David Johnson

In the 1940s a young jazz singer with a four-octave range and bebop chops burst onto the big-band scene with Earl Hines and Billy Eckstine before going on to establish herself as a solo star.

Babs Gonzales was the toastmaster of the bebop world, a vocalese hipster who made the scene and lived to sing and write about it.

In the mid-20th century Black jazz artists began to make inroads into the movie industry scoring films such as Anatomy Of A Murder and Odds Against Tomorrow.

Pittsburgh has produced many great jazz artists, and at the beginning of the 1960s two of them teamed up to make a notable series of albums for the Blue Note label.

In 1952 bassist Charles Mingus and drummer Max Roach formed their own record company, in an attempt to assert creative and entrepreneurial control over their music.

Though it received middling reviews, the 1963 concert series included the festival debuts of Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, the rollout of Dizzy Gillespie’s “Dizzy For President” campaign, one of jazz legend Jack Teagarden’s last appearances, and a tribute from the Modern Jazz Quartet to Martin Luther King Jr.

At the beginning of the 1960s jazz pianist and theorist George Russsell teamed up with trombonist and jazz educator David Baker and other Indiana jazz musicians to form one of the era’s most exciting and innovative groups.

Though he recorded with organists Bill Doggett and Jimmy Smith, when saxophonist Percy France died in 1992 he was primarily known and admired among a small circle of his fellow New York City jazz musicians. Now a new website aims to elevate his soulful tenor sound and story.

Music from the Four Freshmen, Rob Dixon, and other Indiana jazz artists.

Music from Camille Thurman, Johnny O'Neal, Dave Brubeck, Chuck Mangione and others.