Friday, November 7, 2025
Dianne Reeves, Nina Simone Band, Simone & Lizz Wright - Full Concert | L...
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Sing the Truth is a tribute to the musical heritage of one of the greatest jazz divas of our time, Nina Simone. She died in 2003 at the age of 71. The tribute to her name that was organized a year later became a remarkable project that was only performed in a few places. Three great jazz vocalists, Dianne Reeves, Lizz Wright and Nina's daughter Simone, will pay homage to her work, together with the original Nina Simone Band. The orchestra is led by Al Shackman, the band leader who accompanied Nina for 41 years. Special guest will be Bob Dorough on piano. The repertoire will stretch from Ne Me Quitte Pas to Four Women. Especially that last song will impart in four couplets the impressive artistic scope of Nina Simone.
Thursday, October 23, 2025
Wednesday, October 22, 2025
Alice Coltrane - Song Of The Underground Railroad (Jazz Jamboree, 1987)
Alice Coltrane performing 'Song Of The Underground Railroad' at international jazz music festival Jazz Jamboree in Warsaw, Poland in 1987.
Piano, Harp – Alice Coltrane
Saxophone – Ravi Coltrane
Drums – Roy Haynes
Contrabass – Reggie Workman
Howard Uni.-AFRO BLUE "NATURE BOY" - The Aeolians Oakwood University Alumni
AFRO BLUE "NATURE BOY"
I’ve Been in the Storm So Long — Aeolian Alumni: Ferdinand Era
The Aeolians Oakwood University Alumni 2020 "We Shall Overcome"
Tuesday, July 8, 2025
Bayou Maharajah
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BAYOU MAHARAJAH explores the life, times and music of piano legend James Booker, who Dr. John described as "the best black, gay, one-eyed junkie piano genius New Orleans has ever produced." This roller coaster portrait traces Booker’s life from his early years as a chart-topping child prodigy, his star-studded years playing as a sideman, through to his outrageous solo career characterized by onstage performances in his underwear, dishing out drug-fueled conspiracy theories. Featuring interviews with the likes of Harry Connick Jr., Irma Thomas and Allen Toussaint and a generous helping of archival footage, the film brings to life the unforgettable story of this amazing musician.
James Carroll Booker III (December 17, 1939 – November 8, 1983) was an American New Orleans rhythm and blues keyboardist and singer. Flamboyant in personality and style, and a pianist of extraordinary technical skill, he was dubbed "the Black Liberace."
His 1960 recording "Gonzo" reached No. 43 on the Billboard magazine record chart and No. 3 in R&B, and he toured internationally in the 1970s. After being mainly a rhythm and blues artist, Booker later fused this genre with jazz and with popular music such as that of the Beatles, playing these in his signature backbeat. He profoundly influenced the New Orleans music scene, where his renditions and originals have been revived and are performed.
Booker's father and paternal grandfather were Baptist ministers. Both were pianists. He was born in New Orleans on December 17, 1939, to Ora, née Cheatham and Rev. James "Jimmie" Harald Booker, a New Orleans Baptist church pastor and World War I army veteran. Nicknamed "J.C.," Booker was a child prodigy, classically trained on piano from the age of six, and played the organ in his father's churches. Due to Rev. Jimmie Booker's health problems, Ora took her daughter Betty Jean (b. 1935) and son James to live near Ora's sister, Eva Sylvester, in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, temporarily on several occasions. Those stays amounted to around half of Booker's childhood up to the age of 8. He returned permanently to New Orleans in 1948, and enrolled in the fourth grade at a school where he befriended fellow students Art Neville, Charles Neville, and Allen Toussaint. By 1949, Booker's parents had separated, and Ora remarried to Owen Champagne of New Orleans.
In 1949, at age 9, Booker was struck by an ambulance in New Orleans, which he said was traveling about 70 miles an hour. According to him, it dragged him for 30 feet (9 metres) and broke his leg in eight places, nearly requiring its amputation. He was given morphine, which he later regarded as a cause of his eventual drug addiction. The accident left him with a permanent limp.
Booker received a saxophone for his 10th birthday in December 1949. He had asked for a trumpet, yet mastered the saxophone despite not having chosen it. But he focused on the piano, and by age 11 was performing blues and gospel organ every Sunday on the New Orleans radio station, WMRY (where his sister had performed). The following year was his last in classical instruction, when Booker learned the entire set of J.S. Bach's Inventions and Sinfonias, performing these at a professional level by age 12.
Rev. Jimmie Booker died in 1953, the year that Booker began high school at Xavier University Preparatory School on Magazine Street. Ellis Marsalis Jr. was band director at the school at the time, and noted the highly advanced quality of Booker's playing of Bach. Even as a working musician by his mid-teens, he excelled at Xavier, especially in math, music, and Spanish, and graduated in 1957. He aspired to become a Catholic priest, but ultimately gave up the idea, instead choosing to express his faith through music.
Monday, June 30, 2025
Monday, February 17, 2025
Wednesday, November 13, 2024
Sunday, November 19, 2023
Tuesday, November 9, 2021
Clora Bryant
Hailed as a “one-of-a-kind trailblazer, super-swinging, joyful, gifted, creative musical force” by drummer and DIVA Jazz Orchestra leader Sherrie Maricle, who posted a heartfelt Facebook tribute after her death, Bryant inspired countless female jazz players to follow her lead. 
Before she staked her claim on Central Avenue, Bryant was a featured soloist in the International Sweethearts of Rhythm and other all-female swing ensembles popular in the 1940s. But she really came into her own in the 1950s at Central Avenue hotspots like The Downbeat, Club Alabam, and the Dunbar Hotel, where she played with Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday and dazzled Gillespie, who mentored Bryant.
Clora Larea Bryant May 30, 1927 – August 25, 2019, was an American jazz trumpeter. She was the only female trumpeter to perform with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker and was a member of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm.
Bryant was born in Denison, Texas to Charles and Eulila Bryant, the youngest of three children. Her father was a day laborer and her mother was a homemaker who died when Clora was only 3 years old. When Bryant was a young child, she learned to play piano with her brother Mel. As a child, Bryant was a member of the choir in a Baptist church. When her brother Fred joined the military, he left his trumpet, which she learned how to play.
In high school, she played trumpet in the marching band.
Bryant turned down scholarships from Oberlin Conservatory and Bennett College to attend Prairie View College in Houston starting in 1943, where she was a member of the Prairie View Co-eds jazz band. The band toured in Texas and performed at the Apollo Theater in New York City in 1944.
Her father got a job in Los Angeles, and she transferred to UCLA in 1945. Bryant heard bebop for the first time on Central Avenue.
In 1946 she became a member of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, an all-female jazz band, earned her union card, and dropped out of school. Dizzy Gillespie became her mentor and provided her with work.
She joined the black female jazz band the Queens of Swing as a drummer and went on tour with the band.
In 1951 she worked in Los Angeles as a trumpeter for Josephine Baker and Billie Holiday. Two years later she moved to New York City.
The Queens of Swing performed on television in 1951 as The Hollywood Sepia Tones, in a half-hour variety program on KTLA. They were the first women's jazz group to appear on television. After six weeks the show was dropped due to a lack of a sponsor. 
During filming Bryant was about seven months pregnant. After her daughter's birth she was called onto Ada Leonard's all-girl orchestra show; however, she only stayed for a week after calls demanding to "get that nigger off there".
In 1954 she briefly moved to New York because she had lost inspiration from playing in bands.
In 1951, she was a member of an all-female sextet led by Ginger Smock that was broadcast for six weeks on CBS.
“Dizzy always gave me my props,” Bryant recalled, during a 2010 interview at the Central Avenue Jazz Festival. As Gillespie himself put it in Trumpetistically, Clora Bryant, a documentary by Zainabu Davis: “She has the feeling of the trumpet. The feeling, not just the notes.”
Armed with the trumpet mouthpiece Gillespie gave her, Bryant recorded her first and only album as a leader, 1957’s Gal With A Horn. As Mode Records demanded, Bryant also sang on all the tracks. But it’s the bold bebop voice of her trumpet, which explodes with piercing runs, that established her as a serious player.
Still, without an agent or a label contract behind her, Bryant continued to face hurdles as a gal with a horn.
Bryant recorded her first and only album, Gal with a Horn, in 1957 before returning to the life of a traveling musician. She worked often at clubs in Chicago and Denver. In Las Vegas she performed with Louis Armstrong and Harry James. She toured with singer Billy Williams and accompanied him on The Ed Sullivan Show.
During the 1960s and 1970s, she toured around the world with her brother Mel, who was a singer, and they had a TV show in Australia. In 1989 Bryant became the first female jazz musician to tour in the Soviet Union after writing to Mikhail Gorbachev.
After a heart attack and quadruple bypass surgery in 1996, Bryant was forced to give up the trumpet but she continued to sing. She also began to give lectures on college campuses about the history of jazz, co-edited a book on jazz history in Los Angeles titled Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles, and worked with children in Los Angeles elementary schools.
In 2002, she received a lifetime achievement award (the Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Award) from the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Two years later a documentary about her was released.
In an interview with JazzTimes, Bryant said, "Nobody ever told me, 'You can't play the trumpet, you're a girl.' Not when I got started in high school and not when I came out to L.A. My father told me, 'It's going to be a challenge, but if you're going to do it, I'm behind you all the way.' And he was."
Clora Bryant /Gal With A Horn 1957
Clora Bryant (Trumpetiste) - Interview - Ladies Behind the Beat.TV
Little Girl Blue · Clora Bryant
Clora Bryant (1), Vienne (F) 1987 - Trumpet Legends
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/01/arts/music/clora-bryant-dead.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clora_Bryant
https://downbeat.com/news/detail/in-memoriam-clora-bryant-1927-2019
Sunday, July 26, 2020
Cannonball Adderley - Live 1963
Cannonball Adderley - Alto Sax
Nat Adderley - Cornet
Yusef Lateef - Tenor Sax, Flute, Oboe
Joe Zawinul - Piano
Sam Jones - Bass
Luis Hayes - Drums
Music in this video
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Song
Jive Samba (Live)
Artist
The Cannonball Adderley Sextet
Album
Live in Lugano, 1963
Licensed to YouTube by
Believe Music (on behalf of Blue Velvet); BMI - Broadcast Music Inc., UMPI, Concord Music Publishing, and 7 Music Rights Societies
Song
Bohemia After Dark (Live)
Artist
The Cannonball Adderley Sextet
Album
Live in Lugano, 1963
Writers
Oscar Pettiford
Licensed to YouTube by
Believe Music (on behalf of Blue Velvet); UMPG Publishing, BMI - Broadcast Music Inc., and 5 Music Rights Societies
Song
Dizzy's Business (Live)
Artist
The Cannonball Adderley Sextet
Album
Live in Lugano, 1963
Licensed to YouTube by
Believe Music (on behalf of Blue Velvet); BMG Rights Management (US), LLC, ARESA, and 2 Music Rights Societies
Song
Trouble in Mind (Live)
Artist
The Cannonball Adderley Sextet
Album
Live in Lugano, 1963
Writers
Richard M. Jones
Licensed to YouTube by
Believe Music (on behalf of Blue Velvet); UMPI, UMPG Publishing, and 5 Music Rights Societies
Song
Work Song (Live)
Artist
The Cannonball Adderley Sextet
Album
Live in Lugano, 1963
Licensed to YouTube by
Believe Music (on behalf of Blue Velvet); UMPI, EMI Music Publishing, SOLAR Music Rights Management, BMI - Broadcast Music Inc., and 12 Music Rights Societies
Song
Unit Seven (Live)
Artist
The Cannonball Adderley Sextet
Album
Live in Lugano, 1963
Licensed to YouTube by
Believe Music (on behalf of Blue Velvet); EMI Music Publishing, ARESA, UMPI, BMI - Broadcast Music Inc., and 6 Music Rights Societies
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