddie Waits, WDR Big Band Köln with Joe Williams and Milt Jackson, George Robert, Dal Richards & His Orchestra, and Ximo Tebar & the Ivam Jazz Ensemble.

Tonight's Jazz Feature has been an important part of tonight's Christmas Jazz Show for many years and tradition will continue with the famous and lasting Christmas Eve (1954) recording session with the Miles Davis All-Stars. It's sometimes known as the "Bags' Groove Session" as that tune written by Milt Jackson is the opener. The All-Stars are of course, Miles Davis on trumpet, Milt Jackson on vibes, Thelonious Monk on piano, Percy Heath on bass and Kenny Clarke on drums. Four tunes were recorded and the session has gone into Jazz History as a very important document and timeless music. The men creating this music were just playing what they always played doing it so very well. The tunes are "Bags' Groove by Milt Jackson, Bemsha swing by Thelonious Monk, The Man I Love by the Gershwin Brothers, and Miles Davis', Swing Spring. The spirit of Christmas seems to be evident throughout the session without any actual reference to Christmas music, There will be more tributes to Christmas tonight so when the big day rolls around..... Merry Christmas to Jazz fans everywhere and to a brighter 2024.

Six longer sets tonight: Sidney Bechet, Gerry Mulligan, Wes Montgomery; Harry Carney, Paul Gonsalves, Harold Ashby & The Duke's Men, Duke Ellington with Ella Fitzgerald, Stanley Turrentine, and Milt Jackson

Six longer sets tonight: Sidney Bechet, Gerry Mulligan, Wes Montgomery; Harry Carney, Paul Gonsalves, Harold Ashby & The Duke's Men, Duke Ellington with Ella Fitzgerald, Stanley Turrentine, and Milt Jackson

Bebop meets R&B . . the Dizzy Gillespie Quintet (Dizzy, Bill Graham on baritone sax, Wade Legge, Milt Jackson or Wynton Kelly on piano, Al Jones on drums, Percy Heath on bass) with Milt Jackson on vibes, Joe Caroll and Melvin Moore singing, and Stuff Smith on violin. 1951 recordings for DeeGee and Savoy and live at the Salle Pleyel in Paris, 1953. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/john-clark49/support

Tonight's show: Peggy Lee, Georgie Auld & His Orchestra with Sarah Vaughan on vocals, Stan Kenton and His Orchestra, Earl Bostic, Oscar Peterson, Yusef Lateef, Ella Fitzgerald, Art Pepper, Richard "Groove" Holmes, Milt Jackson, Milt Jackson & The Ray Brown Big Band, Ledisi, and Chet Baker with Paul Desmond.

It has been three years since composer/pianist/educator Darrell Grant visited the Café at Artichoke Music. He's so busy and prolific it seems like we could have him on once a month. Of course he is still a tenured professor of Jazz Studies and Associate Director of the School of Music at Portland State University, but I also like to think of him in the true New Orleans use of the word “professor,” when it comes to pianists, one of great respect. He released a new album this week called Our Mr. Jackson, honoring not only the Modern Jazz Quartet and Milt Jackson but beloved Portland drummer, the late Carlton Jackson who plays on the album along with Marcus Shelby and Mike Horsfall. The album release concert takes place at Hallowed Halls on Thursday October 12. It's a beautiful album. Let's find out all about it. Listen to Versailles from the album at the end of our conversation.

Bandleader and pianist talks about growing up next door to Milt Jackson in Yonkers and his early trips into Manny's Music in New York City.

Tonight's show has lots of rhythm, spanning 1926 to 1999: Benny Goodman, Jelly Roll Morton & His Red Hot Peppers, Dizzy Gillespie with Charlie Parker, Fats Navarro, Red Norvo, Hank Jones. Also Machito with Cannonball Adderley, Milt Jackson, Dave Brubeck with Tony Bennett, Ray Charles, Ron Carter with Eric Dolphy and Mal Waldron, Ray Bryant, Earl "Fatha" Hines, Herbie Mann, The Crusaders, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, and Wynton Marsalis.

Back to the regular programming after a few weeks away! I have a LOT of new digs and purchases to play - here's just a short selection of some of the great music I've grabbed over the past month. RIP to the legends Wayne Shorter and Trugoy the Dove. Big shout out to everyone who streamed my De La Soul mix - make sure to support their re-releases! Tracklist: Pekka Pohoja, Wayne Shorter and Milton Nascimento, Yussef Dayes Experience, Juan Pablo Torres, Okonski, Joe Bonner, Don Burrows Quartet, Milt Jackson and Ray Brown

TWiV reviews an outbreak of Marburg hemorrhagic fever in Equatorial Guinea, wild poliovirus type 3 shedding from a laboratory in the Netherlands, and white-tailed deer as a reservoir for previous SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern. Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Dickson Despommier, and Rich Condit Subscribe (free): Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS, email Become a patron of TWiV! Links for this episode •Register for ASV 2023 •MicrobeTV Discord Server •Marburg virus disease outbreak in Equatorial Guinea (WHO) •Wild-type poliovirus type 3 from laboratory (Eurosurveillance) •Extinct SARS-CoV-2 VOC in white-tailed deer (PNAS) •Letters read on TWiV 985 •Timestamps by Jolene. Thanks! Weekly Picks Dickson – Jazz Project: Vibraphone: Lionel Hampton/Gary Burton/Cal Jader. Lionel Hampton: Signature album: The Classics Album Collection, Signature song: Flying Home. Gary Burton: Signature album: A Genuine Tong Funeral. Signature song: General Mojo's Well Laid Plan. Cal Jader: Signature album: Latin Kick. Signature song: Soul Sauce (Wachi Wara).  Milt Jackson (a member of the Modern Jazz Quartet). Signature song: Ice Skating in Central Park. Rich – The American Phage Group: Founders of Molecular Biology by William C. Summers Vincent – DJ Miss Monique aka Olesia Arkusha Listener Pick Megan – The Day The Music Stopped: How a 1942 recording ban changed America forever and The Weather Channel presents the best of smooth Jazz Intro music is by Ronald Jenkees Send your virology questions and comments to twiv@microbe.tv

A tribute to musicians born 100 years ago, this year.  Performers include: Hank Williams, Maria Callas, Wes Montgomery, Albert King, Milt Jackson, Buddy DeFranco and Ida Haendel.

Episode one hundred and fifty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “White Rabbit”, Jefferson Airplane, and the rise of the San Francisco sound. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three-minute bonus episode available, on "Omaha" by Moby Grape. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Erratum I refer to Back to Methuselah by Robert Heinlein. This is of course a play by George Bernard Shaw. What I meant to say was Methuselah's Children. Resources I hope to upload a Mixcloud tomorrow, and will edit it in, but have had some problems with the site today. Jefferson Airplane's first four studio albums, plus a 1968 live album, can be found in this box set. I've referred to three main books here. Got a Revolution!: The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane by Jeff Tamarkin is written with the co-operation of the band members, but still finds room to criticise them. Jefferson Airplane On Track by Richard Molesworth is a song-by-song guide to the band's music. And Been So Long: My Life and Music by Jorma Kaukonen is Kaukonen's autobiography. Some information on Skip Spence and Matthew Katz also comes from What's Big and Purple and Lives in the Ocean?: The Moby Grape Story, by Cam Cobb, which I also used for this week's bonus. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, I need to confess an important and hugely embarrassing error in this episode. I've only ever seen Marty Balin's name written down, never heard it spoken, and only after recording the episode, during the editing process, did I discover I mispronounce it throughout. It's usually an advantage for the podcast that I get my information from books rather than TV documentaries and the like, because they contain far more information, but occasionally it causes problems like that. My apologies. Also a brief note that this episode contains some mentions of racism, antisemitism, drug and alcohol abuse, and gun violence. One of the themes we've looked at in recent episodes is the way the centre of the musical world -- at least the musical world as it was regarded by the people who thought of themselves as hip in the mid-sixties -- was changing in 1967. Up to this point, for a few years there had been two clear centres of the rock and pop music worlds. In the UK, there was London, and any British band who meant anything had to base themselves there. And in the US, at some point around 1963, the centre of the music industry had moved West. Up to then it had largely been based in New York, and there was still a thriving industry there as of the mid sixties. But increasingly the records that mattered, that everyone in the country had been listening to, had come out of LA Soul music was, of course, still coming primarily from Detroit and from the Country-Soul triangle in Tennessee and Alabama, but when it came to the new brand of electric-guitar rock that was taking over the airwaves, LA was, up until the first few months of 1967, the only city that was competing with London, and was the place to be. But as we heard in the episode on "San Francisco", with the Monterey Pop Festival all that started to change. While the business part of the music business remained centred in LA, and would largely remain so, LA was no longer the hip place to be. Almost overnight, jangly guitars, harmonies, and Brian Jones hairstyles were out, and feedback, extended solos, and droopy moustaches were in. The place to be was no longer LA, but a few hundred miles North, in San Francisco -- something that the LA bands were not all entirely happy about: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Who Needs the Peace Corps?"] In truth, the San Francisco music scene, unlike many of the scenes we've looked at so far in this series, had rather a limited impact on the wider world of music. Bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company were all both massively commercially successful and highly regarded by critics, but unlike many of the other bands we've looked at before and will look at in future, they didn't have much of an influence on the bands that would come after them, musically at least. Possibly this is because the music from the San Francisco scene was always primarily that -- music created by and for a specific group of people, and inextricable from its context. The San Francisco musicians were defining themselves by their geographical location, their peers, and the situation they were in, and their music was so specifically of the place and time that to attempt to copy it outside of that context would appear ridiculous, so while many of those bands remain much loved to this day, and many made some great music, it's very hard to point to ways in which that music influenced later bands. But what they did influence was the whole of rock music culture. For at least the next thirty years, and arguably to this day, the parameters in which rock musicians worked if they wanted to be taken seriously – their aesthetic and political ideals, their methods of collaboration, the cultural norms around drug use and sexual promiscuity, ideas of artistic freedom and authenticity, the choice of acceptable instruments – in short, what it meant to be a rock musician rather than a pop, jazz, country, or soul artist – all those things were defined by the cultural and behavioural norms of the San Francisco scene between about 1966 and 68. Without the San Francisco scene there's no Woodstock, no Rolling Stone magazine, no Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, no hippies, no groupies, no rock stars. So over the next few months we're going to take several trips to the Bay Area, and look at the bands which, for a brief time, defined the counterculture in America. The story of Jefferson Airplane -- and unlike other bands we've looked at recently, like The Pink Floyd and The Buffalo Springfield, they never had a definite article at the start of their name to wither away like a vestigial organ in subsequent years -- starts with Marty Balin. Balin was born in Ohio, but was a relatively sickly child -- he later talked about being autistic, and seems to have had the chronic illnesses that so often go with neurodivergence -- so in the hope that the dry air would be good for his chest his family moved to Arizona. Then when his father couldn't find work there, they moved further west to San Francisco, in the Haight-Ashbury area, long before that area became the byword for the hippie movement. But it was in LA that he started his music career, and got his surname. Balin had been named Marty Buchwald as a kid, but when he was nineteen he had accompanied a friend to LA to visit a music publisher, and had ended up singing backing vocals on her demos. While he was there, he had encountered the arranger Jimmy Haskell. Haskell was on his way to becoming one of the most prominent arrangers in the music industry, and in his long career he would go on to do arrangements for Bobby Gentry, Blondie, Steely Dan, Simon and Garfunkel, and many others. But at the time he was best known for his work on Ricky Nelson's hits: [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, "Hello Mary Lou"] Haskell thought that Marty had the makings of a Ricky Nelson style star, as he was a good-looking young man with a decent voice, and he became a mentor for the young man. Making the kind of records that Haskell arranged was expensive, and so Haskell suggested a deal to him -- if Marty's father would pay for studio time and musicians, Haskell would make a record with him and find him a label to put it out. Marty's father did indeed pay for the studio time and the musicians -- some of the finest working in LA at the time. The record, released under the name Marty Balin, featured Jack Nitzsche on keyboards, Earl Palmer on drums, Milt Jackson on vibraphone, Red Callender on bass, and Glen Campbell and Barney Kessell on guitars, and came out on Challenge Records, a label owned by Gene Autry: [Excerpt: Marty Balin, "Nobody But You"] Neither that, nor Balin's follow-up single, sold a noticeable amount of copies, and his career as a teen idol was over before it had begun. Instead, as many musicians of his age did, he decided to get into folk music, joining a vocal harmony group called the Town Criers, who patterned themselves after the Weavers, and performed the same kind of material that every other clean-cut folk vocal group was performing at the time -- the kind of songs that John Phillips and Steve Stills and Cass Elliot and Van Dyke Parks and the rest were all performing in their own groups at the same time. The Town Criers never made any records while they were together, but some archival recordings of them have been released over the decades: [Excerpt: The Town Criers, "900 Miles"] The Town Criers split up, and Balin started performing as a solo folkie again. But like all those other then-folk musicians, Balin realised that he had to adapt to the K/T-event level folk music extinction that happened when the Beatles hit America like a meteorite. He had to form a folk-rock group if he wanted to survive -- and given that there were no venues for such a group to play in San Francisco, he also had to start a nightclub for them to play in. He started hanging around the hootenannies in the area, looking for musicians who might form an electric band. The first person he decided on was a performer called Paul Kantner, mainly because he liked his attitude. Kantner had got on stage in front of a particularly drunk, loud, crowd, and performed precisely half a song before deciding he wasn't going to perform in front of people like that and walking off stage. Kantner was the only member of the new group to be a San Franciscan -- he'd been born and brought up in the city. He'd got into folk music at university, where he'd also met a guitar player named Jorma Kaukonen, who had turned him on to cannabis, and the two had started giving music lessons at a music shop in San Jose. There Kantner had also been responsible for booking acts at a local folk club, where he'd first encountered acts like Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, a jug band which included Jerry Garcia, Pigpen McKernan, and Bob Weir, who would later go on to be the core members of the Grateful Dead: [Excerpt: Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, "In the Jailhouse Now"] Kantner had moved around a bit between Northern and Southern California, and had been friendly with two other musicians on the Californian folk scene, David Crosby and Roger McGuinn. When their new group, the Byrds, suddenly became huge, Kantner became aware of the possibility of doing something similar himself, and so when Marty Balin approached him to form a band, he agreed. On bass, they got in a musician called Bob Harvey, who actually played double bass rather than electric, and who stuck to that for the first few gigs the group played -- he had previously been in a band called the Slippery Rock String Band. On drums, they brought in Jerry Peloquin, who had formerly worked for the police, but now had a day job as an optician. And on vocals, they brought in Signe Toley -- who would soon marry and change her name to Signe Anderson, so that's how I'll talk about her to avoid confusion. The group also needed a lead guitarist though -- both Balin and Kantner were decent rhythm players and singers, but they needed someone who was a better instrumentalist. They decided to ask Kantner's old friend Jorma Kaukonen. Kaukonen was someone who was seriously into what would now be called Americana or roots music. He'd started playing the guitar as a teenager, not like most people of his generation inspired by Elvis or Buddy Holly, but rather after a friend of his had shown him how to play an old Carter Family song, "Jimmy Brown the Newsboy": [Excerpt: The Carter Family, "Jimmy Brown the Newsboy"] Kaukonen had had a far more interesting life than most of the rest of the group. His father had worked for the State Department -- and there's some suggestion he'd worked for the CIA -- and the family had travelled all over the world, staying in Pakistan, the Philippines, and Finland. For most of his childhood, he'd gone by the name Jerry, because other kids beat him up for having a foreign name and called him a Nazi, but by the time he turned twenty he was happy enough using his birth name. Kaukonen wasn't completely immune to the appeal of rock and roll -- he'd formed a rock band, The Triumphs, with his friend Jack Casady when he was a teenager, and he loved Ricky Nelson's records -- but his fate as a folkie had been pretty much sealed when he went to Antioch College. There he met up with a blues guitarist called Ian Buchanan. Buchanan never had much of a career as a professional, but he had supposedly spent nine years studying with the blues and ragtime guitar legend Rev. Gary Davis, and he was certainly a fine guitarist, as can be heard on his contribution to The Blues Project, the album Elektra put out of white Greenwich Village musicians like John Sebastian and Dave Van Ronk playing old blues songs: [Excerpt: Ian Buchanan, "The Winding Boy"] Kaukonen became something of a disciple of Buchanan -- he said later that Buchanan probably taught him how to play because he was such a terrible player and Buchanan couldn't stand to listen to it -- as did John Hammond Jr, another student at Antioch at the same time. After studying at Antioch, Kaukonen started to travel around, including spells in Greenwich Village and in the Philippines, before settling in Santa Clara, where he studied for a sociology degree and became part of a social circle that included Dino Valenti, Jerry Garcia, and Billy Roberts, the credited writer of "Hey Joe". He also started performing as a duo with a singer called Janis Joplin. Various of their recordings from this period circulate, mostly recorded at Kaukonen's home with the sound of his wife typing in the background while the duo rehearse, as on this performance of an old Bessie Smith song: [Excerpt: Jorma Kaukonen and Janis Joplin, "Nobody Loves You When You're Down and Out"] By 1965 Kaukonen saw himself firmly as a folk-blues purist, who would not even think of playing rock and roll music, which he viewed with more than a little contempt. But he allowed himself to be brought along to audition for the new group, and Ken Kesey happened to be there. Kesey was a novelist who had written two best-selling books, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion, and used the financial independence that gave him to organise a group of friends who called themselves the Merry Pranksters, who drove from coast to coast and back again in a psychedelic-painted bus, before starting a series of events that became known as Acid Tests, parties at which everyone was on LSD, immortalised in Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Nobody has ever said why Kesey was there, but he had brought along an Echoplex, a reverb unit one could put a guitar through -- and nobody has explained why Kesey, who wasn't a musician, had an Echoplex to hand. But Kaukonen loved the sound that he could get by putting his guitar through the device, and so for that reason more than any other he decided to become an electric player and join the band, going out and buying a Rickenbacker twelve-string and Vox Treble Booster because that was what Roger McGuinn used. He would later also get a Guild Thunderbird six-string guitar and a Standel Super Imperial amp, following the same principle of buying the equipment used by other guitarists he liked, as they were what Zal Yanovsky of the Lovin' Spoonful used. He would use them for all his six-string playing for the next couple of years, only later to discover that the Lovin' Spoonful despised them and only used them because they had an endorsement deal with the manufacturers. Kaukonen was also the one who came up with the new group's name. He and his friends had a running joke where they had "Bluesman names", things like "Blind Outrage" and "Little Sun Goldfarb". Kaukonen's bluesman name, given to him by his friend Steve Talbot, had been Blind Thomas Jefferson Airplane, a reference to the 1920s blues guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Match Box Blues"] At the band meeting where they were trying to decide on a name, Kaukonen got frustrated at the ridiculous suggestions that were being made, and said "You want a stupid name? Howzabout this... Jefferson Airplane?" He said in his autobiography "It was one of those rare moments when everyone in the band agreed, and that was that. I think it was the only band meeting that ever allowed me to come away smiling." The newly-named Jefferson Airplane started to rehearse at the Matrix Club, the club that Balin had decided to open. This was run with three sound engineer friends, who put in the seed capital for the club. Balin had stock options in the club, which he got by trading a share of the band's future earnings to his partners, though as the group became bigger he eventually sold his stock in the club back to his business partners. Before their first public performance, they started working with a manager, Matthew Katz, mostly because Katz had access to a recording of a then-unreleased Bob Dylan song, "Lay Down Your Weary Tune": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Lay Down Your Weary Tune"] The group knew that the best way for a folk-rock band to make a name for themselves was to perform a Dylan song nobody else had yet heard, and so they agreed to be managed by Katz. Katz started a pre-publicity blitz, giving out posters, badges, and bumper stickers saying "Jefferson Airplane Loves You" all over San Francisco -- and insisting that none of the band members were allowed to say "Hello" when they answered the phone any more, they had to say "Jefferson Airplane Loves You!" For their early rehearsals and gigs, they were performing almost entirely cover versions of blues and folk songs, things like Fred Neil's "The Other Side of This Life" and Dino Valenti's "Get Together" which were the common currency of the early folk-rock movement, and songs by their friends, like one called "Flower Bomb" by David Crosby, which Crosby now denies ever having written. They did start writing the odd song, but at this point they were more focused on performance than on writing. They also hired a press agent, their friend Bill Thompson. Thompson was friends with the two main music writers at the San Francisco Chronicle, Ralph Gleason, the famous jazz critic, who had recently started also reviewing rock music, and John Wasserman. Thompson got both men to come to the opening night of the Matrix, and both gave the group glowing reviews in the Chronicle. Record labels started sniffing around the group immediately as a result of this coverage, and according to Katz he managed to get a bidding war started by making sure that when A&R men came to the club there were always two of them from different labels, so they would see the other person and realise they weren't the only ones interested. But before signing a record deal they needed to make some personnel changes. The first member to go was Jerry Peloquin, for both musical and personal reasons. Peloquin was used to keeping strict time and the other musicians had a more free-flowing idea of what tempo they should be playing at, but also he had worked for the police while the other members were all taking tons of illegal drugs. The final break with Peloquin came when he did the rest of the group a favour -- Paul Kantner's glasses broke during a rehearsal, and as Peloquin was an optician he offered to take them back to his shop and fix them. When he got back, he found them auditioning replacements for him. He beat Kantner up, and that was the end of Jerry Peloquin in Jefferson Airplane. His replacement was Skip Spence, who the group had met when he had accompanied three friends to the Matrix, which they were using as a rehearsal room. Spence's friends went on to be the core members of Quicksilver Messenger Service along with Dino Valenti: [Excerpt: Quicksilver Messenger Service, "Dino's Song"] But Balin decided that Spence looked like a rock star, and told him that he was now Jefferson Airplane's drummer, despite Spence being a guitarist and singer, not a drummer. But Spence was game, and learned to play the drums. Next they needed to get rid of Bob Harvey. According to Harvey, the decision to sack him came after David Crosby saw the band rehearsing and said "Nice song, but get rid of the bass player" (along with an expletive before the word bass which I can't say without incurring the wrath of Apple). Crosby denies ever having said this. Harvey had started out in the group on double bass, but to show willing he'd switched in his last few gigs to playing an electric bass. When he was sacked by the group, he returned to double bass, and to the Slippery Rock String Band, who released one single in 1967: [Excerpt: The Slippery Rock String Band, "Tule Fog"] Harvey's replacement was Kaukonen's old friend Jack Casady, who Kaukonen knew was now playing bass, though he'd only ever heard him playing guitar when they'd played together. Casady was rather cautious about joining a rock band, but then Kaukonen told him that the band were getting fifty dollars a week salary each from Katz, and Casady flew over from Washington DC to San Francisco to join the band. For the first few gigs, he used Bob Harvey's bass, which Harvey was good enough to lend him despite having been sacked from the band. Unfortunately, right from the start Casady and Kantner didn't get on. When Casady flew in from Washington, he had a much more clean-cut appearance than the rest of the band -- one they've described as being nerdy, with short, slicked-back, side-parted hair and a handlebar moustache. Kantner insisted that Casady shave the moustache off, and he responded by shaving only one side, so in profile on one side he looked clean-shaven, while from the other side he looked like he had a full moustache. Kantner also didn't like Casady's general attitude, or his playing style, at all -- though most critics since this point have pointed to Casady's bass playing as being the most interesting and distinctive thing about Jefferson Airplane's style. This lineup seems to have been the one that travelled to LA to audition for various record companies -- a move that immediately brought the group a certain amount of criticism for selling out, both for auditioning for record companies and for going to LA at all, two things that were already anathema on the San Francisco scene. The only audition anyone remembers them having specifically is one for Phil Spector, who according to Kaukonen was waving a gun around during the audition, so he and Casady walked out. Around this time as well, the group performed at an event billed as "A Tribute to Dr. Strange", organised by the radical hippie collective Family Dog. Marvel Comics, rather than being the multi-billion-dollar Disney-owned corporate juggernaut it is now, was regarded as a hip, almost underground, company -- and around this time they briefly started billing their comics not as comics but as "Marvel Pop Art Productions". The magical adventures of Dr. Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts, and in particular the art by far-right libertarian artist Steve Ditko, were regarded as clear parallels to both the occult dabblings and hallucinogen use popular among the hippies, though Ditko had no time for either, following as he did an extreme version of Ayn Rand's Objectivism. It was at the Tribute to Dr. Strange that Jefferson Airplane performed for the first time with a band named The Great Society, whose lead singer, Grace Slick, would later become very important in Jefferson Airplane's story: [Excerpt: The Great Society, "Someone to Love"] That gig was also the first one where the band and their friends noticed that large chunks of the audience were now dressing up in costumes that were reminiscent of the Old West. Up to this point, while Katz had been managing the group and paying them fifty dollars a week even on weeks when they didn't perform, he'd been doing so without a formal contract, in part because the group didn't trust him much. But now they were starting to get interest from record labels, and in particular RCA Records desperately wanted them. While RCA had been the label who had signed Elvis Presley, they had otherwise largely ignored rock and roll, considering that since they had the biggest rock star in the world they didn't need other ones, and concentrating largely on middle-of-the-road acts. But by the mid-sixties Elvis' star had faded somewhat, and they were desperate to get some of the action for the new music -- and unlike the other major American labels, they didn't have a reciprocal arrangement with a British label that allowed them to release anything by any of the new British stars. The group were introduced to RCA by Rod McKuen, a songwriter and poet who later became America's best-selling poet and wrote songs that sold over a hundred million copies. At this point McKuen was in his Jacques Brel phase, recording loose translations of the Belgian songwriter's songs with McKuen translating the lyrics: [Excerpt: Rod McKuen, "Seasons in the Sun"] McKuen thought that Jefferson Airplane might be a useful market for his own songs, and brought the group to RCA. RCA offered Jefferson Airplane twenty-five thousand dollars to sign with them, and Katz convinced the group that RCA wouldn't give them this money without them having signed a management contract with him. Kaukonen, Kantner, Spence, and Balin all signed without much hesitation, but Jack Casady didn't yet sign, as he was the new boy and nobody knew if he was going to be in the band for the long haul. The other person who refused to sign was Signe Anderson. In her case, she had a much better reason for refusing to sign, as unlike the rest of the band she had actually read the contract, and she found it to be extremely worrying. She did eventually back down on the day of the group's first recording session, but she later had the contract renegotiated. Jack Casady also signed the contract right at the start of the first session -- or at least, he thought he'd signed the contract then. He certainly signed *something*, without having read it. But much later, during a court case involving the band's longstanding legal disputes with Katz, it was revealed that the signature on the contract wasn't Casady's, and was badly forged. What he actually *did* sign that day has never been revealed, to him or to anyone else. Katz also signed all the group as songwriters to his own publishing company, telling them that they legally needed to sign with him if they wanted to make records, and also claimed to RCA that he had power of attorney for the band, which they say they never gave him -- though to be fair to Katz, given the band members' habit of signing things without reading or understanding them, it doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that they did. The producer chosen for the group's first album was Tommy Oliver, a friend of Katz's who had previously been an arranger on some of Doris Day's records, and whose next major act after finishing the Jefferson Airplane album was Trombones Unlimited, who released records like "Holiday for Trombones": [Excerpt: Trombones Unlimited, "Holiday For Trombones"] The group weren't particularly thrilled with this choice, but were happier with their engineer, Dave Hassinger, who had worked on records like "Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones, and had a far better understanding of the kind of music the group were making. They spent about three months recording their first album, even while continually being attacked as sellouts. The album is not considered their best work, though it does contain "Blues From an Airplane", a collaboration between Spence and Balin: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Blues From an Airplane"] Even before the album came out, though, things were starting to change for the group. Firstly, they started playing bigger venues -- their home base went from being the Matrix club to the Fillmore, a large auditorium run by the promoter Bill Graham. They also started to get an international reputation. The British singer-songwriter Donovan released a track called "The Fat Angel" which namechecked the group: [Excerpt: Donovan, "The Fat Angel"] The group also needed a new drummer. Skip Spence decided to go on holiday to Mexico without telling the rest of the band. There had already been some friction with Spence, as he was very eager to become a guitarist and songwriter, and the band already had three songwriting guitarists and didn't really see why they needed a fourth. They sacked Spence, who went on to form Moby Grape, who were also managed by Katz: [Excerpt: Moby Grape, "Omaha"] For his replacement they brought in Spencer Dryden, who was a Hollywood brat like their friend David Crosby -- in Dryden's case he was Charlie Chaplin's nephew, and his father worked as Chaplin's assistant. The story normally goes that the great session drummer Earl Palmer recommended Dryden to the group, but it's also the case that Dryden had been in a band, the Heartbeats, with Tommy Oliver and the great blues guitarist Roy Buchanan, so it may well be that Oliver had recommended him. Dryden had been primarily a jazz musician, playing with people like the West Coast jazz legend Charles Lloyd, though like most jazzers he would slum it on occasion by playing rock and roll music to pay the bills. But then he'd seen an early performance by the Mothers of Invention, and realised that rock music could have a serious artistic purpose too. He'd joined a band called The Ashes, who had released one single, the Jackie DeShannon song "Is There Anything I Can Do?" in December 1965: [Excerpt: The Ashes, "Is There Anything I Can Do?"] The Ashes split up once Dryden left the group to join Jefferson Airplane, but they soon reformed without him as The Peanut Butter Conspiracy, who hooked up with Gary Usher and released several albums of psychedelic sunshine pop. Dryden played his first gig with the group at a Republican Party event on June the sixth, 1966. But by the time Dryden had joined, other problems had become apparent. The group were already feeling like it had been a big mistake to accede to Katz's demands to sign a formal contract with him, and Balin in particular was getting annoyed that he wouldn't let the band see their finances. All the money was getting paid to Katz, who then doled out money to the band when they asked for it, and they had no idea if he was actually paying them what they were owed or not. The group's first album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, finally came out in September, and it was a comparative flop. It sold well in San Francisco itself, selling around ten thousand copies in the area, but sold basically nothing anywhere else in the country -- the group's local reputation hadn't extended outside their own immediate scene. It didn't help that the album was pulled and reissued, as RCA censored the initial version of the album because of objections to the lyrics. The song "Runnin' Round This World" was pulled off the album altogether for containing the word "trips", while in "Let Me In" they had to rerecord two lines -- “I gotta get in, you know where" was altered to "You shut the door now it ain't fair" and "Don't tell me you want money" became "Don't tell me it's so funny". Similarly in "Run Around" the phrase "as you lay under me" became "as you stay here by me". Things were also becoming difficult for Anderson. She had had a baby in May and was not only unhappy with having to tour while she had a small child, she was also the band member who was most vocally opposed to Katz. Added to that, her husband did not get on well at all with the group, and she felt trapped between her marriage and her bandmates. Reports differ as to whether she quit the band or was fired, but after a disastrous appearance at the Monterey Jazz Festival, one way or another she was out of the band. Her replacement was already waiting in the wings. Grace Slick, the lead singer of the Great Society, had been inspired by going to one of the early Jefferson Airplane gigs. She later said "I went to see Jefferson Airplane at the Matrix, and they were making more money in a day than I made in a week. They only worked for two or three hours a night, and they got to hang out. I thought 'This looks a lot better than what I'm doing.' I knew I could more or less carry a tune, and I figured if they could do it I could." She was married at the time to a film student named Jerry Slick, and indeed she had done the music for his final project at film school, a film called "Everybody Hits Their Brother Once", which sadly I can't find online. She was also having an affair with Jerry's brother Darby, though as the Slicks were in an open marriage this wasn't particularly untoward. The three of them, with a couple of other musicians, had formed The Great Society, named as a joke about President Johnson's programme of the same name. The Great Society was the name Johnson had given to his whole programme of domestic reforms, including civil rights for Black people, the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts, and more. While those projects were broadly popular among the younger generation, Johnson's escalation of the war in Vietnam had made him so personally unpopular that even his progressive domestic programme was regarded with suspicion and contempt. The Great Society had set themselves up as local rivals to Jefferson Airplane -- where Jefferson Airplane had buttons saying "Jefferson Airplane Loves You!" the Great Society put out buttons saying "The Great Society Really Doesn't Like You Much At All". They signed to Autumn Records, and recorded a song that Darby Slick had written, titled "Someone to Love" -- though the song would later be retitled "Somebody to Love": [Excerpt: The Great Society, "Someone to Love"] That track was produced by Sly Stone, who at the time was working as a producer for Autumn Records. The Great Society, though, didn't like working with Stone, because he insisted on them doing forty-five takes to try to sound professional, as none of them were particularly competent musicians. Grace Slick later said "Sly could play any instrument known to man. He could have just made the record himself, except for the singers. It was kind of degrading in a way" -- and on another occasion she said that he *did* end up playing all the instruments on the finished record. "Someone to Love" was put out as a promo record, but never released to the general public, and nor were any of the Great Society's other recordings for Autumn Records released. Their contract expired and they were let go, at which point they were about to sign to Mercury Records, but then Darby Slick and another member decided to go off to India for a while. Grace's marriage to Jerry was falling apart, though they would stay legally married for several years, and the Great Society looked like it was at an end, so when Grace got the offer to join Jefferson Airplane to replace Signe Anderson, she jumped at the chance. At first, she was purely a harmony singer -- she didn't take over any of the lead vocal parts that Anderson had previously sung, as she had a very different vocal style, and instead she just sang the harmony parts that Anderson had sung on songs with other lead vocalists. But two months after the album they were back in the studio again, recording their second album, and Slick sang lead on several songs there. As well as the new lineup, there was another important change in the studio. They were still working with Dave Hassinger, but they had a new producer, Rick Jarrard. Jarrard was at one point a member of the folk group The Wellingtons, who did the theme tune for "Gilligan's Island", though I can't find anything to say whether or not he was in the group when they recorded that track: [Excerpt: The Wellingtons, "The Ballad of Gilligan's Island"] Jarrard had also been in the similar folk group The Greenwood County Singers, where as we heard in the episode on "Heroes and Villains" he replaced Van Dyke Parks. He'd also released a few singles under his own name, including a version of Parks' "High Coin": [Excerpt: Rick Jarrard, "High Coin"] While Jarrard had similar musical roots to those of Jefferson Airplane's members, and would go on to produce records by people like Harry Nilsson and The Family Tree, he wasn't any more liked by the band than their previous producer had been. So much so, that a few of the band members have claimed that while Jarrard is the credited producer, much of the work that one would normally expect to be done by a producer was actually done by their friend Jerry Garcia, who according to the band members gave them a lot of arranging and structural advice, and was present in the studio and played guitar on several tracks. Jarrard, on the other hand, said categorically "I never met Jerry Garcia. I produced that album from start to finish, never heard from Jerry Garcia, never talked to Jerry Garcia. He was not involved creatively on that album at all." According to the band, though, it was Garcia who had the idea of almost doubling the speed of the retitled "Somebody to Love", turning it into an uptempo rocker: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Somebody to Love"] And one thing everyone is agreed on is that it was Garcia who came up with the album title, when after listening to some of the recordings he said "That's as surrealistic as a pillow!" It was while they were working on the album that was eventually titled Surrealistic Pillow that they finally broke with Katz as their manager, bringing Bill Thompson in as a temporary replacement. Or at least, it was then that they tried to break with Katz. Katz sued the group over their contract, and won. Then they appealed, and they won. Then Katz appealed the appeal, and the Superior Court insisted that if he wanted to appeal the ruling, he had to put up a bond for the fifty thousand dollars the group said he owed them. He didn't, so in 1970, four years after they sacked him as their manager, the appeal was dismissed. Katz appealed the dismissal, and won that appeal, and the case dragged on for another three years, at which point Katz dragged RCA Records into the lawsuit. As a result of being dragged into the mess, RCA decided to stop paying the group their songwriting royalties from record sales directly, and instead put the money into an escrow account. The claims and counterclaims and appeals *finally* ended in 1987, twenty years after the lawsuits had started and fourteen years after the band had stopped receiving their songwriting royalties. In the end, the group won on almost every point, and finally received one point three million dollars in back royalties and seven hundred thousand dollars in interest that had accrued, while Katz got a small token payment. Early in 1967, when the sessions for Surrealistic Pillow had finished, but before the album was released, Newsweek did a big story on the San Francisco scene, which drew national attention to the bands there, and the first big event of what would come to be called the hippie scene, the Human Be-In, happened in Golden Gate Park in January. As the group's audience was expanding rapidly, they asked Bill Graham to be their manager, as he was the most business-minded of the people around the group. The first single from the album, "My Best Friend", a song written by Skip Spence before he quit the band, came out in January 1967 and had no more success than their earlier recordings had, and didn't make the Hot 100. The album came out in February, and was still no higher than number 137 on the charts in March, when the second single, "Somebody to Love", was released: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Somebody to Love"] That entered the charts at the start of April, and by June it had made number five. The single's success also pushed its parent album up to number three by August, just behind the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Monkees' Headquarters. The success of the single also led to the group being asked to do commercials for Levis jeans: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Levis commercial"] That once again got them accused of selling out. Abbie Hoffman, the leader of the Yippies, wrote to the Village Voice about the commercials, saying "It summarized for me all the doubts I have about the hippie philosophy. I realise they are just doing their 'thing', but while the Jefferson Airplane grooves with its thing, over 100 workers in the Levi Strauss plant on the Tennessee-Georgia border are doing their thing, which consists of being on strike to protest deplorable working conditions." The third single from the album, "White Rabbit", came out on the twenty-fourth of June, the day before the Beatles recorded "All You Need is Love", nine days after the release of "See Emily Play", and a week after the group played the Monterey Pop Festival, to give you some idea of how compressed a time period we've been in recently. We talked in the last episode about how there's a big difference between American and British psychedelia at this point in time, because the political nature of the American counterculture was determined by the fact that so many people were being sent off to die in Vietnam. Of all the San Francisco bands, though, Jefferson Airplane were by far the least political -- they were into the culture part of the counterculture, but would often and repeatedly disavow any deeper political meaning in their songs. In early 1968, for example, in a press conference, they said “Don't ask us anything about politics. We don't know anything about it. And what we did know, we just forgot.” So it's perhaps not surprising that of all the American groups, they were the one that was most similar to the British psychedelic groups in their influences, and in particular their frequent references to children's fantasy literature. "White Rabbit" was a perfect example of this. It had started out as "White Rabbit Blues", a song that Slick had written influenced by Alice in Wonderland, and originally performed by the Great Society: [Excerpt: The Great Society, "White Rabbit"] Slick explained the lyrics, and their association between childhood fantasy stories and drugs, later by saying "It's an interesting song but it didn't do what I wanted it to. What I was trying to say was that between the ages of zero and five the information and the input you get is almost indelible. In other words, once a Catholic, always a Catholic. And the parents read us these books, like Alice in Wonderland where she gets high, tall, and she takes mushrooms, a hookah, pills, alcohol. And then there's The Wizard of Oz, where they fall into a field of poppies and when they wake up they see Oz. And then there's Peter Pan, where if you sprinkle white dust on you, you could fly. And then you wonder why we do it? Well, what did you read to me?" While the lyrical inspiration for the track was from Alice in Wonderland, the musical inspiration is less obvious. Slick has on multiple occasions said that the idea for the music came from listening to Miles Davis' album "Sketches of Spain", and in particular to Davis' version of -- and I apologise for almost certainly mangling the Spanish pronunciation badly here -- "Concierto de Aranjuez", though I see little musical resemblance to it myself. [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "Concierto de Aranjuez"] She has also, though, talked about how the song was influenced by Ravel's "Bolero", and in particular the way the piece keeps building in intensity, starting softly and slowly building up, rather than having the dynamic peaks and troughs of most music. And that is definitely a connection I can hear in the music: [Excerpt: Ravel, "Bolero"] Jefferson Airplane's version of "White Rabbit", like their version of "Somebody to Love", was far more professional, far -- and apologies for the pun -- slicker than The Great Society's version. It's also much shorter. The version by The Great Society has a four and a half minute instrumental intro before Slick's vocal enters. By contrast, the version on Surrealistic Pillow comes in at under two and a half minutes in total, and is a tight pop song: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "White Rabbit"] Jack Casady has more recently said that the group originally recorded the song more or less as a lark, because they assumed that all the drug references would mean that RCA would make them remove the song from the album -- after all, they'd cut a song from the earlier album because it had a reference to a trip, so how could they possibly allow a song like "White Rabbit" with its lyrics about pills and mushrooms? But it was left on the album, and ended up making the top ten on the pop charts, peaking at number eight: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "White Rabbit"] In an interview last year, Slick said she still largely lives off the royalties from writing that one song. It would be the last hit single Jefferson Airplane would ever have. Marty Balin later said "Fame changes your life. It's a bit like prison. It ruined the band. Everybody became rich and selfish and self-centred and couldn't care about the band. That was pretty much the end of it all. After that it was just working and living the high life and watching the band destroy itself, living on its laurels." They started work on their third album, After Bathing at Baxter's, in May 1967, while "Somebody to Love" was still climbing the charts. This time, the album was produced by Al Schmitt. Unlike the two previous producers, Schmitt was a fan of the band, and decided the best thing to do was to just let them do their own thing without interfering. The album took months to record, rather than the weeks that Surrealistic Pillow had taken, and cost almost ten times as much money to record. In part the time it took was because of the promotional work the band had to do. Bill Graham was sending them all over the country to perform, which they didn't appreciate. The group complained to Graham in business meetings, saying they wanted to only play in big cities where there were lots of hippies. Graham pointed out in turn that if they wanted to keep having any kind of success, they needed to play places other than San Francisco, LA, New York, and Chicago, because in fact most of the population of the US didn't live in those four cities. They grudgingly took his point. But there were other arguments all the time as well. They argued about whether Graham should be taking his cut from the net or the gross. They argued about Graham trying to push for the next single to be another Grace Slick lead vocal -- they felt like he was trying to make them into just Grace Slick's backing band, while he thought it made sense to follow up two big hits with more singles with the same vocalist. There was also a lawsuit from Balin's former partners in the Matrix, who remembered that bit in the contract about having a share in the group's income and sued for six hundred thousand dollars -- that was settled out of court three years later. And there were interpersonal squabbles too. Some of these were about the music -- Dryden didn't like the fact that Kaukonen's guitar solos were getting longer and longer, and Balin only contributed one song to the new album because all the other band members made fun of him for writing short, poppy, love songs rather than extended psychedelic jams -- but also the group had become basically two rival factions. On one side were Kaukonen and Casady, the old friends and virtuoso instrumentalists, who wanted to extend the instrumental sections of the songs more to show off their playing. On the other side were Grace Slick and Spencer Dryden, the two oldest members of the group by age, but the most recent people to join. They were also unusual in the San Francisco scene for having alcohol as their drug of choice -- drinking was thought of by most of the hippies as being a bit classless, but they were both alcoholics. They were also sleeping together, and generally on the side of shorter, less exploratory, songs. Kantner, who was attracted to Slick, usually ended up siding with her and Dryden, and this left Balin the odd man out in the middle. He later said "I got disgusted with all the ego trips, and the band was so stoned that I couldn't even talk to them. Everybody was in their little shell". While they were still working on the album, they released the first single from it, Kantner's "The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil". The "Pooneil" in the song was a figure that combined two of Kantner's influences: the Greenwich Village singer-songwriter Fred Neil, the writer of "Everybody's Talkin'" and "Dolphins"; and Winnie the Pooh. The song contained several lines taken from A.A. Milne's children's stories: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil"] That only made number forty-two on the charts. It was the last Jefferson Airplane single to make the top fifty. At a gig in Bakersfield they got arrested for inciting a riot, because they encouraged the crowd to dance, even though local by-laws said that nobody under sixteen was allowed to dance, and then they nearly got arrested again after Kantner's behaviour on the private plane they'd chartered to get them back to San Francisco that night. Kantner had been chain-smoking, and this annoyed the pilot, who asked Kantner to put his cigarette out, so Kantner opened the door of the plane mid-flight and threw the lit cigarette out. They'd chartered that plane because they wanted to make sure they got to see a new group, Cream, who were playing the Fillmore: [Excerpt: Cream, "Strange Brew"] After seeing that, the divisions in the band were even wider -- Kaukonen and Casady now *knew* that what the band needed was to do long, extended, instrumental jams. Cream were the future, two-minute pop songs were the past. Though they weren't completely averse to two-minute pop songs. The group were recording at RCA studios at the same time as the Monkees, and members of the two groups would often jam together. The idea of selling out might have been anathema to their *audience*, but the band members themselves didn't care about things like that. Indeed, at one point the group returned from a gig to the mansion they were renting and found squatters had moved in and were using their private pool -- so they shot at the water. The squatters quickly moved on. As Dryden put it "We all -- Paul, Jorma, Grace, and myself -- had guns. We weren't hippies. Hippies were the people that lived on the streets down in Haight-Ashbury. We were basically musicians and art school kids. We were into guns and machinery" After Bathing at Baxter's only went to number seventeen on the charts, not a bad position but a flop compared to their previous album, and Bill Graham in particular took this as more proof that he had been right when for the last few months he'd been attacking the group as self-indulgent. Eventually, Slick and Dryden decided that either Bill Graham was going as their manager, or they were going. Slick even went so far as to try to negotiate a solo deal with Elektra Records -- as the voice on the hits, everyone was telling her she was the only one who mattered anyway. David Anderle, who was working for the label, agreed a deal with her, but Jac Holzman refused to authorise the deal, saying "Judy Collins doesn't get that much money, why should Grace Slick?" The group did fire Graham, and went one further and tried to become his competitors. They teamed up with the Grateful Dead to open a new venue, the Carousel Ballroom, to compete with the Fillmore, but after a few months they realised they were no good at running a venue and sold it to Graham. Graham, who was apparently unhappy with the fact that the people living around the Fillmore were largely Black given that the bands he booked appealed to mostly white audiences, closed the original Fillmore, renamed the Carousel the Fillmore West, and opened up a second venue in New York, the Fillmore East. The divisions in the band were getting worse -- Kaukonen and Casady were taking more and more speed, which was making them play longer and faster instrumental solos whether or not the rest of the band wanted them to, and Dryden, whose hands often bled from trying to play along with them, definitely did not want them to. But the group soldiered on and recorded their fourth album, Crown of Creation. This album contained several songs that were influenced by science fiction novels. The most famous of these was inspired by the right-libertarian author Robert Heinlein, who was hugely influential on the counterculture. Jefferson Airplane's friends the Monkees had already recorded a song based on Heinlein's The Door Into Summer, an unintentionally disturbing novel about a thirty-year-old man who falls in love with a twelve-year-old girl, and who uses a combination of time travel and cryogenic freezing to make their ages closer together so he can marry her: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Door Into Summer"] Now Jefferson Airplane were recording a song based on Heinlein's most famous novel, Stranger in a Strange Land. Stranger in a Strange Land has dated badly, thanks to its casual homophobia and rape-apologia, but at the time it was hugely popular in hippie circles for its advocacy of free love and group marriages -- so popular that a religion, the Church of All Worlds, based itself on the book. David Crosby had taken inspiration from it and written "Triad", a song asking two women if they'll enter into a polygamous relationship with him, and recorded it with the Byrds: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Triad"] But the other members of the Byrds disliked the song, and it was left unreleased for decades. As Crosby was friendly with Jefferson Airplane, and as members of the band were themselves advocates of open relationships, they recorded their own version with Slick singing lead: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Triad"] The other song on the album influenced by science fiction was the title track, Paul Kantner's "Crown of Creation". This song was inspired by The Chrysalids, a novel by the British writer John Wyndham. The Chrysalids is one of Wyndham's most influential novels, a post-apocalyptic story about young children who are born with mutant superpowers and have to hide them from their parents as they will be killed if they're discovered. The novel is often thought to have inspired Marvel Comics' X-Men, and while there's an unpleasant eugenic taste to its ending, with the idea that two species can't survive in the same ecological niche and the younger, "superior", species must outcompete the old, that idea also had a lot of influence in the counterculture, as well as being a popular one in science fiction. Kantner's song took whole lines from The Chrysalids, much as he had earlier done with A.A. Milne: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Crown of Creation"] The Crown of Creation album was in some ways a return to the more focused songwriting of Surrealistic Pillow, although the sessions weren't without their experiments. Slick and Dryden collaborated with Frank Zappa and members of the Mothers of Invention on an avant-garde track called "Would You Like a Snack?" (not the same song as the later Zappa song of the same name) which was intended for the album, though went unreleased until a CD box set decades later: [Excerpt: Grace Slick and Frank Zappa, "Would You Like a Snack?"] But the finished album was generally considered less self-indulgent than After Bathing at Baxter's, and did better on the charts as a result. It reached number six, becoming their second and last top ten album, helped by the group's appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in September 1968, a month after it came out. That appearance was actually organised by Colonel Tom Parker, who suggested them to Sullivan as a favour to RCA Records. But another TV appearance at the time was less successful. They appeared on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, one of the most popular TV shows among the young, hip, audience that the group needed to appeal to, but Slick appeared in blackface. She's later said that there was no political intent behind this, and that she was just trying the different makeup she found in the dressing room as a purely aesthetic thing, but that doesn't really explain the Black power salute she gives at one point. Slick was increasingly obnoxious on stage, as her drinking was getting worse and her relationship with Dryden was starting to break down. Just before the Smothers Brothers appearance she was accused at a benefit for the Whitney Museum of having called the audience "filthy Jews", though she has always said that what she actually said was "filthy jewels", and she was talking about the ostentatious jewellery some of the audience were wearing. The group struggled through a performance at Altamont -- an event we will talk about in a future episode, so I won't go into it here, except to say that it was a horrifying experience for everyone involved -- and performed at Woodstock, before releasing their fifth studio album, Volunteers, in 1969: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Volunteers"] That album made the top twenty, but was the last album by the classic lineup of the band. By this point Spencer Dryden and Grace Slick had broken up, with Slick starting to date Kantner, and Dryden was also disappointed at the group's musical direction, and left. Balin also left, feeling sidelined in the group. They released several more albums with varying lineups, including at various points their old friend David Frieberg of Quicksilver Messenger Service, the violinist Papa John Creach, and the former drummer of the Turtles, Johnny Barbata. But as of 1970 the group's members had already started working on two side projects -- an acoustic band called Hot Tuna, led by Kaukonen and Casady, which sometimes also featured Balin, and a project called Paul Kantner's Jefferson Starship, which also featured Slick and had recorded an album, Blows Against the Empire, the second side of which was based on the Robert Heinlein novel Back to Methuselah, and which became one of the first albums ever nominated for science fiction's Hugo Awards: [Excerpt: Jefferson Starship, "Have You Seen The Stars Tonite"] That album featured contributions from David Crosby and members of the Grateful Dead, as well as Casady on two tracks, but  in 1974 when Kaukonen and Casady quit Jefferson Airplane to make Hot Tuna their full-time band, Kantner, Slick, and Frieberg turned Jefferson Starship into a full band. Over the next decade, Jefferson Starship had a lot of moderate-sized hits, with a varying lineup that at one time or another saw several members, including Slick, go and return, and saw Marty Balin back with them for a while. In 1984, Kantner left the group, and sued them to stop them using the Jefferson Starship name. A settlement was reached in which none of Kantner, Slick, Kaukonen, or Casady could use the words "Jefferson" or "Airplane" in their band-names without the permission of all the others, and the remaining members of Jefferson Starship renamed their band just Starship -- and had three number one singles in the late eighties with Slick on lead, becoming far more commercially successful than their precursor bands had ever been: [Excerpt: Starship, "We Built This City on Rock & Roll"] Slick left Starship in 1989, and there was a brief Jefferson Airplane reunion tour, with all the classic members but Dryden, but then Slick decided that she was getting too old to perform rock and roll music, and decided to retire from music and become a painter, something she's stuck to for more than thirty years. Kantner and Balin formed a new Jefferson Starship, called Jefferson Starship: The Next Generation, but Kantner died in January 2016, coincidentally on the same day as Signe Anderson, who had occasionally guested with her old bandmates in the new version of the band. Balin, who had quit the reunited Jefferson Starship due to health reasons, died two years later. Dryden had died in 2005. Currently, there are three bands touring that descend directly from Jefferson Airplane. Hot Tuna still continue to perform, there's a version of Starship that tours featuring one original member, Mickey Thomas, and the reunited Jefferson Starship still tour, led by David Frieberg. Grace Slick has given the latter group her blessing, and even co-wrote one song on their most recent album, released in 2020, though she still doesn't perform any more. Jefferson Airplane's period in the commercial spotlight was brief -- they had charting singles for only a matter of months, and while they had top twenty albums for a few years after their peak, they really only mattered to the wider world during that brief period of the Summer of Love. But precisely because their period of success was so short, their music is indelibly associated with that time. To this day there's nothing as evocative of summer 1967 as "White Rabbit", even for those of us who weren't born then. And while Grace Slick had her problems, as I've made very clear in this episode, she inspired a whole generation of women who went on to be singers themselves, as one of the first prominent women to sing lead with an electric rock band. And when she got tired of doing that, she stopped, and got on with her other artistic pursuits, without feeling the need to go back and revisit the past for ever diminishing returns. One might only wish that some of her male peers had followed her example.