pplpod

Nat King Cole is remembered for one of the smoothest voices of the 20th century, but he considered himself a jazz pianist first and even recorded instrumental tracks under pseudonyms like Shorty Nadine and Sam Schmaltz to avoid singing. This episode traces his path from a Baptist minister's household in Montgomery, Alabama and Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood, through formal piano lessons at 12,...

In the 1960s Freddie Hubbard was recruited for the most radical avant-garde records of the decade, and by 1978 he was handpicked to play the blazing solo on Billy Joel's Zanzibar. This episode explains how one musician inhabited both worlds, starting with his physical mechanics. Born in Indianapolis in 1938, he played mellophone, French horn, and tuba in the Arsenal Technical High School band, bui...

Eubie Blake threw the party of the century for his 100th birthday, passed away five days later, and turned out to have been 96. That fabricated four-year gap says everything about the showmanship of a man whose life stretched from the aftermath of the Civil War to Saturday Night Live. Born in Baltimore in 1887 to formerly enslaved parents, he wandered into a music store at four or five, climbed on...

Eddie Palmieri built the house that salsa moved into and refused to say the word, dismissing it as a cheap marketing term for the complexity of New York Latin music. This episode follows him from his birth in Manhattan in December 1936 to Puerto Rican parents from Ponce, through a South Bronx childhood in the shadow of his older brother Charlie, an established piano phenom nine years his senior. E...

Miles Davis dismissed him as a gimmick playing random notes on a brass toy, then walked into the Five Spot Cafe, borrowed the tiny pocket trumpet, played a set on it, and publicly changed his mind. This episode builds a biography of Don Cherry from that turnaround. Born in Oklahoma City in 1936 to a family of Choctaw and African-American heritage, he grew up around his father's Cherry Blossom Club...

In 1964 an actual write-in presidential campaign proposed renaming the White House the Blues House, making Miles Davis director of the CIA, and naming Malcolm X attorney general. It was run by Dizzy Gillespie, and the merchandise money quietly funded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress of Racial Equality, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This episode looks past the puffed chee...

Only one jazz musician has ever been nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award, and he was not a trained actor but a six-foot-six tenor saxophonist whose real life outdid any script. Dexter Gordon was born in Los Angeles in 1923 to Dr. Frank Gordon, one of the city's first African-American physicians, whose patients included Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton, and his maternal grandfather was Meda...

In the 1950s many of the greatest jazz musicians believed genius required a life of self-destruction. Clifford Brown shattered that myth before his 26th birthday, playing with a precision that stunned Miles Davis and Charlie Parker while never touching drugs and having almost no interest in alcohol. Born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1930, he sang in a family vocal quartet, fell for his father's tru...

In 1960, as Cuba's political fabric was being torn apart, 19-year-old Chucho Valdés watched his father Bebo Valdés, director of the Tropicana Club Orchestra and Orquesta Sabor de Cuba, leave the island for an exile that would silence him on the world recording stage for more than 30 years. This episode follows how the teenager left behind in Havana did not merely carry his father's tradition but d...

In 1995 Dave Brubeck composed a piano and double bass duet titled Here Comes McBride, a public induction of a 20-something bassist into the lineage of jazz itself. This episode explores how Christian McBride, born in Philadelphia in May 1972, became the ultimate musical bridge, with more than 400 sideman recordings and 11 Grammy Awards spanning James Brown, Sting, Paul McCartney, Queen Latifah, an...

Chick Webb reached the pinnacle of jazz drumming while living with a badly deformed spine, constant pain, and no ability to read a single note of sheet music. Born in Baltimore to William and Marie Webb, with a birth year that sources place anywhere from 1905 to 1909, he fell down a flight of stairs as an infant, crushing vertebrae, and the injury progressed into Pott's disease, tuberculosis of th...

Flip over the sleeve of a 1963 jazz record and instead of personnel lists and critical praise you find a clinical psychological analysis co-written by the composer's own psychotherapist, Edmund Pollock. That is how Charles Mingus packaged The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, and this episode uses the making of that album as a window into his genius, his psychological complexity, and his refusal to...

At 18, Cécile McLorin Salvant left Miami for Aix-en-Provence to study law and Baroque voice, two disciplines that punish deviation. Three years later she had won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition, the most prestigious vocal prize in jazz. This episode traces how that leap was possible, starting with a childhood in a household where her Haitian doctor father and French mother, who...

On an alternate take of John Coltrane's Giant Steps in April 1959, the pianist simply sat out the solo, not because he lacked the chops but because his genius was for building foundations so solid that the giants around him could fly. Cedar Walton, born in Dallas in 1934, got his first lessons from his mother Ruth, an aspiring concert pianist who took him into local jazz clubs, and absorbed Nat Ki...

Late-1950s New York audiences expecting swing or bebop instead saw a pianist attacking the keys with forearms and elbows, playing what one phrase of the era called 88 tuned drums. Cecil Taylor, born in 1929 and raised in Corona, Queens, was pushed into music at six by his mother Almeida, a dancer who also played piano and violin, and he later said he was trying to imitate the leaps and spatial mov...

Half a century before Michael Jackson debuted the moonwalk, a ghost in a 1932 Betty Boop cartoon was gliding backward across the screen, and the animators had traced the move directly from Cab Calloway's body. This episode traces how a kid born in Rochester in 1907 and raised in Baltimore after his father's death hustled papers, shined shoes, walked horses at Pimlico, played pro basketball for the...

Bunk Johnson was one of the top trumpeters in New Orleans between roughly 1905 and 1915, a formally trained prodigy who could sight-read and improvise, played with the Superior Orchestra and the Eagle Band, and studied under Adam Olivier. He was also a notoriously unreliable narrator of his own life, aging himself up a full decade to 1879 and claiming to be a regular member of Buddy Bolden's band....

Imagine sitting in a New York State psychiatric hospital in the late 1940s, sincerely explaining that you are a successful recording artist who arranges for major orchestras, and watching the doctors write down delusions of grandeur. That was Earl Bud Powell's reality. This episode examines how a Harlem-born child of a stride pianist and grandson of a flamenco guitarist, trained in Bach from age f...

Imagine holding one of the most lucrative jobs in entertainment, bandleader for The Tonight Show, where all you have to do is play great music and fake a big smile at every joke. Branford Marsalis was incapable of faking it. This episode follows him from the Marsalis dynasty in New Orleans, where his father Ellis was a pianist and professor and his mother Dolores a jazz singer and teacher, through...

You walk into a dimly lit jazz club expecting Cole Porter and Gershwin, and instead the pianist plays a Radiohead or Soundgarden song with the mathematical precision of Bach. This episode explores Brad Mehldau, born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1970, adopted by an ophthalmologist and a homemaker, and raised in West Hartford, Connecticut, where he picked out Top 40 melodies by ear before a piano te...

Imagine inventing a new genre of music, writing jukebox anthems that define an era, and then rejecting the title of composer because you claim you wrote those tracks by accident while whistling or killing time at the piano. This episode follows Bobby Timmons from Philadelphia, where he was born in December 1935 into a family of ministers and pianists, played in his grandfather's church, studied wi...

Imagine creating the only purely a cappella song to hit number one on the Billboard charts, then dropping it from your live shows forever because a presidential campaign used it without permission, and later becoming the subject of a false urban legend that you had died. This episode goes far past that one hit to explore Bobby McFerrin, born in Manhattan in 1950 to vocal teacher Sara Copper and Ro...

Imagine producing a sound as pure as a perfectly cast bell while your entire life falls apart around you. That is the paradox of Leon Bismark Beiderbecke, known as Bix, a self-taught kid from Davenport, Iowa, born in 1903, who replicated theater piano and riverboat calliope tunes by ear as a small child and taught himself cornet by playing along to his brother's early jazz records. This episode ex...

How does a teenager drafted into a U.S. Army band end up a few years later behind a spaceship-sized drum kit, pioneering jazz fusion and jamming with the Grateful Dead? This episode follows Billy Cobham from his birth in Panama in 1944 and a childhood in Brooklyn, where his father worked as a hospital statistician by week and played piano by weekend, to New York's High School of Music and Art, thr...

How does a kid from Colorado who started on classical clarinet with a Denver Symphony player become a jazz guitarist whose repertoire moves from Aaron Copland to doom metal to a Madonna song? This episode follows Bill Frisell from a university theory class taught by Johnny Smith that became private lessons because every other student quit, through Berklee studies with Jim Hall, to a Pat Metheny re...