Someday My Prince Will Come is an album by Chet Baker recorded at the Jazzhus Montmartre on October 4, 1979, and released by SteepleChase in 1983. The lineup features Chet Baker on trumpet and vocals, Doug Raney on guitar, and Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen on bass.

Personally, I believe this is one of the most beautiful albums Chet Baker ever recorded, yet it is far too often overlooked by critics and audiences alike. The interpretation of Someday My Prince Will Come, the tune that gives the record its title, reaches a greatness that is genuinely difficult to put into words: a performance that should be required listening in every music school in the world. The way the theme is stated, the construction of the solo, the sound of that trumpet, which has never existed again in this world, are things that deserve a place in every museum. It is worth remembering that the melody was originally written by Frank Churchill in 1937 for Disney’s Snow White: yet in Baker’s hands that fairy-tale music becomes something deeply adult and melancholic, heavy with lived experience that you can feel in every single note.

And yet, despite this Oscar-worthy interpretation, the entire album holds its own. The lineup is perhaps one of the most interesting Baker ever brought together. The absence of a piano is not a shortcoming but a deliberate choice: without the harmonic padding that the piano typically provides, the dialogue between the trumpet, Raney’s guitar, and Pedersen’s bass becomes something more airy, almost chamber-like, giving each musician a breathing room rarely granted in more traditional formations. The recording was produced by Nils Winther, the founder of SteepleChase, who followed that evening with a camera in hand as well, personally signing the cover photograph. A detail that speaks volumes about how deeply that Danish label was tied, almost viscerally, to those nights at the Montmartre.

The original vinyl release was later expanded in the CD version with two previously unreleased tracks from the same evening, “Gnid” by Tadd Dameron and “Love Vibrations” by Horace Silver: first-rate material that had been sitting in a drawer for years and is absolutely worth seeking out. Over time the album has also been reissued in an audiophile limited edition of two thousand copies on 180-gram vinyl, a sign that in the quality vinyl market it has found a loyal niche of listeners who recognize its true worth.

A truly remarkable performance by the trio, recorded in the European club that has done more than any other to honor jazz from across the ocean, having hosted virtually every giant and major voice the music has ever produced, including, of course, Chet Baker himself.

The Awakening is an album by Ahmad Jamal with Jamil Nasser on bass and Frank Gant on drums. It was produced by Ed Michel for Impulse! Records, recorded on February 2nd and 3rd, 1970 at Plaza Sound Studios in New York, and released that same year. Seven tracks make up the album, two of which, The Awakening and Patterns, bear Jamal’s signature and both, by chance or by design, run exactly 6 minutes and 19 seconds. The remaining tracks are works by other artists, but it is in Stolen Moments by Oliver Nelson, Dolphin Dance by Herbie Hancock and Wave by Antonio Carlos Jobim that the trio finds its clearest direction and makes the listening experience truly worthwhile.

There is, however, one track that deserves a mention of its own, and that at first glance might seem the least urgent on the tracklist: I Love Music, written by Emil Boyd and Hale Smith. It is not among the most striking moments on the record, yet it is precisely here that two decades later one of the most fascinating stories in the history of sampling would begin. Pete Rock, one of New York hip hop’s most refined producers, recognized in the way Jamal builds silence around that melody the perfect raw material for Nas’s “The World Is Yours,” one of the most powerful tracks on Illmatic (1994).

That melancholic piano floating beneath Nas’s bars is Jamal, unfiltered and undisguised. A few years later, DJ Premier returned to the same track for Jeru The Damaja’s “Me or the Papes,” proof that two different sets of ears can extract entirely different things from the same source.

And the Dolphin Dance that so rightly commands attention at the listening was the starting point chosen by Chicago producer No I.D. for “Resurrection,” the opening track of Common’s second album (1994): a few seconds of piano transformed into something new without betraying anything of the original.

The Awakening is today considered one of the most sampled jazz records ever made, and the reason is exactly what you hear: the gaps, the architectural pauses, the space that Jamal constructs between one phrase and the next. That is the raw material a producer needs. The loop lives in the breath, not in the note.

The liner notes are by Leonard Feather, who describes Jamal as “one of the most pianistic of pianists.” The cover photograph was taken by Chuck Stewart, a name far from incidental: he was Impulse!’s photographer of reference for decades, with over two thousand album covers to his name, Coltrane, Miles Davis, Mingus, Rollins, Ella Fitzgerald, all of them having sat before his lens. He wrote of himself that in his portraits he sought to unveil the soul of the artists he photographed. The graphic design is by George S. Whiteman. That cover, Jamal in a meditative profile, gathered into himself, already tells you everything before the record begins to spin.

To this day it remains an album praised and admired by critics, who have long considered it essential listening for any music lover. For this recording Jamal is seated at a majestic nine-foot Steinway, and through the extraordinary craftsmanship of the instrument and his own musical sensitivity he draws from it the finest sound possible: perfect, gentle, yet as cutting and aggressive as the moment demands. An essential album, for everyone, no one excluded.

Brazil, 1958. The two main characters in this story were childhood friends before they were colleagues: Antonio Carlos Jobim, known as Tom, and Newton Mendonça. They had met as children, neighbors who shared the absence of their fathers and an early passion for the piano. That closeness had never faded.

In the late 1950s the two spent a great deal of time together at Mendonça’s home in Ipanema, taking turns at the piano in search of new compositions, often with Newton’s wife present as a quiet witness. Those sessions produced some of the finest pages of the nascent bossa nova: “Discussão”, “Meditação”, “Samba de uma nota só”, and then that one, the most celebrated of all.

Financially, however, the two were still facing reality. Since 1952, Jobim had been working at a record label, where his job was to transcribe other artists’ compositions onto the staff. He had already earned a particular reputation there: his instinct was to rearrange the pieces he worked on, loading them with complex chords and effectively transforming them. But it was not enough. Like Mendonça, he made ends meet by playing in ballrooms and nightclubs across Rio de Janeiro, in that cluster of venues the musicians called the “Beco das Garrafas,” the alley of bottles.

The most frustrating thing, and it came around with an irritating regularity, was having to accompany singers who were out of tune and short on class. Every night the same story. For Jobim and Mendonça, men who thought in terms of harmony and style, it was a silent professional humiliation, accepted out of necessity and endured with dignity.

From that frustration, paradoxically, a masterpiece was born.

During one of their usual sessions, Jobim and Mendonça conceived a piece that would appear, on the surface, to be a simple defense of out-of-tune singers, but that would conceal, harmonically, traps of every kind: two major modulations, melodic intervals extremely difficult to intone, a sixty-eight-bar structure designed deliberately to catch off guard anyone who lacked the technical means to handle it. A piece that would sound approachable and prove merciless. A revenge disguised as a love song.

That piece was called “Desafinado.”

When Jobim and Mendonça played it for their friend João Gilberto, he did not hesitate for a moment: “This one is mine.” Gilberto’s voice was not one of great physical impact, but it set a standard. With his low, almost whispered tone, he managed to tame the piece’s dissonances with a disarming naturalness, quietly teaching a lesson to every virtuoso of the day. It is said that only after thirteen attempts was the song finally recorded in the way that Gilberto, a man of near-maniacal precision, felt was right. It was recorded on November 10, 1958 at the Odeon Studios in Rio de Janeiro and released as a single in February 1959.

The lyrics are a small gem of irony. The protagonist is a singer who, faced with the person he loves, tries to justify his off-key voice: “If you tell me I’m out of tune, my love, know that this causes me tremendous pain.” But the sharpest barb is the one aimed at the young musicians who at that moment were proclaiming themselves the fathers and masters of bossa nova, Ronaldo Bôscoli, Carlos Lyra, Nara Leão and others. Not an attack, more a fond and ferocious teasing: “If you insist on classifying my behavior as anti-musical, I, even if it means lying, must argue that this is bossa nova, this is very natural.” It is worth noting that the reference to the Rolleiflex camera in the lyrics was suggested by Mendonça himself, a passionate lover of cinema and photography, who had photographed his wife holding their child with that very camera. A deeply personal detail hidden inside a universal song.

The ending is not only ironic, it is moving: “In the chest of the out-of-tune, deep in the chest it beats in silence, for in the chest of the out-of-tune a heart beats too.” Right there, in that word “silence,” lies the heart of the entire operation: even those who cannot sing still love, still suffer, and still deserve respect.

The song reached the world through one of those fortunate chains of coincidence that mark the history of music. In 1961, American guitarist Charlie Byrd, during a tour of Brazil sponsored by the U.S. State Department, had the chance to discover bossa nova and its leading figures. On his return he brought back a suitcase full of Brazilian records and played them for Stan Getz and producer Creed Taylor. The result was the album “Jazz Samba,” recorded on February 13, 1962 for Verve Records. The success was enormous: the “Desafinado” single climbed the charts and earned Getz the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance in 1963, with the recording later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2000. Getz, whose career had been relaunched by that song, introduced it every night with the same line: “This is the piece that will put my five children through school.”

What Getz had achieved was something rare: he had fused his cool phrasing with a rhythmic language that was not culturally his own, creating something genuinely new. Jazz was drawing inspiration from a genre that, paradoxically, had itself been inspired by jazz at its origins: a vicious circle, or rather a virtuous one.

Before long, “Desafinado” became a piece of universal repertoire. Ella Fitzgerald reworked it in a samba register. Quincy Jones included it in his “Big Band Bossa Nova.” Coleman Hawkins recorded a version best left unremarked upon, those rhythms being clearly beyond his reach. Frank Sinatra, in 1967, recorded it with Jobim himself, on English lyrics by Gene Lees. In 2009, “Rolling Stone Brasil” placed it fourteenth on its list of the hundred greatest Brazilian songs of all time.

Newton Mendonça did not live to see any of it. He died in 1960, at just thirty-two years of age, before the song had reached the world. Unlike his friend Jobim, who was beginning to become widely known, Mendonça had never sought the spotlight, an introverted man recognized only within the small circle of bossa nova musicians. History gave him back the place he deserved, but late, as it so often does.

There remains an open question, and likely an unanswerable one: some have claimed that part of the lyrics were written by Ronaldo Bôscoli, without this ever being officially acknowledged. Mendonça’s heirs have never confirmed the story.

What is certain is that “Desafinado” has outlasted everything: the nightclubs of Rio, the quarrels between musicians, the early death of one of its authors, the fashions that have passed through it without wearing it down. It is still there, every night, in some club in some city somewhere in the world, with its harmonic traps intact and its heart beating in silence.

“…around that time, I started to realize that rock musicians didn’t know anything about music. They didn’t study it, they couldn’t study different styles, and reading music was completely out of the question. But they were popular and sold a lot of records because they gave the audience a certain sound and what they wanted to hear. So I started thinking that if they could reach all those people and sell all those records without even knowing what they were doing, well, I could do it too — and do it better.”

The year is 1970, and jazz was living through a further evolution that almost no one was ready to understand.

The protagonist is trumpeter Miles Davis, and the album in question is Bitches Brew.

Produced by Columbia Records and released in March 1970, Bitches Brew is considered by music critics worldwide as the album that gave birth to a new style called Jazz-Rock, today known as fusion. It was a record so distinctive, complex and outside all accepted frameworks that it managed to reach, strike and achieve enormous success even among the rock music audience.

Bitches Brew sold more than half a million copies and stands as the second greatest commercial success in jazz history, after Kind of Blue, also by Miles Davis. It was, moreover, the first double LP of his career.

“What we played for Bitches Brew would be impossible to write down and have an orchestra play it, and that’s why I didn’t write it…”

It was a particularly difficult period for Miles, who constantly sensed a growing indifference from the public toward his music, which had been static and unchanging for too long. At Columbia, new president Clive Davis had begun putting pressure on the trumpeter, who was being paid handsomely by the label but had long been absent from work that could truly leave a mark.

“Jazz music didn’t seem to be in fashion anymore at the end of the Sixties. For the first time in a long while I wasn’t playing to sold-out crowds. Even though my concerts in Europe were still always sold out, in the United States in 1969 we were often performing in half-empty venues. For me that was a sign…”

So Miles Davis gathered his courage and, convinced as always of his own ideas, decided the time had come to change and experiment with something new — something that could break out beyond the boundaries of jazz. This required new musicians and new instruments, so he chose to abandon the acoustic in favor of electric and electronic tools.

These changes transformed Miles’s music not only on a sonic and stylistic level, but above all in terms of image. Clive Davis encouraged him to schedule concerts in open spaces, where his music could reach a far larger audience. His look changed dramatically too: leather jackets, enormous dark glasses, psychedelic shirts — clothing that brought him as close as possible to the world of rock musicians.

The Woman Behind the Title

There is, however, a story that has too often remained on the margins — one without which Bitches Brew would probably have a different name, and perhaps a different shape altogether.

In the summer of 1968, Miles Davis married Betty Mabry, a singer, model and central figure of the New York underground scene, twenty years his junior. She was a woman who knew Jimi Hendrix personally, who listened to Sly Stone, Cream and James Brown, who moved in circles that included artists like Andy Warhol, and who carried with her an energy radically different from the jazz of the 1950s in which Miles had built his identity. Before Betty, Miles wore tailored suits and was unaware of the psychedelic rock that was taking over the scene. Afterward, he wore leather and oversized glasses and had Hendrix in his head.

The marriage lasted less than a year, but in that brief time Betty transformed Miles in ways that were deep and irreversible. It was she, according to multiple sources, who suggested the album’s definitive title. Miles had originally thought of Witches Brew. Betty told him: no, go all the way. Call it Bitches Brew. Bassist Christian McBride, in an interview with NPR, was direct about this: “People always talk about Miles as the fiery one. No. Betty was the one who was navigating Miles’s ship at that time.”

Betty Davis died in February 2022, at seventy-seven years old, largely forgotten by the general public. Yet without her, very likely, that record would not carry the same name — nor perhaps the same direction.

The Title, the Cover

The title Bitches Brew is a complex play on words. It draws on the expression “Witch’s Brew,” meaning a magic potion or a witches’ cauldron. The word “bitch” carries several meanings, some derogatory, others — in the form “bitching” — enthusiastically complimentary. It is worth noting that the original title contains no apostrophe: not “Bitches’” but “Bitches,” which turns “brew” from a noun into a verb, loading the whole thing with a more dynamic and elusive ambiguity. In Italian the translation is particularly difficult: “brodo primordiale” and “brodo di cagne” are the most common attempts, neither of which manages to capture the full density of the original.

The cover is the work of artist Mati Klarwein, who had previously designed the cover for Carlos Santana’s Abraxas. It depicts a naked couple looking out toward the horizon across the sea, with a large vibrant red flower beside them — an image clearly rooted in Africa, the cultural soil from which Miles was drawing in those years. It is an image that looks forward, toward a boundary that can no longer be crossed in the opposite direction.

The Sessions, Woodstock in the Background

Bitches Brew was recorded in just three days, from August 19 to 21, 1969, in Studio B at Columbia Records on West 52nd Street in New York. This is not a neutral detail: the sessions began the day after the conclusion of the Woodstock festival, an event Miles had followed closely and that had confirmed his conviction — rock music was speaking to millions of people, and he could do the same, and better. Miles and producer Teo Macero recorded all the material as though it were a single, endless jam session, never stopping the tape.

In his autobiography, Miles flatly denies the version that portrays the record as something forced on him by Columbia: he states that he guided the musicians with a precise project in mind, like a conductor who works by subtraction, indicating just a few chords and trusting everything else to the instincts of those present. For the project, Miles brought an imposing ensemble into the recording studio: two drum kits (Jack DeJohnette and Lenny White), three percussionists (Don Alias, Jumma Santos and Airto Moreira), a soprano saxophone (Wayne Shorter), a bass clarinet (Bennie Maupin), three electric pianos (Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul, Larry Young), two basses — Dave Holland on acoustic and Harvey Brooks on electric — and the lead guitar of John McLaughlin.

Teo Macero and the Fourth Instrument

There is another name that in the story of Bitches Brew always appears in the background, often reduced to a footnote. That name is Teo Macero.

A veteran producer at Columbia, he had studied composition at Juilliard and had a background as a jazz saxophonist, but also an intimate familiarity with the European avant-garde of musique concrète. Macero brought all of this into the Columbia editing room, and there he became, in effect, the album’s fourth instrument.

The raw material recorded across the three sessions was not yet a record: it was hours of unbroken tape, fragments, improvisations that broke off and started again. Macero cut that tape with a razor blade, reassembled sections recorded on different days, built structures that the musicians had never actually performed. The opening track alone, “Pharaoh’s Dance,” contains nineteen edits: its famous stop-start theme was constructed entirely in post-production, using repeated loops of fifteen- and thirty-one-second tape fragments. To these interventions he added echo, reverb and tape delay effects, including through a machine purpose-built by Columbia’s technicians and named the “Teo One.” As Macero himself described it: “I would take everything from the very beginning of the session, every little fragment, mix it all down and then cut the material and put it all together — front to back, back to front, the middle somewhere else — and make it into a piece.”

Miles, in his autobiography, forcefully claimed full artistic ownership of the record, irritated by the idea that credit might be given to others. Macero responded, tersely: “Miles always wanted to take the credit for everything.” The truth lay somewhere in between: without Miles’s ideas there would have been nothing to edit; without Macero’s editing, those ideas would never have become Bitches Brew.

The Compositions

“When I started changing so fast, a lot of critics put me down because they didn’t understand what I was doing. But critics have never meant much to me, and I kept going my own way, trying to grow as a musician.”

Many critics and musicians did not appreciate Miles’s work, calling him a sellout and a traitor. Jazz drummer and critic Stanley Crouch went so far as to describe Bitches Brew as the turning point toward commercial capitulation, calling the album a collection of long, shapeless pieces going nowhere.

The compositions are difficult to absorb, demanding attention and concentration. They run long and follow no linear structure, shifting rhythm and harmony constantly. The tracks on the record are: “Pharaoh’s Dance,” “Bitches Brew,” “Spanish Key,” “John McLaughlin,” “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down,” “Sanctuary.”

Miles began earning a great deal, performing on stages no jazz musician had ever set foot on before, alongside Carlos Santana and the Steve Miller Band. Duke Ellington described him as the “Picasso of Jazz.” He had invented cool jazz, then modal jazz, and now with Bitches Brew he was once again inaugurating a new genre.

What Came After

Bitches Brew was not just a record: it was a forge. Almost every musician who took part in it left the experience with a transformed vision and an open road toward something new. Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter founded Weather Report, which in the 1970s became one of the defining groups of the fusion world, with Jaco Pastorius on bass. John McLaughlin formed the Mahavishnu Orchestra with drummer Billy Cobham, and took the electric guitar into territory rock had never imagined. Chick Corea, alongside Lenny White, created Return to Forever. As Paul Tingen wrote in JazzTimes: “Almost all the musicians involved in Bitches Brew progressed to high-profile careers in their own right, and this enormously amplified the album’s influence on the entire jazz scene of the 1970s.”

Herbie Hancock, who had not been present at the sessions but had played alongside Miles in the previous quintet, watched this evolution closely and drew his own conclusions from it. In 1973 he released Head Hunters, which fused jazz, funk and African rhythms into what became the best-selling jazz record in history up to that point. Bennie Maupin, the bass clarinettist of Bitches Brew, was among the musicians on that record — a direct thread connecting the two albums through the same man, the same sound, the same bloodline.

The arc was this: Miles had opened the door, and each of his musicians had stepped through it in their own way, taking that music wherever it made sense for them. It is rare for a single album to generate this many parallel paths. Bitches Brew managed it because it contained not an answer, but a question — one that each listener could pick up and carry somewhere else entirely.

Recognition

Bitches Brew received numerous honors: it won a Grammy Award in 1971 for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album, and in 1999 was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. In Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, it appeared at number 95 in the 2003 edition, climbing to number 87 in the 2020 revision.

There is a document that has been circulating for years, written by a daughter for her father. It is not an obituary, not a biography. It is something harder to classify: a testimony, a defense, a love letter with an open wound inside.

Mary Pastorius first wrote it in 1994, for the liner notes of the double CD Portrait of Jaco… The Early Years, and later published it in the national magazine of NAMI — the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill — in the summer of 2001. His firstborn daughter. The one who waited for him after school, who climbed trees with him, who stole mangoes, who went to Burger King on Fridays.

“That Wasn’t Dad”

On September 21, 1987, Jaco Pastorius died at the age of 35 from a brain hemorrhage, following a brutal beating outside a nightclub in Florida. His killer served only four months in prison.

The years leading up to that night have been told many times: the genius who loses himself, the musician who sleeps on the street, the man who begs for change or offers bass lessons for a few dollars. A story that seems tailor-made to confirm a certain myth — the self-destructive jazz musician, the genius who cannot bear the weight of himself.

Mary refuses that narrative.

“I think a lot of people wrote my father off, relegating him to the category of ‘self-destructive genius/jazz musician who can’t handle fame or his own creativity, so he turns to alcohol and drugs and eventually goes crazy.’ These elements certainly contribute to the picture, but they don’t complete it. That wasn’t Dad, even though he may superficially seem to fit the profile.”

The truth, she says, is both simpler and harder: her father was mentally ill. He suffered from bipolar disorder, officially diagnosed in the fall of 1982. A real, serious illness — one he had made worse through his abuses, but had never sought or chosen.

The Japan Tour

Mary remembers the exact moment she understood something had changed. She was twelve years old. Her father picked her up at the airport in a white Silver Cloud Rolls Royce, dressed head to toe in traditional Miccosukee Indian clothing, shaved from head to toe.

“That trip was like being in a theme park in a parallel dimension. I only knew that Dad wasn’t the same anymore. He resembled him a little, but this man was strange, irresponsible, disorganized, and had a strange look in his eyes.”

Jaco got away with a great deal of outrageous behavior because he was Jaco — and that, in hindsight, worked against him. It prevented him from receiving the help he so desperately needed.

An Inherited Illness

There is one thing that makes this text unlike any other testimony about Jaco Pastorius. Mary does not write only as a daughter. She writes as a survivor.

Along with her father’s long arms, full lips, and sense of style, she also inherited his chemical imbalance. In November 1988 — little more than a year after Jaco’s death — she was admitted to the Neuroscience Center at St. Francis Hospital in Miami. Diagnosis: bipolar disorder.

She describes clinical depression as a place — “the place where you find yourself wandering aimlessly, after everything you are has been stripped away from you” — and then adds, with a clarity that cuts deep: “I vividly remember the moment I realized that this must have been the place where Dad lived. That realization only intensified my ever-present, growing terror.”

Lithium saved her life. And from that moment on, she understood everything with a different kind of clarity.

“The Illness Didn’t Kill Him”

There is one sentence Mary repeats, as if saying it once is never enough:

“Bipolar disorder did not kill my father. My father was murdered by a man who beat him savagely with his bare hands.”

His killer served four months. Four months, for taking the life of a father, a brother, a son. For depriving two of his three siblings of a father they never knew. For forcing his grandparents to bury their firstborn after only 35 years of life.

“We live in a society that condemns the mentally ill and tolerates violence against them. It is disgusting.”

The Memories No One Can Take Away

And yet, after all of it — after the illness, the grief, the anger, and the clarity it takes to write these words — Mary closes with something unexpectedly tender.

The stolen mangoes. Frisbee on the beach. Her first plane ride. Cookies on the way to Central Park. Star Trek. Burger King on Fridays. Postcards from everywhere in the world. Hiding from the tickle monster. Listening to him play piano, drums, anything at all. Holding him tight when he picked her up from school on his motorcycle. The goodnight kiss.

“These are some of my memories and no one can take them away from me. These are what I will give to my children, so that they may know him, through me and through the music.”

Jaco Pastorius was the greatest bass player in the history of jazz — and perhaps in the history of music, full stop. But before all of that, he was a man. A father. And his daughter remembers him this way: full of life and laughter, until one day that familiar look in his eyes became someone else’s.

I love you, Dad.

The story of Charlie Parker’s recording of Lover Man takes place in late July 1946, and its protagonist is one of the greatest geniuses jazz has ever known.

By that point, Parker had been away from the recording studio for a long time. He was going through a prolonged period of inactivity, a direct consequence of his drug addiction and psychiatric troubles. His moods swung violently between states of intense aggression and moments of absolute, almost unsettling calm. Playing had become nearly impossible for him.

Hoping to give the session the best possible chance, Ross Russell, head of Dial Records, decided to bring a psychiatrist into the studio to monitor the saxophonist’s condition. That day, Bird was in bad shape: sweating, agitated, barely able to produce a sound from his instrument. The doctor assessed the situation and gave him a few pills. That was enough.

Parker recorded Lover Man, and that take would go down in history as one of the most celebrated recordings jazz has ever produced.

Ross Russell himself described what happened in the studio:

“There was a long piano introduction by Jimmy Bunn that seemed to go on forever, marking time while waiting for the saxophone. Charlie had missed his entry. Finally, a few bars late, he came in. Charlie’s tone had coarsened: it was raw, full of anguish. There was something in it that broke your heart. The phrases were choked with the bitterness and frustration of all those months spent in California. The notes that followed one another had a sad, solemn grandeur of their own. It seemed as though Charlie was playing on automatic, no longer a thinking musician. These were the aching notes of a nightmare, rising from some deep underground place. There was one last strange phrase, suspended, unfinished, and then silence. Those of us in the control booth were a little embarrassed, disturbed, and deeply moved.”

That evening, after the session ended, Parker was taken back to his hotel. Not long after, he lost all control: he ran out into the street without clothes, screaming. Back in his room, he tried to set his bed on fire. They stopped him just in time. He was taken to Camarillo State Hospital, where he remained under care for roughly six months.

Parker was never satisfied with that recording. Years later he re-recorded Lover Man, producing a technically flawless version. But it was less intense. Less true. Less painful than that night in July 1946.

Green Is Beautiful is an album by Grant Green, recorded on January 30, 1970 at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, and released in July of the same year on Blue Note Records. The lineup is one to remember: Grant Green on guitar, Blue Mitchell on trumpet, Claude Bartee on tenor saxophone, Neal Creque and Emmanuel Riggins on organ, Jimmy Lewis on electric bass, Idris Muhammad on drums, Candido Camero on congas, and Richie “Pablo” Landrum on bongos. Produced by Francis Wolff, one of the founding architects of the Blue Note sound.

Green Is Beautiful marks a crucial turning point in Grant Green’s career, one already underway with his previous album Carryin’ On: his full embrace of jazz-funk. Many critics took issue with this new direction from the St. Louis guitarist, but there is far more here than a first glance might suggest. Green reveals himself as a deep and refined connoisseur of popular music, moving through well-known material with the ease of someone who has always known these songs by heart: Ain’t It Funky Now by James Brown, A Day in the Life by Lennon and McCartney, and the gorgeous I’ll Never Fall in Love Again by Burt Bacharach, described in the original liner notes as a melody capable of running the full gamut of human emotion, from pain to joy and everything in between.

The liner notes, written by Morton Roth, open with a question worth repeating: is Grant Green perhaps the greatest jazz guitar genius of his time? The comparison to Charlie Christian, the father of jazz guitar who died at only twenty-four in 1942, is neither casual nor exaggerated. It reflects how deeply Blue Note believed in him, ever since Lou Donaldson introduced Green to Frank Wolff and Alfred Lion around 1960. His sound, Roth writes, is instantly recognizable, steady and continuous, something that needs no introduction.

And on this album, that sound is at its finest. Green’s guitar sits up front, melodic and assured, flanked by Blue Mitchell’s bright trumpet and Emmanuel Riggins’ organ in constant, knowing conversation with him. But the rhythm section is the true engine: Idris Muhammad on drums and Candido Camero on congas build a groove of rare power, irresistible, the kind of rhythm that makes you want to move and never stop.

One further detail worth noting is the cover itself, a small artistic masterpiece in the Blue Note tradition, designed by Bob Venosa, its image radiating the same solar, unstoppable energy as the music within.

Green Is Beautiful is an album that deserves rediscovery and reappraisal. It is not a concession to commerce. It is proof that a great musician can change clothes without losing anything of himself.

Interplay is an album by Bill Evans, released by Riverside Records in 1963. The lineup features Bill Evans on piano, Jim Hall on guitar, Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Philly Joe Jones on drums, and Percy Heath on double bass.

Interplay arrives roughly three years after the recording of Kind of Blue, where Bill Evans, alongside Miles Davis, was the true protagonist: the only white musician in an all-Black band, and the one Miles repeatedly credited as the decisive element behind that record’s success.

It can be said without hesitation that Interplay marks a pivotal moment in Evans’ career. Beyond being a stellar album, it definitively establishes him as a bandleader. One can clearly hear how far he had come from the delicate, introspective piano of Kind of Blue, broadening his musical horizons and developing a sound that sits closer to hard bop, with a more adventurous and assertive language.

The surroundings play their part. Surrounded by exceptional musicians, Evans must in some ways set aside his “romantic” style to properly frame Freddie Hubbard’s thrilling trumpet, which, when Hubbard lifts the horn, is capable of stealing the show from anyone.

Interplay also follows Undercurrent, one of Evans’ best-known albums, recorded as a duo with Jim Hall, who again keeps him company here. The chemistry between the two is unmistakable: they know each other deeply, they spar and converse, and their mutual respect runs through every bar of this recording.

The original LP contains six tracks. The CD reissue adds an alternate take of I’ll Never Smile Again, already present on the album, as a bonus track. Of all seven versions, only Interplay bears Bill Evans’ signature as a composer.

The fact remains that Evans’ Riverside releases are a genuine treasure of jazz, both for the quality of his sound and for the way they were engineered and reproduced, especially on headphones.

Ride into the Sun is an album by Brad Mehldau, recorded in Brooklyn in January 2025 and released on August 29 of the same year by Nonesuch Records. Mehldau is joined by Daniel Rossen on vocals and guitar, Chris Thile on mandolin, a rhythm section, and a chamber orchestra conducted by Dan Coleman.

This record confronts us, once and for all, with a musician of extraordinary musical and pianistic depth. I had always been used to hearing Mehldau in the context of his historic trio, one of the most influential groups in the history of modern jazz, and this album moves decidedly away from that world. Yet it is precisely that distance that makes it so beautiful and surprising.

The collaboration with Daniel Rossen, guitarist and compositional heart of Grizzly Bear, and with Chris Thile, one of the most remarkable mandolinists in contemporary music, takes the album into territory that resists easy categorisation: it is not jazz in the strictest sense, not folk, not classical chamber music, yet it draws freely from all of these. The result is a record that breathes in its own particular way, where the melodies feel written to last and the orchestra never imposes itself, but supports from within, like an invisible architecture.

The listening experience is clean, fluid, and flows with a grace that catches you off guard. It carries a rare calm, capable of reconciling you with a difficult day. It is the kind of record that asks nothing in return: you can listen to it distractedly while gazing out the window, or follow it note by note, and either way it leaves you with something good that makes life worth living.

Wiki Jazz comes from far away. More than a project, it has always been a journey, and like all real journeys it had no clear destination when it began.

I can say with complete sincerity that jazz has changed my life. It taught me to listen before judging, to be among people with more openness, to not be afraid of saying what I think. These are not empty words: it is what actually happened, record by record, year by year.

Today, after three months of publishing, Wiki Jazz has reached one thousand subscribers. It is the first real milestone, and I find myself stopping for a moment just to look at it. Among you there are people who have chosen to support this project with a monthly or annual subscription: I do not take that for granted, and it fills me with a joy that is hard to put into words.

There is not much more to add. Just a big, sincere, and heartfelt thank you for being here.

With affection, Andrea

Black Saint and the Sinner Lady is far more than a jazz album: it is a stream-of-consciousness musical experience, an intensely autobiographical work in which Charles Mingus pours his soul into every note, balanced between genius and torment. Recorded on January 20, 1963 with an eleven-piece ensemble, the album unfolds as a continuous suite, blending jazz, classical influences, flamenco, and free jazz into a deeply cinematic and emotional soundscape.

One of the album’s most fascinating aspects is that Mingus insisted on including liner notes written by his psychotherapist, Dr. Edmund Pollock, going so far as to persuade him to write a second text offering a psychological reading of his patient’s music. A rare choice, which underscores just how personal this record was for him: not a mere collection of compositions, but a form of therapy, an exploration of his inner struggles through music.

The context in which the work was born is worth recalling. Just months earlier, in October 1962, Mingus’s long-awaited Town Hall concert in New York had been a spectacular disaster: impossible timelines, insufficient rehearsals, terrible sound. The audience demanded refunds, the police were called, and Mingus, at the peak of his tension, summoned Dr. Pollock during the intermission just to keep himself together. It was precisely from that catastrophe that the urgency behind Black Saint and the Sinner Lady was born.

The album was conceived from the start as a single, continuous composition, but Mingus was later persuaded by the label to divide it into separate tracks for commercial reasons. The main recording took place on January 20, 1963, but the work was not yet complete: Mingus called saxophonist Charlie Mariano back into the studio a week later to overdub entire alto saxophone sections, without a single written note. As Mariano himself told the BBC in 1966, Mingus directed him entirely through gestures, in real time.

Mingus had conceived the suite as a jazz ballet: “I wrote this music to be danced to and listened to,” he wrote in the liner notes, expressing his aversion to the word “jazz,” which he associated with discrimination and second-class citizenship. For this reason he convinced Impulse! to market the record under the label “ethnic folk-dance music.”

The subtitles Mingus gave to each movement reveal much about the nature of the work: the sixth and final one is titled “Of Love, Pain and Passioned Revolt, then Farewell, My Beloved ‘til It’s Freedom Day,” a farewell that reads like an existential manifesto. In the liner notes he wrote: “This music is my living epitaph, from birth to the day I first heard of Bird and Diz. Now I am myself again.”

Chaotic yet magnificently structured, passionate yet deeply introspective, Black Saint and the Sinner Lady is jazz in its most avant-garde and uncompromising form. The Penguin Guide to Jazz awarded it a “Crown,” the publication’s highest honor, while AllMusic gave it five out of five stars, describing it as one of the greatest orchestral achievements of any composer in jazz history. An essential listen, one that does not merely transform, but permanently changes everyone who encounters it.

A truly magnificent album, with an uncommon elegance that would be difficult to find anywhere else. The symbiosis between vibraphone and trumpet is genuinely fascinating and in some ways experimental. It is not, in fact, a common format in jazz: stripped of the traditional rhythm section, the two instruments must build everything on their own, harmony, tempo, breath. This makes the listening experience all the more captivating, because every silence carries weight.

Chet’s trumpet creates a deep and important feeling with the hypnotic sound of Wolfgang Lackerschmid’s vibraphone. And it is no coincidence: the vibraphone, with its prolonged resonance and natural fluctuation of sound, blends almost miraculously with Chet’s trumpet, which is itself a profoundly vocal instrument. This is music that speaks directly to the gut.

It is worth dwelling on one of the album’s most beautiful tracks and on how its title came to be. Wolfgang Lackerschmid recalls: “When we recorded it, it had no title yet. I had just composed it and hadn’t yet written out the harmonic progression in B flat. I was about to do so, when Chet said: I don’t need the changes, the melody is enough for me.” A sentence that says everything about his approach to music. If you have the melody, you can master the structure and the chords too, without being forced to chew through notes in the order dictated by a pile of harmonic symbols. It is perhaps the most beautiful summary of what Chet Baker was as a musician: instinct, melody, and an absolute freedom from mechanics.

At the end of the recording, Chet’s girlfriend and Wolfgang’s girlfriend, sitting in the control room, burst into tears. “They were moved by the recording and also a little embarrassed, as they had been caught in a moment of vulnerability. So we both exclaimed: why shouldn’t you cry? And Why Shouldn’t You Cry? became the title of the track.”

There is also an element that makes this record even more precious: the period in which it was recorded. It was the late Seventies, Chet had been living in Europe for some time, already deeply marked by life. And yet it was precisely during those years that he produced some of the most touching music of his entire career. There is something paradoxical and moving in this: the more life wore him down, the purer his music became.

A fully accomplished project that deserves a place in every jazz school.

Chet Baker’s story in Italy began around 1959. Some impresarios I knew asked me who they might bring over for a tour, and I put forward Chet Baker’s name. At the time, Chet was going through a rough patch: he had fallen out with Stan Getz and the project with Gerry Mulligan had fallen apart, which meant bringing him to Italy was relatively affordable. He accepted the offer and agreed to a tour opening in Fiesole. They asked me to go and pick him up at Milan’s Linate Airport.

Once I had Chet Baker with me, there was absolutely no communication between us: he spoke only English and I didn’t know a single word of it. My only aim was to make him understand that I played the piano.

Chet was supposed to tour with the Lucca Quartet. I told the quartet’s leader I would bring him to Italy on one condition: that I would be the group’s pianist. We were meant to start rehearsals, but they didn’t honor the agreement, so I wasn’t the pianist on that occasion.

The tour went badly. There were very few people in Italy at the time who truly understood jazz or knew how to play it.

When the tour ended, Chet decided to stay in Italy anyway and play evenings at venues that were happy to have him. He made his way to Bologna, to a club called the Guaraní, where he had been invited to perform because his name was appearing in all the papers, both for his music and for his drug troubles.

I walked into the club and there he was, rehearsing with a local Bologna orchestra that knew nothing about jazz. He was struggling enormously to express himself musically. They were working through “Polka Dots and Moonbeams,” and the pianist didn’t know a single chord of the song. I quietly moved toward the piano and, little by little, started filling in the chords to accompany him. He turned toward me and gave a nod of approval.

When the piece was over, he came over and asked me to become his pianist.

We played together for a month, until the day I lent him my car to go and pick up some medication in Lucca. Once he had it, he pulled into a service station and took the entire week’s dose in one go. The attendant, noticing he hadn’t come out of the bathroom, called the police. Chet Baker was arrested.

Amedeo Tommasi

Oriana Fallaci on the Chet Baker Affair

January 1962, L’Europeo magazine. Italy’s most fearless journalist launches into the government’s decision to expel Chet Baker after his release from Lucca prison, defending both the trumpeter and jazz itself.

“I’d love to know whether the honorable Mario Scelba has any idea who Chet Baker is... The official who decided not to renew his residence permit has no idea who Chet Baker is. That official dislikes jazz, considers it a bizarre eccentricity, and couldn’t care less that Chet Baker might have to stop playing that trumpet which, at times, sounds like a hymn to the Lord. But the honorable Scelba is a man of wide-ranging interests: he ought to know that Chet Baker is the greatest white trumpet player in the world today.”

“Chet Baker, raising his Oklahoma farmboy face, would say: ‘But do you really think the honorable Scelba could let me stay in Italy, if he wanted to?’ Or he would smile with those blue eyes, a little naive, that small mouth where the left front tooth should be but isn’t. He lost the tooth at thirteen, when a boy broke it with a stone. His parents were too poor to waste dollars on a replacement, so the gap remained: and Chet Baker learned to play the trumpet through a gap where a tooth should have been. When he finally had the money to fix it, he realized he wouldn’t be able to play anymore with a tooth there, so he left the gap. Besides, why should he care about being handsome? All he cares about is playing that trumpet, inventing music by blowing through that gap: ‘Oh, signora, can you imagine a world without music? Can you imagine me without my trumpet?’”

“At the trial, Chet Baker didn’t yet speak Italian, so everything had to be translated word by word through an interpreter who was an English teacher, someone who knew everything about William Shakespeare but nothing about jazz and trumpets. Not that jazz and trumpets meant anything to the defense lawyers, the public prosecutor, or the presiding judge either. The great lawyer De Marsico, arriving in Lucca, asked his colleague Frezza: ‘But who is this Chet Baker?’ And Frezza replied: ‘He’s an American who plays the trumpet. Apparently he’s quite good at it.’”

“He was a good judge, the judge at the Lucca Tribunal. He was kind and fatherly. But he couldn’t understand: he was an Italian from Naples, not an American from Oklahoma; he loved Verdi and Puccini, not Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. The public prosecutor was a good public prosecutor. The defense lawyers were good defense lawyers. Everyone was good: from the clerk who kept the record to the carabinieri who snapped on the handcuffs. But none of them could understand: not one of them had ever been to New Orleans, and in Italy, trumpets are what the Bersaglieri play as they run past with their feathered hats.”

Selected Italian Albums

Soft Journey (1980)

Soft Journey is a collaborative album by Italian pianist Enrico Pieranunzi and trumpeter Chet Baker, released in Italy on the Edi-Pan Records label in 1980. The lineup features Pieranunzi on piano, Baker on vocals and trumpet, Maurizio Giammarco on tenor saxophone, Riccardo del Fra on double bass, and Roberto Gatto on drums.

The album documents the first encounter between Pieranunzi and Baker, an experience the Roman pianist describes in the liner notes as one of the most profound and unforgettable of his life, one that fundamentally changed the way he approached his instrument. The title track was composed by Pieranunzi with the unique atmosphere of Chet’s trumpet in mind. The version of “My Funny Valentine” recorded here is, by many accounts, among the finest Baker ever committed to record.

Chet Is Back (1962)

Chet Is Back was released on RCA in 1962 and recorded in Rome on January 5 and 15 of that year. The band includes Baker on trumpet and vocals, Bobby Jaspar on flute and tenor saxophone, René Thomas on guitar, Amedeo Tommasi on piano, Benoît Quersin on double bass, and Daniel Humair on drums.

One of Baker’s most celebrated records, the album showcases his swing through tracks like “Well, You Needn’t” and “Barbados.” A remarkable feature is the contribution of Ennio Morricone, who arranged and conducted the orchestra on the album’s final four tracks, in which Baker sings in Italian, a testament to his deep affection for the country. Also worth highlighting is Amedeo Tommasi’s original composition “Ballata in forma di Blues,” one of the album’s standout moments.

Chet on Poetry (1988)

One of Baker’s last albums, and one of his rarest and most unusual, Chet on Poetry was recorded at Forum Studio in Rome in 1988. Alongside the music, Baker recites poetry by Gianluca Mauri and Maurizio Guercini, making the album a collector’s item among serious jazz listeners.

The artistic peak comes with “In a Sentimental Mood,” where Baker’s spoken introduction of a beautiful poem sets the tone for everything that follows. “Almost Blues,” performed with just voice and guitar, reaches similarly rarefied heights. Throughout, the rhythm section of Roberto Gatto and Enzo Pietropaoli creates the kind of spellbinding atmosphere that defines late-period Baker at his most intimate.

Black, Brown and Beige is an album by Duke Ellington and his orchestra, featuring singer Mahalia Jackson. Released on the Columbia Records label in 1958, the album is a recording of a revised version of the suite Black, Brown and Beige, originally composed by Duke Ellington in 1943.

MASTERPIECE is the only word that comes to mind when I think of this record.

An hour and a quarter of pure wonder, which captures the very essence of Duke Ellington’s music and, above all, allows us to fully appreciate the Duke’s extraordinary gift as a composer.

But rather than discussing the album in detail, I want to dwell on Mahalia Jackson’s masterful performance on Come Sunday. The version you will find at the end of this post features the singer delivering an a cappella rendition.

This is probably one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard since I started listening to music, and I believe Mahalia Jackson could have easily given an entire concert on her own: it would have been simply extraordinary.

The depth, the warmth, and the richness of her voice fill the entire room; it feels like being wrapped in a wool blanket while the north wind blows fiercely all around you.

It is a unique feeling, one you have to experience for yourself.

Before I leave you to listen to the piece, I am including the lyrics of the composition below.

Ooh Lord, dear Lord above, God almighty,
God of love, please look down and see my people through.I believe that God put sun and moon up in the sky.
I don't mind the gray skies
'cause they're just clouds passing by.Heaven is a goodness time.
A brighter light on high.Do unto others as you would have them do to you.And have a brighter by and by.Lord, dear Lord above, God almighty,
God of love, please look down and see my people through.I believe God is now, was then and always will be.
With God's blessing we can make it through eternity.Lord, dear Lord above, God almighty,
God of love, please look down and see my people through.

One Flight Up is an album by Dexter Gordon released by Blue Note Records in 1965 (BLP 4176) and recorded at Barclay Studios in Paris on June 2, 1964. The sound engineer is Jacques Lubin, production by Francis Wolff. The lineup includes Dexter Gordon on tenor saxophone, Donald Byrd on trumpet, Kenny Drew on piano, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen on bass, and Art Taylor on drums.

In 1964, Dexter Gordon had been living in Copenhagen for two years. He had moved to Europe in search of the freedom that the United States denied him. As he himself said: “I felt that I could breathe, and just be more or less a human being, without being white or black.”

The opening track is “Tanya,” an 18-minute piece that occupies the entire A-side of the vinyl. A Donald Byrd composition that takes all the time in the world. You never get tired of listening to it.

On the B-side there’s “Coppin’ The Haven,” a Kenny Drew composition. The way Art Taylor plays here is something unique. Impossible to replicate.

And then there’s “Darn That Dream.” There’s a phrase at minute 3:17 of this recording. It lasts two seconds, maybe less. I couldn’t even describe it musically. But every time I hear it, my breath stops.

I was a kid when I discovered this record. I was studying drums and dreaming of becoming a jazz musician. It didn’t turn out that way, life decided otherwise. But that phrase at 3:17 is still there, every time I put this record on.

One Flight Up is one of those albums that demonstrates why European jazz in the ‘60s had a different sound. Freer. Less bound by commercial pressures and radio formats.

When people think of Charles Mingus, the mind goes straight to the double bass. That powerful, almost visceral sound that redefined the instrument’s role in jazz. And yet, there is a hidden side of Mingus, more intimate and in some ways more revealing: that of the pianist. An unconventional, irreducible pianist who never stopped considering the piano as his true compositional language.

The Piano Before the Bass

Few people know that Mingus began his musical training on the piano and trombone, before definitively taking up the double bass during his high school years. The piano, however, was never abandoned. It remained the place where Mingus composed, where ideas took shape before being transcribed or taught to the musicians of his Jazz Workshop. It was, in the truest sense, his instrument of thought.

This dual identity, performer on double bass and composer at the piano, is a fundamental key to understanding his music. Like Duke Ellington, a major reference point in his artistic life, Mingus used the keyboard as a laboratory. His compositions, of considerable harmonic complexity, were born there, among those octaves, and still bear the marks of that pianistic gestation.

The Tour and the Live Experiment

In the early 1960s, during his band’s residencies in New York, Mingus did something unusual: he hired a bassist to free himself up and play the piano in front of an audience. It was an experiment, a way of experiencing a different role on stage. This period coincided with one of the most troubled phases of his life. A concert at Town Hall in New York in 1962, with a 31-piece orchestra, turned into a scandal. The audience walked out demanding refunds, and Mingus had struck trombonist Jimmy Knepper in a moment of rage, breaking a tooth and compromising his embouchure for years. The months that followed were marked by physical exhaustion. It was a dark period, from which Mingus emerged thanks to a stay in California and a retreat with an old friend.

“Mingus Plays Piano”: The Only Solo Record

From that darkness came, paradoxically, one of the most creative periods of his career. In 1963, a few months apart, two masterpieces were released: “The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady,” considered by many critics one of the most extraordinary achievements in jazz orchestration, and “Mingus Plays Piano,” recorded in a single session on July 30, 1963, and published in 1964, produced by Bob Thiele for Impulse! Records.

The album was born almost by accident. Phil Kurnit, an in-house counsel at ABC Records, recalls hearing someone playing the piano very hauntingly in the dark, in a room with the lights off. He asked who it was, and Bob Thiele replied: “It’s Charlie Mingus. A very close friend of his died.” About half an hour later, Thiele said: “Charles, let’s go into a studio.” That session became “Mingus Plays Piano.”

The record is the only one to feature Mingus playing the instrument he used for composing. This makes it an exceptional document, almost an act of artistic nakedness: no band, no double bass, no arrangement to hide behind. Just him and the keys.

Critic Nat Hentoff, in the original liner notes, wrote: “Listen to Charles Mingus as a pianist, for the first time, on record. He is uniquely himself, as this album demonstrates, playing with an impressive range of expressive power. Mingus has developed a personal piano style that expresses the more gentle, the more reflective and the more innocent elements of his personality.”

Mingus himself commented, heard on the recording itself when producer Bob Thiele asks what they can do for him: “It’s not like playin’ at home by yourself.” A phrase that says everything. The piano was a private place for him, and bringing it into a recording studio meant exposing himself in an entirely new way.

Listening: Spontaneous Compositions and Introspection

The album opens with Mingus sputtering a percussive motif with one hand while the other riffs out an arabesque fantasia. There is a tension of opposites. A fixed pitch struggles with an ecstatic melody and the battleground is rhythm. This gives way to rich, rolling chords that develop into a strange waltz. The piece unfolds like a dreamlike tremor, a sort of musical fingerprint of the artist’s unconscious, and is aptly titled “Myself When I Am Real.”

Mingus had first worked the piece out in his wife Judy’s living room. In the liner notes, he told Hentoff: “I go into a kind of trance when I’m playing this kind of number. I remember that when we were recording this one, I noticed suddenly I didn’t seem to be breathing.”

The record is not a display of technical virtuosity in the conventional sense. On the contrary, there is a playfulness to this album, an understated, casual mood, like he is jamming in your kitchen. It is an intimate portrait that reveals Mingus’s creative process, his ability to move between composition and improvisation with the ease of someone who makes no distinction between the two acts. Standards such as “Body and Soul” and “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You” carry his unmistakable mark, alongside original compositions that would later find their way into his larger orchestral works.

An Irreducible Piano Style

Mingus’s piano resembled no one else’s. It had neither the lightness of Bill Evans, nor the architectural construction of Monk, nor the bebop velocity of Bud Powell. He plays as if self-taught on the instrument, giving the recording a rawer feel. But this does not mean his playing is unfinished. At the center of Mingus’s art is the soul of a man keenly aware of the joy and suffering that are both inescapable in life.

It is the music of a composer who thinks in orchestral structures even when he has only ten fingers at his disposal. You can hear the voice of the bass in his left hand, the instinct of the conductor in his harmonic direction, the mind of a man who absorbed the blues and gospel, classical music and ragtime, from Charlie Parker to Ellington, and distilled everything into something unclassifiable and profoundly his own.

A Work to Rediscover

“Mingus Plays Piano” remained out of print for a long time, considered a marginal curiosity compared to Mingus’s major orchestral works. The San Francisco archival label Superior Viaduct remastered and reissued it, bringing renewed attention to this subtle record. Several of its piano improvisations, including “Meditations for Moses” and “She’s Just Miss Popular Hybrid,” were later transcribed and arranged for full ensemble by musicians in the Mingus Big Band, a testament to the compositional depth buried in those solo takes.

Those who love Mingus will find it revelatory. It is like peeking into his private notebook, seeing the thoughts before they become grand sonic architectures. Those who do not yet know Mingus might find here one of the most accessible entry points, not because the music is simple, but because it is bare and direct. The sound of a musician who, for once, speaks quietly.

“Myself When I Am Real,” the opening track, is not just a song title. It is a declaration of identity. At the piano, without the armor of bassist and bandleader, Charles Mingus was, perhaps more than anywhere else, authentically himself.

It was 1968, and Sanremo was still shrouded in a sense of grief following the recent and tragic death of Luigi Tenco. The Italian stars competing that year were many, as were the international artists taking part in that edition. Among them, one name stood out above all others: Louis Armstrong, also known as Satchmo. The host, meanwhile, was a young man from Catania: Pippo Baudo, who was taking to the Ariston stage for the very first time as Festival presenter.

Among the many stories that defined that memorable edition, the one worth telling is the tale of jazz legend Louis Armstrong.

The great American trumpeter entered the competition with the song “Mi va di cantare,” composed by Giorgio Bertero, Marino Marini, Aldo Valleroni, and food writer and journalist Vincenzo Buonassisi. The style was reminiscent of a Dixieland tune typical of the 1920s, crafted specifically to showcase Armstrong’s unique personality and musical character. Unfortunately, the endeavour turned out to be something of a disaster: Armstrong’s command of Italian was virtually nonexistent, and he was forced to read the lyrics from a sheet of paper placed on the stage, performing with his head bowed the entire time, never once looking up at the audience.

Despite these difficulties, the crowd warmly embraced the sixty-six-year-old Satchmo’s performance. Buoyed by the reception, Armstrong decided to extend his set into what became a roughly 45-minute show, most likely reasoning that a fee of 32 million lire was far too generous to justify performing just one song. This, however, ran directly against the Festival’s strict regulations, and so a young Pippo Baudo was instructed by the Festival’s director Gianni Ravera to rush onto the stage, waving a white handkerchief and gently pulling the trumpet away from the artist’s lips.

To this day, no video footage exists to document exactly what happened that evening at the Teatro Ariston. The only surviving record is a photograph showing a visibly embarrassed and tense Pippo Baudo standing beside a bemused Louis Armstrong, who appeared entirely unaware of what was going on around him.

The song did reach the final, though it neither won nor received any award.

It is widely believed that Armstrong had no idea he had even been entered into the competition. Had he known that, after a lifetime of legendary achievements, he would be required to submit himself to the judgement of an unfamiliar jury, he would almost certainly have declined the invitation, feeling deeply offended by the very premise.

Fortunately, the whole affair ended on a gracious note. But then again, given the renowned elegance and dignity of the genius from New Orleans, it could hardly have ended any other way.

“The first time I heard Dick Twardzik, I was incredulous. It was as if he had built a bridge between classical music and jazz.”

Chet Baker

Richard Henryk Twardzik was born on April 30, 1931, in Danvers, Massachusetts. His father Henryk was a Polish immigrant who worked as a laborer. His mother Clare worked in the acoustics laboratory at Harvard. Both parents loved the arts, a passion they immediately passed on to their son, whose first words were “beautiful music.” At nine years old he began taking piano lessons, and gradually he absorbed the influences of jazz and blues. Before long he became a true aesthete, and every aspect of his behavior reflected his devotion to music.

“He was fired up by Bartok rather than Beethoven, Schoenberg rather than Schumann.”

The young pianist also changed his outward appearance, dressing in a more refined way and always carrying a stack of books under his arm. During this period he studied piano technique with Margaret Chaloff, a teacher at the New England Conservatory. Although Dick was classically trained, he later collaborated with some of the greatest jazz pianists such as Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, and Keith Jarrett.

His first jam session appearances date back to 1948.

“It seemed impossible that someone so young could play like that.”

In 1952 he found work at the Hi Hat, where he met the saxophonist Charlie Parker. Twardzik made such a strong impression that, once Parker returned to Boston, he hired him for the duration of his tour. This became one of the high points of his career, as he had the opportunity to perform in the same group with Charles Mingus and Roy Haynes. From that moment on Dick became a rising star, and musicians were eager to have him in their bands.

In 1953 his career was slowed by recurring problems with drugs, which had begun during his time with Chaloff. Police attention intensified to the point that he was forced to leave Boston for several months.

At the beginning of 1954 Dick returned to Boston and reentered the scene, performing with Lionel Hampton’s group. Tall and thin, with a high forehead and slicked back hair, he had the air of an intellectual, his eyes half closed and melancholic. The turning point of his brief career came in 1954 at Storyville in Boston, where the twenty three year old pianist was playing in the band of saxophonist Serge Chaloff. That evening the main attraction was the Chet Baker Quartet, and during the final set Baker invited the young pianist onstage to perform with his group.

“He told me that Bud Powell and Art Tatum were his favorite pianists, and those influences were clearly audible, but he was certainly developing a highly individual language.”

Russ Freeman

Despite his young age, Dick Twardzik had already worked with top level musicians such as Lionel Hampton, Charlie Parker, and Charlie Mariano, and was regarded by local players as a true prodigy. At seventeen he was already inside the jazz scene. Russ Freeman wasted no time in contacting Dick Bock to arrange a recording session for Pacific Jazz. Proud to record under his own name, Dick invited his friend Peter Littman on drums. With no bassist available, they chose Carson Smith.

The highlight of that session was “A Crutch For The Crab,” featuring a remarkable syncopated motion inspired by watching the hands of Polish pianist Jan Smeterlin moving across the keyboard like a crab.

During a tour he met Chet Baker again. Still astonished by Twardzik’s extraordinary talent, Baker asked him to join his upcoming European tour. Dick accepted immediately. As he was about to depart for Paris, his girlfriend went to say goodbye and, heading toward his cabin, found a party in full swing. She left the ship in tears, convinced he would take another girl with him to Paris.

“They were so high spirited that I thought it was the end for him.”

According to Chet Baker’s biography, Dick likely began using heroin at the start of that tour.

“I now know that Dick started using that first night, but I did not find out until months later.”

The tour began chaotically, with the group missing several engagements of which Baker was unaware. Eventually things settled, and the quartet traveled to the Netherlands, where they performed their first concert in Amsterdam.

Baker opened the show by announcing the musicians’ names, since the posters had listed Russ Freeman on piano and Ron Carter on bass. The concert was a triumph, and the audience responded with a warm ovation. Many journalists highlighted Twardzik’s presence, calling him the cornerstone of the quartet and the solid foundation upon which Baker could rely. A Dutch reviewer wrote that the “impassively romantic approach of Dick Twardzik fits wonderfully with Chet Baker’s introspective phrasing.”

Dick struggled to gauge the purity of the heroin he had purchased in Amsterdam, and after one of the concerts at the Flying Dutchman jazz club he injected himself with an excessive dose. Paul Acket, seated in the audience, noticed that the pianist had completely fallen asleep onstage. He was sitting behind the piano with a thread of saliva running from his mouth. Fortunately Jimmy Bond quickly carried him backstage and vigorously rubbed his back with a brush until he regained consciousness.

During that period Dick wrote many letters to his parents, as if to reassure them about his physical condition. To his father, an art lover, he sent a postcard depicting Strasbourg Cathedral, writing: “Hi Dad! Today was truly an exciting day for me. This is the most beautiful church I have ever seen. The stained glass windows take your breath away. A fantastic symphony of colors. I do not know how else to describe them. Truly one of the most beautiful masterpieces in the world. I love you. Dick.”

The quartet returned to Paris, where they recorded the most significant album of their European stay, Chet in Europe.

“He played legato against Chet’s staccato, with intellect when the other played from the heart, thought against the trumpeter’s feeling, and what emerged was greater than the simple sum of its parts.”

Jack Chambers

A second overdose struck Dick during a date in Zurich.

“During the party he locked himself in the bathroom to take a dose,” Chet recalled. “He had already used earlier that day, complaining that he was not high enough. Now he had injected an overdose. He tried to walk into the room but collapsed on the floor.”

Once again an ambulance arrived in time to save his life.

The quartet returned to Paris on October 20 to prepare a new recording session. The night before, the musicians went to the Club Tabou for a jam session and returned to the hotel before dawn. Chet left the club with Liliane, while Littman and Twardzik went back together.

The following afternoon at the Pathé Magellan studio, as they waited for Twardzik to arrive, the musicians set up their instruments, smoked, and decided which tunes to record. After an hour they began to worry. Littman volunteered to go to the hotel to wake him.

“I knocked violently on the door to wake him. I will never forget the sight when the door opened. Dick was on the floor with a needle in his arm. He had injected an overdose. That is why he had not woken up. And he was dead.”

What happened that night remains shrouded in mystery, as the accounts given many years later do not fully align.

It’s rare for me to be moved like this on first listen. Like love at first sight. Like when you were a teenager and you’d see a girl from a distance and your legs would tremble.

Ima Adesso came out on February 18 on Dodicilune Records. Giuseppe Bassi on double bass, Javier Girotto on sax, Daniel Karlsson on piano, Lorenzo Tucci on drums.

The title comes from 今 (ima), an ancient Japanese character that doesn’t just mean “now” in a chronological sense, but a point of balance between past and future. An instant full of potential.

I’m Italian and maybe I’m biased, but it had been a long time since I put on a record from my beloved nation. Lately, I’d seen few interesting productions. Very few.

Ima Adesso is instead a ray of sunlight cutting through the curtains of your apartment on a cold February day.

“Tutto,” Lorenzo Tucci’s track, is the cherry on top. A musical masterpiece I could never tire of listening to.

Giuseppe Bassi has shaped something that deserves a place in your record collection.

In late January, the New York Times reported news that shook the jazz world: after nearly four decades leading Jazz at Lincoln Center, Wynton Marsalis will step down from his role as managing and artistic director.

The transition will be gradual. Marsalis, 64, will leave his position as artistic director in July 2027 and maintain an advisory role until June 2028, when his contract expires. He will remain on the board of directors indefinitely.

“It’s the perfect time to identify the next generation of leaders,” Marsalis said. The goal is to ensure the organization continues to thrive under new leadership.

Jazz at Lincoln Center began in 1987 as a summer concert series and built its permanent home in 2004 at the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle. The facility, Frederick P. Rose Hall, includes three spaces: the Rose Theater, the Appel Room, and Dizzy’s Club.

The organization faced difficulties in its early years after moving into its new $131 million facility. The budget tripled rapidly, and six executive directors came and went in the first three years before stabilizing with Greg Scholl in 2012.

Marsalis’s presence has been instrumental in transforming Jazz at Lincoln Center into a national cultural landmark. Beyond artistic direction, Marsalis became a global jazz ambassador, equally comfortable engaging with figures like Barack Obama and middle school students.

Under his leadership, the organization expanded its educational programs, including the Essentially Ellington competition for high school bands worldwide and the “Let Freedom Swing” program for elementary students. Through Blue Engine Records, Jazz at Lincoln Center releases recordings from its digitized performance archive.

The board has established two special committees: one will work with Marsalis to identify the next generation of artistic leaders, while another will guide the search for the next executive director to replace Scholl after his departure in June.

Marsalis has identified several key musicians who could lead the organization’s future, including Carlos Henriquez, Ted Nash, Victor Goines, Walter Blanding, and Rodney Whitaker.

“The institution is not Wynton Marsalis at Lincoln Center,” Marsalis stated. “It’s Jazz at Lincoln Center.”

Source: The New York Times