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Another recent Night Lights program, exploring pianist Herbie Hancock's powerful emergence on the 1960s jazz scene, up for online listening: Maiden Voyage: Herbie Hancock In The 1960s

This week on Night Lights it’s “The Arrival of Victor Feldman.” Multi-instrumentalist Victor Feldman was a musical prodigy who sat in on drums with Glenn Miller’s Army Air Force Band at the age of 10 and was hailed by the English press as “Kid Krupa.” After continuing his rise to fame in the 1950s British jazz world, Feldman moved to America and eventually made his way to the West Coast jazz scene. We’ll hear the records he made both as a sideman and a leader, playing piano and vibes with Cannonball Adderley, Shelly Manne, Miles Davis, and Scott La Faro. You can read a 1971 interview with Feldman here. “The Arrival of Victor Feldman” airs Saturday, December 9 at 11:05 p.m. EST on WFIU and at 9 p.m. Central Time on WNIN-Evansville. It also airs Sunday at 10 p.m. EST on Michigan's Blue Lake Public Radio. The program will be posted Monday afternoon in the Night Lights archives. Next week: "A Jazzy Quartet." Jazz soloists and ensembles accompanied by string quartets.

The new issue of the literary periodical Brilliant Corners includes a poem inspired in part by the Night Lights program The Jazz Monk: Thomas Merton. Though it's not available online, the poet (Betsy Sholl, former Poet Laureate of Maine) and publisher/editor Sascha Feinstein have given me permission to share it: "Thomas Merton Experiments with Meditations on Jazz" (Brilliant Corners is always well worth checking out, btw. Poetry, fiction, interviews, and other literary content all related to jazz.)

A recent new Night Lights show, highlighting singer Ella Fitzgerald's prolific year of 1957, which saw her recording close to one hundred tracks and collaborating with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Oscar Peterson, and Stan Getz: Ella '57: Ella Fitzgerald Flies High

The most recent Night Lights program, Jazzing The Cool With Ted Gioia is now up for online listening. Gioia, the author of The History of Jazz and West Coast Jazz, talks about his new book The Birth (and Death) of the Cooland jazz's relationship to cool, from Bix Beiderbecke up to the present day, with plenty of music accompanying the timeline. And the Night Lights Six Degrees of Support fund-drive continues, as the show heads towards its sixth anniversary. If you're a regular listener or somebody who enjoys the program and its archives from time to time, please consider making a contribution...any amount is welcome! The direct link to the support page is here.

Posting this brand-new Night Lights program in honor of Mr. Tyner's 80th birthday today: Tyner Time: McCoy Tyner's Blue Note Years The show focuses exclusively on his leader dates for Blue Note from 1967 to 1970.

Posting this week’s Night Lights show a bit early in honor of the Nat King Cole centennial—the music and story of Cole’s groundbreaking 1956-57 TV variety program: “The Jackie Robinson of Television”: The Nat King Cole Show It also airs at 10 this evening on Michigan’s Blue Lake Public Radio.

A recent Night Lights show featuring saxophonist and composer Jimmy Heath's early-1960s Riverside recordings is now up for online listening: Portrait Of Jimmy Heath: The Riverside Years

Last week’s Night Lights took a look at the musical career of pianist Don Shirley, recently depicted in the Oscar-nominated movie Green Book: “Jazz Is Not A Noun”: Don Shirley, The Extraordinary Pianist

This past weekend's "Portrait of Max: Max Roach, 1924-2007" (tribute program by listener request) is now archived. Next week: "Jazz Studio 5 and 6: Ralph Burns and David Amram."

My annual take, with a number of recordings listed in the post that I wasn't able to include in the program itself. There's a note at the bottom about why the Mosaic Herman and Mobley sets are not present. Best Historical Jazz Releases Of 2019 I also didn't include the Miles Davis 1969 Lost Quintet concert because I actually haven't heard it yet (the import CD I received was defective and had to be returned) and the U.S. release is slated for next week. I'd say it's a promising candidate for the 2020 list.

For the Easter weekend, a wide-ranging survey of 1960s sacred jazz, with Duke Ellington, Mary Lou Williams, Ed Summerlin, Paul Horn and Lalo Schifrin, Vince Guaraldi, Joe Masters, Herbie Hancock, and even a humorous take on the jazz-mass trend from Al Jazzbo Collins. Much more on the program's website page, including a clip of Ellington's first sacred concert, performed at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco in September 1965: Sacred Blue: Jazz Goes To Church In The 1960s

Happy holidays, all--Night Lights' annual Christmas show is posted for online listening, with music from Paul Bley, Carla Bley, Duke Pearson, Eddie Higgins, June Christy, Pete Rugolo, and more: A Cool Christmas Season's greetings and all that jazz!

Last week’s Night Lights show, about songwriter Hoagy Carmichael’s Hollywood years, is now archived for online listening. It includes an introduction from John Hasse and archival interview commentary from Carmichael biographer Richard Sudhalter and longtime WFIU radio host Dick Bishop: Where The Rainbow Hits The Ground: Hoagy Carmichael In Hollywood

An early chapter in music biz D.I.Y.: Tom Wilson, a young African-American Harvard graduate who'd go on to produce some of the 1960s' most landmark albums, working with Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground, and Frank Zappa, started out in the 1950s by running his own label, Transition Records. Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Herb Pomeroy, Donald Byrd, Paul Chambers/John Coltrane, Louis Smith and Herb Pomeroy were some the jazz artists who recorded for Transition--some of them making their debut on wax. The music of all of these artists, plus more of the backstory on Wilson, this week on Night Lights: Before Rock, There Was Jazz: Tom Wilson And Transition Records Broadcast times around the U.S. Next week: "Sweet Smell of Success."

In honor of pianist Harold Mabern's 75th birthday (coming up tomorrow, Sunday, March 20): A Few Miles From Memphis: Harold Mabern, the Early Years Covering 1960-70 with the MJT + 3, the Jazztet, Wes Montgomery, and Hank Mobley, as well as leader dates featuring Lee Morgan and George Coleman.

1957 was a prolific year for Art Blakey, the volcanic drummer and leader of the Jazz Messengers. The Messengers were one of jazz’s most-noted and longest-running collectives, and young musicians such as Freddie Hubbard, Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Woody Shaw, Keith Jarrett, and Wynton Marsalis all pulled tours of duty with the group, sometimes called “the hardbop academy.” Its bop-and-funk-driven history stretches from the late 1940s to the beginning of the 1990s; the lesser-known 1957 edition included saxophonists Jackie McLean and Johnny Griffin, as well as trumpeter Bill Hardman, whose chemistry with McLean one writer described as “beautiful, tart…their brash, peppery tones created a distinctive front-line sound.” Blakey recorded a myriad of albums in 1957 for various labels, including Columbia, Bethlehem, RCA, and Pacific Jazz, resulting in one of his most diverse years on record. We’ll hear music from eight different LPs, including the Messengers’ collaboration with Thelonious Monk, the three-horn Night in Tunisia date, one of Blakey’s percussion/rhythm numbers, and two “Jazz-Messengers-plus” sides that venture into the realm of Blakey big-band. Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers: Class Of '57 airs Saturday evening, Dec. 29 at 11:05 p.m. on WFIU. It will be posted for online listening Monday morning in the preceding link and in the Night Lights archives. Next week: "Moodsville 2."

In honor of the 93rd anniversary of Trane's birth today, here are several Night Lights shows that I've devoted to him over the years: Trane '57: John Coltrane's Pivotal Year In Jazz Trane '62: The Classic Coltrane Quartet Begins Trane '63: A Classic, A Challenge, A Change Red Trane: The Collaborations Of John Coltrane And Red Garland The John Coltrane Songbook

A recent Night Lights program devoted to saxophonist Lester Young's late-1940s recordings, with special guest Loren Schoenberg (annotator of both Young Mosaic box sets) is now up for online listening: Postwar Prez:  Lester Young 1945-1950

This past week's Night Lights show, Goin' Up: Space Age Jazz is now archived for online listening. In addition to the above listed, music from Gil Melle, Curtis Counce, Earl Bostic, Russ Garcia, Mel Torme, and Frank Comstock, as well as some space sounds and news flashes. Special thanks to board members Teasing the Korean, Medjuck, and jazztrain.

For arcane behind-the-scene reasons I won't go into, my radio station WFIU has been forced over the past year to convert all of its web content from the WordPress format that we used for many years to Cascade, a system used by the university that is less user and creator-friendly than WordPress. Our integrated media staff has been working to make the transition as easy as possible, but certain functions may not appear as readily. One such instance is looking for shows in the archives. To access the older, month-by-month and year-by-year version, you can still go to this page: Night Lights archives It's currently available through a small "older stories" link at the bottom of the archives page on the new site. There's also no longer an individual search bar for Night Lights itself (well, there appears to be through the link above, but if you search for anything within it, it takes you to the new home-page), so you have to use the general WFIU search box in the upper righthand corner of the Night Lights home page. You can also generally google "Night Lights" and the artist or approximate title/subject of a show and turn it up that way. I'm hoping we can soon get a new Night Lights-specific search tool to be present and working again. I'll be working with the integrated-media team in the next few weeks to try to get the new Cascades version of the website up to some level of convenience resembling the WordPress-generated site. For the time being, only posts from the last several months are going to be immediately visible when you visit the home page.

This week's Night Lights program, an indirect jazz celebration of the 4th of July, is up for online listening: Freedom Jazz! A couple of the featured recordings are included as well in the post/playlist I did for this week's NPR Take Five column: Five Platters For Your 4th Of July Picnic Special note of thanks to Chuck Nessa, who turned me on to the Ellington recording of "Rhapsody in Blue" years ago.

Suggestions, additions welcome: http://indianapublicmedia.org/nightlights/jazz-capitals-america-books/

The recent Night Lights show, Jazz For Mad Men: Hits From The 1960s is now archived for online listening.

This past week's Night Lights program up for online listening, including a tribute on a 1944 Orson Welles radio program to clarinetist Jimmy Noone, the Duke Ellington orchestra with Alice Babs performing Norris Turney's "Checkered Hat" salute to Johnny Hodges, Elvin Jones' "Lament For John Coltrane" from the Bob Thiele Emergency's Head Start album, and more: Turn Out The Stars Volume 5