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A recent Night Lights show, featuring music from the first batch of Xanadu reissues and an interview with reissue producer Zev Feldman, is up for online listening: Return To Xanadu: Rebirth Of A Label At the bottom of the web post there's also some news from Zev about upcoming releases from Elemental Music and Resonance.

Posted for Sonny Rollins' 85th birthday, last week's Night Lights show delves into the story and music of his early-1960s return to the jazz scene, following a two-year sabbatical. The program page includes video of Rollins' quartet performing live in 1962: Crossing The Bridge: The Return Of Sonny Rollins

Last week's Night Lights show focused on the diverse body of work that Nina Simone recorded for RCA in the late 1960s and early 70s, interpreting songwriters from Hoagy Carmichael to Jimmy Webb, offering civil-rights commentary through songs such as "Backlash Blues" and "I Wish I Knew How It Feels To Be Free," and incorporating folk, pop, rock and soul into her repertoire. You can listen to it here: Here Comes The Sun: Nina Simone On RCA

This weekend's Night Lights Louis Armstrong program is up, featuring lots of music from Armstrong's 1947-57 period (including the bebopper parody of "The Whiffenpoof Song") and interviews with jazz writer Dan Morgenstern and historian Michael McGerr: It's All in the Game: Louis Armstrong, 1947-57 The program page also includes about half a dozen outtakes from my interviews with Dan and Michael, as well as a segment on Louis and Jack Teagarden that had to be removed from the final version of the program, and a slide show featuring several William Gottlieb photographs of Armstrong (as well as a revelation about the cover of the AMBASSADOR SATCH album ). A happy Fourth of July holiday weekend to all.

In the years following World War II, a number of African-American jazz musicians took up residence in France, inspired by the relative lack of racism, the working opportunities, and the appreciation that French audiences showed for their art. Jazz greats such as Dexter Gordon, Bud Powell, Kenny Clarke, and Don Byas spent long periods of time on the European continent and made many recordings there; we’ll hear from them as well as trumpeter Bill Coleman, tenor saxophonist Lucky Thompson, avant-garde group the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and more. More here. The program airs this Saturday at 11:05 p.m. on WFIU and will be archived Monday morning on the new Night Lights website.

A roundup of four Night Lights programs devoted to the year of 1957 for Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers, John Coltrane, Curtis Fuller, and Sonny Rollins: 1957 Four Portraits In Jazz

The Connection was a groundbreaking 1959 off-Broadway play from New York City’s Living Theater group, written by Jack Gelber, that cast jazz musicians as heroin addicts waiting for a score. Artists that passed through the play included pianist Freddie Redd (who composed the original score), alto saxophonist Jackie McLean, tenor saxophonist Tina Brooks, and pianist Cecil Taylor. The Connection was made into a 1961 movie directed by Shirley Clarke, who would go on to film the adaptation of Warren Miller’s controversial Harlem-set novel The Cool World. A West Coast production was also staged in Los Angeles, with different music written by cast member Dexter Gordon. The show won several Obies and ran for more than 700 performances; eventually it was presented in London, where its raw immediacy and demolition of the normal boundaries between audience and cast provoked a near-riot. We’ll hear music from four different versions of The Connection’s soundtrack–the Blue Note album released under Freddie Redd’s name, the Felsted record on which Tina Brooks replaced Jackie McLean and trumpeter Howard McGhee was added to the line-up; baritone saxophonist Cecil Payne and pianist Kenny Drew’s rarely-heard 1962 score; Dexter Gordon’s Blue Note recordings of two of the pieces he wrote for the Los Angeles production; and a performance of one of Redd’s compositions by a French group led by Daniel Humair as well (the show was staged in Paris in the early 1960s). We’ll also hear dialogue from the 1961 movie version, which included original cast members Freddie Redd and Jackie McLean. Though parts of The Connection may now sound dated, it remains a cultural landmark of both early-1960s jazz and theater–a moment when the jazz world found itself in the service of avant-garde drama. There's more, including video from the movie of McLean and Redd performing "Who Killed Cock Robin?" on the program page for the show on the new Night Lights website. The Connection: The Living Theater and Hardbop Jazz airs tonight at 11:05 p.m. EST on WFIU and at 9 p.m. Central Time on WNIN-Evansville, and at 10 p.m. EST Sunday evening on Michigan's Blue Lake Public Radio. The program will be posted for online listening Monday morning in the Night Lights archives. (Note: this is a re-recording of a previous program, with extra music added.) Next week: "Trane '57."

Sure looks like October out there to me... music for the autumn this week on Night Lights, including Jack Kerouac reading from "October in the Railroad Earth," Stan Getz doing "Early Autumn," Sinatra and Ellington teaming up for "Indian Summer," plus video clips of Nat King Cole and the 1964 Miles Davis Quintet doing their respective takes on "Autumn Leaves": Autumn Serenades

Here's a new, recent Night Lights show about Duke Pearson's late-1960s big band up for online listening: http://indianapublicmedia.org/nightlights/hear-duke-pearsons-big-band/ Special thanks to board member Ted O'Reilly for providing the audio interview excerpt of Pearson speaking.

The Horace Silver Songbook Horace Silver turns 80 on Tuesday, September 2, and Night Lights pays tribute to his compositions this week with performances by Art Blakey, Woody Herman, Art Farmer, Mark Murphy, Eddie Jefferson, Chet Baker, Ran Blake, and Silver himself. The program airs tonight at 11 p.m. EST on WFIU and will be archived for online listening Monday morning at the link above (which also includes a video of Silver performing "Senor Blues" in 1959). Next week: "Last of the Lions: Gerald Wilson."

More info about the show, plus a video clip from the late-1950s proto-black-nationalist documentary The Cry of Jazz (featuring music and appearances by members of the Arkestra), at Second Magic City: Sun Ra in Chicago. "Second Magic City" airs Saturday, Oct. 27 at 11:05 p.m. EST on WFIU and at 9 p.m. Central Time on WNIN-Evansville. It will also air Sunday evening at 10 p.m. EST on Michigan's Blue Lake Public Radio. The program will be posted for online listening Monday morning in the Night Lights archives. Next week: a live fund-drive broadcast from WFIU... WNIN and Blue Lake will carry a repeat ("Charles Tolliver on Strata East") instead.

A new Night Lights show up for online listening, featuring special guest Phil Ford, author of the book Dig: Sound And Music In Hip Culture: http://indianapublicmedia.org/nightlights/dig-dig-jazz-hip-phil-ford/ With music and spoken-word performances from Charlie Parker, John Benson Brooks, Fred Katz, Ken Nordine, Del Close, Thelonious Monk, Jack Kerouac, Cab Calloway, Lennie Tristano, and the cast of The Nervous Set.

Night Lights will begin airing in Chicago next week, every Wednesday evening at 8 CST on WDCB: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-01-30/entertainment/chi-wdcb-piano-jazz-20140130_1_piano-jazz-wdcb-marian-mcpartland They'll be starting off with a couple of Chicago-themed programs from the archives: http://indianapublicmedia.org/nightlights/chicago-calling-unsung-heroes-citys-hardbop-scene/ http://indianapublicmedia.org/nightlights/returning-call-jazz-unsung-heroes-chicago-hardbop/

Last week's Night Lights show, featuring music from concerts recorded on college campuses in the 1950s (Dave Brubeck, Bud Shank, George Shearing and others) is now up for online listening: http://indianapublicmedia.org/nightlights/jazz-college/

Here's another entry in Night Lights' ongoing series of Memorial Day week programs devoted to jazz elegies for departed musicians: http://indianapublicmedia.org/nightlights/turn-stars-volume/ It includes tributes to Carl Perkins, Billy Strayhorn, Johnny Dodds, Albert Stinson and others from artists such as Wes Montgomery, Gerry Mulligan, Sidney Bechet and Earl Hines, and Bobby Hutcherson. There are links to the previous three shows on the page above as well. Happy Memorial Day to all.

Recently JazzWax blogger and Wall Street Journal music writer Marc Myers joined me on an episode of Night Lights to talk about his new book, Why Jazz Happened: http://indianapublicmedia.org/nightlights/jazz-happened-marc-myers/ Music from Miles Davis, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker, and others as well.

Here's another episode of the Jazz Crossroads of America Night Lights series that focused on the jazz history of Indiana: http://indianapublicmedia.org/nightlights/national-road-song-indiana-singing-groups-songwriters/

A recent Night Lights show, up for online listening: http://indianapublicmedia.org/nightlights/jazz-women-1940s/

"1960: Jazz at the Dawn of a Decade" (a sequel to the previous Night Lights program 1959: Jazz's Vintage Year) features music from Hank Mobley, Wes Montgomery, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, the Jazztet, and Max Roach, as well as a rare encounter between Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman, playing the music of Thelonious Monk. You can also watch a video of the Jazztet at Newport and check out a historical 1960 timeline on the program page, where the show is archived for online listening. Coming up this week: "Returning the Call: More Music From the Unsung Heroes of Chicago Hardbop."

Last week's Night Lights show, Jazz From Monterey: 1966, is now posted for online listening. It includes music from Joe Henderson (a quartet with Bobby Hutcherson), Randy Weston, Charles Lloyd, Don Ellis, Bola Sete, and Cannonball Adderley. Last year's program, Jazz From Monterey: 1958, Birth Of A Festival, is also available for online listening.

Posting today for his birthday--Coltrane's music played by Dexter Gordon, McCoy Tyner, Dave Liebman, Gerald Wilson, Steve Kuhn and others: The John Coltrane Songbook

This past week's show up for online listening--music from Ira Sullivan, Wilbur Ware, John Jenkins and more: Chicago Calling: Unsung Heroes of the City's Hardbop Scene ...already at work on a sequel.

Hey fellow O posters, here's the weekly program update for Night Lights: In the 1960s, as the civil-rights movement and other cultural changes gained momentum, a generation of women artists made their way through a jazz world that had long been less than hospitable to their aims. Singers such as Nina Simone and Jeanne Lee, composer Carla Bley, organist Shirley Scott, harpist Dorothy Ashby and fellow harpist and pianist Alice Coltrane, and trumpeter Barbara Donald all left behind some notable recordings from this time of change. It's Jazz Women of the 1960s this week on Night Lights, now archived for online listening.

More info here: Star On Miles: The Return Of Miles Davis Special thanks to Jim Sangrey and Ross Lawson.

This week's Night Lights takes a look at George Benson's straightahead jazz years, featuring the guitarist as a leader and as a sideman with Brother Jack McDuff and Jimmy Smith. It's archived for online listening: Before Broadway: George Benson in the 1960s ...and you can also hear it over the airwaves: Weekly broadcast times around the U.S. Next week: "John Zorn: Hardboiled Bop."