New One-Act Play by Ifa Bayeza Chronicles the Life of the Tale-telling Trumpeter The American playwright Ifa Bayeza—author of The Ballad of Emmett Till, which
When I interviewed Gerry Mulligan in 1981, he told me that his dream was to have a television show patterned after Lawrence Welk’s. An odd
Around five o’clock on Sunday, April 14, 2019, in the Three Rivers Lions Arena in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains, when Earl McKee
As we go to press, The Syncopated Times has learned that Kenyon Adams, a multi-media performance artist and curator, will be named director of the
In December we announced that a high school trio out of Sacramento was sending two musicians on to The Berklee School of Music. We were
Ehud Asherie has definitely taken a circuitous route to becoming a professional musician. The 39-year-old pianist was born in Israel, lived in Italy for six
Over the past 70 or so years, traditional and swing jazz have been my primary jazz interests, beginning as a young listener in my early
‘Don’t You Feel My Leg!’ Maria Muldaur, the jug-band chanteuse who scored a surprise pop hit with 1973’s “Midnight at the Oasis,” released her 41st
Ted des Plantes is an Ohio based multi-instrumentalist who has been involved with numerous traditional jazz groups in a career spanning 50 years. He has
When given the task of writing about a legend of ragtime, I was instantly struck by how inadequate a few words describing such a life
The Sultans of Swing It’s the Saturday before Halloween at the James Joyce Pub in Santa Barbara, and in the long narrow room with the
Jacksonville’s First Couple of Jazz When a hot horn man who once led the Dukes of Dixieland married a velvety-voiced Southern belle with exceptional musical
In our November 2018 issue, we published an essay, “Record Collecting: Where Do I Begin?” by Terri Bruce. The following is a reader’s response by
The Map In 1932, E. Simms Campbell, considered the first commercially-successful African-American illustrator, created a map of a two-block area of Harlem between Lenox Avenue
One of the things that interests and intrigues me most as I have interviewed and written about more than 100 musicians in the past decade
Johnny Maddox, one of the most recognizable personalities in ragtime history died Tuesday, November 27th, he was 91. He planted the seeds of a ragtime
November 11, 2018 was the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Armistice, which ended World War I and marked a turning point after which
In Search of an American Music Antonín Dvořák spent three critical years in America residing in New York City, (with summers in a rural Czech enclave
Campaign songs became increasingly important with the rise of sheet music from about 1840. The recording era made them even more accessible to the people.
Collegetown Chronicles When your repertoire boasts more than 1,000 tunes, you never know what you’re going to play next. “That’s kind of true,” says Ithaca,
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly About seventy years ago when I was a young teen and a precocious collector of jazz, my mom
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural, social, and artistic explosion that took place in Harlem, New York and spanned the 1920s into the mid-1930s. It
I’m standing in my favorite flea-markety antiques store panicking a little as I stare at milk crates filled with used records. My husband and I
Dan Barrett shares some of his experiences in playing with legendary trombonist Spiegle Willcox (1903-99) and gives insight as to the interplay among musicians while
