Lester Young News

On Tuesday, July 7, at 7:30 p.m., Memorial Hall Center for the Arts , Wilmington, will proudly celebrate the return of Alki Steriopoulos to Memorial Hall in a concert titled A Tribute to Duke Ellington, with Alki Steriopoulos on piano and vocals, Michael Zsoldos, on saxophone, and Mike Houlis, on bass.

Epithets like "living legend" are often bandied about more for the purpose of hype than as a true reflection of some personality's true value to his or her particular profession and to the public in general.

E ven if John Handy had quit playing immediately following his 1959 solo on "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat," from the celebrated Charles Mingus masterpiece Mingus Ah Um , his stature in jazz would have been cemented.

SOURCE: Rifftides by Doug Ramsey For a project connected with his Jazz At The Philarmonic operation, the impresario Norman Granz filmed Lester Young with trombonist Bill Harris, Pianist Hank Jones, bassist Ray Brown and drummer Buddy Rich.

Lester Young drew on Louis Armstrong, Frank Trumbauer, Bix Beiderbecke and his own genius to create one of the most personal styles in music.

To many people, 1959 was one of the greatest years in the history of modern jazz recording.

A key part of the city's musical heritage will get nearly $150,000 in government funding.

At 87, Frank Wess is a member of the exclusive jazz fraternity old enough to remember and have participated in the last years of the Swing Era.

At first, today's Smackdown topic seems an easy one to answer. Which instrument has had the bigger impact on jazz, the sax or the trumpet? Gotta be the sax, right? I mean, sure, the trumpet had Louis Armstrong and Clark Terry and Miles Davis.

Dexter Gordon , Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane are three of jazz's greatest tenor players.

Lester Young gave Billie Holiday her nickname: "Lady Day." WBGO, April 23, 2009 - Jazz has no shortage of celebrated masters.

The UW-River Falls RADD Jazz Series 2008-09 Presents: Prez and Lady Day: The Music of Lester Young and Billie Holiday, featuring the UW-River Falls Jazz Ensemble, directed by David Milne this Saturday, April 18 at 7:30 p.m. at Abbott Concert Hall.

Reporting from Paris -- Bump Picasso. Forget Rococo. The Quai Branly Museum, a steel-and-glass palace on the Seine River, has news for the culture world: "Three Little Bops" is art.

The California Institute of Technology's Caltech Jazz Bands present their third album of largely big band music, offering selected charts by musicians and composers identified with the music from one end of the jazz spectrum to the other.

For the first thirty minutes of its set on Sunday night, the Odean Pope Saxophone Choir displayed its signature blend of precision and warmth, eight saxes - nine when Pope stopped conducting and took up his axe - soaring and diving in unison like a well-built wooden rollercoaster.

One of the saddest lives in jazz was the inspiration for Geoff Dyer's But Beautiful - which Keith Jarrett praised as "the only book about jazz that I have recommended to my friends.

In celebration of "1959 - Jazz's Greatest Year," all three of those albums have been reconfigured as multi-disc expanded editions .

Judge Dan Mancini is on the level, when he says Coleman Hawkins was the Real McCoy.

The great jazz singer Billie 'Lady Day' Holiday once had this to say about tenor sax genius and Woodville, Miss., native Lester Young.

SOURCE: Rifftides Final report on the opening days of the Potland Jazz Festival: In elegant Schnitzer Hall, clarinetist and tenor saxophonist Don Byron had Edward Simon on piano and Eric Harland on drums in his ...