Bohemia After Dark with Claudia Russell

05/08/2026

New spoken word from Tom Waits!
Dig it!

"The Fly" by & download: https://tomwaits.ffm.to/t...

31/07/2026

Jeanie Bryson, a Jazz Singer with a Dreamlike Style and a Famous Father, Dies at 68. James Gavin has our obituary. https://www.jazztimes.com/features/tributes-and-obituaries/jeanie-bryson-a-jazz-singer-with-a-dreamlike-style-and-a-famous-father-dies-at-68/?v=0b3b97fa6688

26/07/2026

I love these photos. They capture so much.

20/07/2026

Dave Brubeck was offered a simple deal: replace your Black bassist with a white musician, and the concert goes ahead.

He said no. Every time.

In the late 1950s and into 1960, Southern universities and promoters repeatedly approached the Dave Brubeck Quartet with conditions — segregated audiences, or a whites-only lineup on stage. Brubeck's response never changed. The band plays together, or it doesn't play.

It cost them. By Brubeck's own account, 23 out of 25 concerts on a 1960 Southern tour were cancelled because he wouldn't bend.

That same year, a planned U.S. State Department tour to South Africa collapsed for the same reason — under apartheid rules, bassist Eugene Wright would not have been permitted to perform. Brubeck pulled out.

Wright stayed in the quartet for its entire classic run — the years that produced Time Out, the experiments with odd meters, the recordings that made them one of the most recognised groups in jazz history.

That's usually what the story focuses on. The music. The innovation.

But running alongside all of it was something quieter: a bandleader who kept turning down work rather than leave his bassist behind.

[📸 Dave Brubeck Quartet — public domain via Wikimedia Commons]

07/07/2026

When Miles Davis released Bi***es Brew in 1970, DownBeat magazine dropped him from its critics' and readers' polls after years as a regular fixture. Going electric was enough, for many, to erase him from the conversation.

When Herbie Hancock released Head Hunters in 1973, the Associated Press dismissed it as "playing schlock."

Wynton Marsalis, who would become the most influential public voice in jazz during the following three decades, later called jazz-rock fusion "the worst thing that happened to jazz." He repeated variations of that view throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

The critics who said these things were judging fusion against a fixed idea of what jazz should be: acoustic, harmonically complex, rooted in bebop, and made by musicians who had paid their dues within that tradition. By those standards, fusion looked like apostasy.

What they missed was who was making it.

Herbie Hancock. Wayne Shorter. Chick Corea. John McLaughlin. Tony Williams. Joe Zawinul. These weren't musicians abandoning jazz because they couldn't play it. They were musicians who had helped define modern jazz and were choosing to take it somewhere new.

They also made some of the most technically demanding music of the decade. Head Hunters, Bi***es Brew, The Inner Mounting Flame, Heavy Weather and Spectrum remain landmarks not because they were commercial, but because they combined extraordinary musicianship with new ideas.

Today, jazz fusion is studied in conservatoires and university music programmes around the world. The musicians once accused of selling out are now taught as innovators.

[📸 Ethan Hein from Brooklyn, United States, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons]

09/06/2026

Join me for my last event before my rumspringa!
Jazz on Tap is one of my favorite events in San Diego and it raises money for a life-saving organization. The bands are smokin’ hot, there’s a great bar, food available, and plenty of room to dance! I’m proud to be their stage host (which I have done every year except for the year I had spinal surgery) because the vibe is sooooooo good! Some of San Diego’s best bands and a great day with good friends.
Join us and get your Jazz Kitty hug while you can! Feel the love, people!