pplpod

In 2011 the Best New Artist Grammy went not to a marketed pop juggernaut but to a jazz musician holding an upright bass. This episode explores the life of Esperanza Spalding through the lens of strategic constraint, the idea that deliberately removing options and safety nets forces creative adaptation. Born in 1984 in Portland, Oregon and raised by a single mother, she developed juvenile idiopathi...

In the 1971 musical western Zachariah, a villain wins a saloon gunfight and celebrates with a virtuosic drum solo. The gunslinger was Elvin Jones, and he was not acting. This episode traces how a kid from Pontiac, Michigan, born in 1927 to parents who came north from Vicksburg in the Great Migration and raised alongside future jazz legends Hank and Thad Jones, went from watching circus parade drum...

In the summer of 1914, a teenage soda jerk who could not yet read music composed a single tune by ear and disguised it as a one-step, a waltz, a tango and a foxtrot so cafe customers thought he had an endless repertoire. That resourceful kid was Edward Kennedy Ellington. This episode charts his path from a middle-class Washington, D.C. household where his mother played parlor songs and his Navy bl...

At 15, Diana Krall was playing background piano for diners in a restaurant in Nanaimo, British Columbia, a rugged logging and ferry town on Vancouver Island. She went on to become the only jazz singer to have eight albums debut at the top of the Billboard Jazz charts and to sell over 15 million records. This episode examines how an acoustic pianist singing decades-old standards captured mainstream...

William James Basie desperately wanted to be a drummer until a kid down the street named Sonny Greer, the future Duke Ellington drummer, proved undeniably better. That pivot to piano set up one of the most consequential careers in American music. This episode follows Basie from 25-cent lessons and silent-movie accompaniment at the Palace Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey, to Harlem cutting contests...

A 2.7-acre patch of dirt in New Orleans' Treme neighborhood was designed as a containment tool. This episode traces how Congo Square backfired on the authorities who created it. Under the 1724 Code Noir, enslaved Africans were granted Sundays off but forbidden to congregate, so gatherings scattered to levees and a clearing on Bayou St. John. In 1817 the mayor forced them into a single monitored lo...

In the 1910s the saxophone was a vaudeville punchline, played stiffly like an oversized clarinet and compared to a dying farm animal. This episode follows Coleman Hawkins, born in St. Joseph, Missouri in 1904, who silenced that laughter. Piano at four, cello at seven, saxophone at nine, professional gigs by 14 and college-level harmony classes at Washburn College as a teenager gave him a foundatio...

When Charlie Parker died in a New York hotel suite in 1955, the medical examiner guessed the body was 50 or 60 years old. He was 34. This episode asks how someone lived that hard, that fast, and still built the entire genre of bebop from the ground up. We start in wide-open Kansas City, where a teenage Parker dropped out of high school, got a cymbal thrown at his feet by Jo Jones at a Count Basie...

Cassandra Wilson, who passed away in September 2026 at age 70, grew up in Jackson, Mississippi caught between her mother's Motown records and her father Herman Fowlkes Jr.'s jazz bass and guitar. Burned out on classical piano and clarinet, she asked her father for guitar lessons and was handed a Mel Bay book and told to figure it out herself, an intuitive, by-ear approach that shaped everything sh...

Born Lovella May Borg in Oakland in 1936, Carla Bley went from church choir girl to roller-skating teenage dropout to a 17-year-old cigarette girl at Birdland, where she absorbed the bebop revolution night after night. Encouraged by pianist Paul Bley, she began composing angular, unpredictable frameworks that George Russell, Jimmy Giuffre and Paul Bley himself recorded, and she famously described...

The Dave Brubeck Quartet's 1959 album Time Out was built on time signatures alien to American pop and became the first jazz album to sell a million copies. This episode traces its origin to a State Department tour of Eurasia, where Brubeck heard Turkish street musicians playing in 9/8, subdivided as 2+2+2+3, and decided to graft that mesmerizing limp onto the language of American jazz improvisatio...

Benny Goodman was handed a clarinet at a Chicago synagogue because he was the smallest of three brothers enrolled in free music classes. This episode follows the ninth of 12 children from the Maxwell Street slums through classical lessons with Franz Schoepp of the Chicago Symphony, a union card at 13, the death of his father when Benny was 17, session work in New York, and the partnership with arr...

Bebop, one of the most intellectually demanding movements in American music, was named after a nonsense scat syllable that 1940s club audiences used because they had no other word for what they were hearing. This episode traces the revolution from the rigid, dance-driven big bands of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller, through the looser Kansas City sound of Count Basie, and the boundary-pushing of Le...

Warren Baby Dodds helped invent modern drumming, yet his most famous 1920s recordings capture him tapping a woodblock because acoustic recording horns could not handle a bass drum. This episode follows the New Orleans pioneer from a lard-can drum with chair rungs for sticks, through street parades and funeral processions, to Fate Marable's riverboat band on the Mississippi alongside a teenage Loui...

In 1952, Downbeat readers voted Art Pepper the second greatest saxophonist on earth, behind only Charlie Parker. A few years later he was in San Quentin. This episode traces a life born into an earthquake in Gardena, California, with a 14-year-old runaway mother and violent alcoholic parents, and how a boy raised by his grandmother found order in the alto saxophone and a substitute family in the n...

In the mid-1960s, Al Jarreau was a vocational rehabilitation counselor in San Francisco with a master's degree. Decades later he had won major awards across jazz, pop and R&B and was known as the Acrobat of Scat. This episode follows him from a Seventh-day Adventist household in Milwaukee, where his father was a minister and his mother a church pianist, through student council president, Ripon...

In a San Francisco church, a jazz album serves as sacred text and a painting shows a saxophonist with a golden halo. This episode explores how John Coltrane reached that status through his 1965 masterpiece A Love Supreme, examining his apprenticeship under Miles Davis, the classic quartet he built with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones, and the modal framework that gave his players near-...

At 11, Herbie Hancock played a Mozart concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Decades later he was on MTV surrounded by twitching robotic mannequins, producing a global hip hop anthem. This episode traces how a classical prodigy who never had a formal jazz teacher reverse-engineered improvisation from records, earned dual degrees in music and electrical engineering at Grinnell College, wrote...

By her mid-twenties Hazel Scott was earning the modern equivalent of about $1.3 million a year, and in 1950 she became the first person of African descent to host a US network television show. Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad in 1920 and raised in Harlem by her mother Alma, a classically trained pianist who led an all-girl jazz band, she auditioned for Juilliard at eight and rose to fame at Cafe So...

Critics called Hank Mobley the middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone, a player who sat between the aggressive and the mellow and developed a laid-back, melodic tone all his own. Born in Eastman, Georgia in 1930 and raised near Newark, he received a saxophone from his grandmother during months of illness at 16, was rejected by a local music school on residency grounds, and taught himself the...

Gregory Porter's booming baritone has filled Glastonbury and a royal jubilee, but his story starts with childhood scars, an absent father, a shattered football dream and a family tragedy. Raised in Bakersfield, California as one of eight children of a minister mother, he took a football scholarship to San Diego State as an offensive lineman before a shoulder injury ended his career, and at 21 lost...

The baritone saxophone was once the furniture of the horn section, a heavy anchor in the back row. Gerry Mulligan gave it a light, airy voice and changed the trajectory of jazz. This episode follows him from a nomadic childhood as an engineer's son, through a nanny's house in Marion, Ohio filled with Fats Waller player-piano rolls, a confiscated arrangement of Lover at a Kalamazoo Catholic school,...

Long before Keith Moon or John Bonham, Gene Krupa drew up the blueprint for the drummer as star, and he did it playing acoustic jazz in the 1930s. Born in Chicago in 1909, the youngest of nine children in a devout Polish Catholic family, he spent a year at St. Joseph's College studying for the priesthood before leaving to gig around Wisconsin and Chicago, joining Thelma Terry and her Playboys at t...

Carmen McRae was 17 when Billie Holiday recorded her composition Dream of Life in 1939, yet stardom did not follow. Instead she spent her twenties as a chorus girl, a secretary and a working pianist in Harlem's bebop laboratory at Minton's Playhouse, married drummer Kenny Clarke, and then spent nearly four years playing solo piano and singing at Chicago's Archway Lounge, a period she later called...

At 17, Hiromi Uehara crossed paths with Chick Corea in Tokyo and was invited to share his stage the very next day. This episode follows the pianist from Hamamatsu, Japan's city of music and home to Yamaha and Kawai, where teacher Noriko Hikida introduced her to jazz at age eight, through performing with the Czech Philharmonic at 14, years spent writing corporate jingles for Nissan, and study at Be...