Night Lights Classic Jazz
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Night Lights, is a weekly one-hour jazz radio program hosted by David Brent Johnson, focusing on jazz from the 1945-1990 era—a timespan that, as Johnson notes, "weirdly parallels Miles Davis on record and the Cold War.
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.
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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. -
From Lee Morgan's "The Sidewinder" to John Coltrane's A LOVE SUPREME, from the impact of the Beatles to the avant-garde's October revolution, a notable year.
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In 1953 a Gary, Indiana couple started what would become one of the most successful black-owned record labels, highlighting gospel, blues, R and B, and jazz.
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Throughout the 1950s jazz promoter George Wein ran a Boston nightclub that showcased some of the music’s most notable performers. -
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. -
In 1961 saxophonist Sonny Rollins returned from a two-year sabbatical, forming new musical alliances as he plunged into a shifting and vibrant jazz landscape. -
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. -
Claude Thornhill was a pianist, composer, and arranger whose 1940s big bands helped shape the sound of modern jazz, with orchestral bop and ethereal ballads tinged with classical influences that set the stage for later masterpieces by Miles Davis and Gil Evans. -
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. -
Stars Of Jazz was an Emmy-winning weekly late-1950s jazz TV show that featured many of the era’s top jazz artists and used innovative techniques to help bring the music to a wider audience. -
In 1950 bandleader Duke Ellington started his own record label that recorded numerous small-group dates often led by Ellington cohort Billy Strayhorn, featuring outstanding Ellington-orbit musicians such as saxophonist Johnny Hodges, singer Al Hibbler, and bassist Oscar Pettiford. -
Bob Thiele had already spent three decades in the music business recording legendary jazz and pop artists when he started a new record label in 1969 that brought on board notable musicians such as Gil Scott-Heron, Leon Thomas, Duke Ellington, Oliver Nelson, and Louis Armstrong with music that reflected the cultural upheaval of the times. -
In the late 1970s Columbia Records’ jazz roster included artists such as Dexter Gordon, Woody Shaw, Weather Report, Freddie Hubbard, Bobby Hutcherson, Stan Getz and others, led by a label executive with a deep passion for their music. The program includes commentary from jazz producer Michael Cuscuna.
