Deep Focus

Celebrating the incomparable Dexter Gordon on the centenary of his birth, February 27, 2023, with the brilliant Eric Person.     Photo credit: Dexter Gordon at Mountain Winery Jazz Festival, Saratoga CA_1981 Brianmcmillen, CC BY-SA 4.0 creativecommons.org-licenses-by-sa-4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Jeff Beck arrived at a time when all the rules were being questioned.  Unlike many of his contemporaries (and many in his audience), he never lost the sense of discovery in his music.  Put an instrumental band together and get it played on the radio?  Sure, why not?  Collaborate with Stevie Wonder and Tina Turner?  I'll try that!  Introduce a whole new audience to the music of Charles Mingus? That...

Jeff Beck arrived at a time when all the rules were being questioned.  Unlike many of his contemporaries (and many in his audience), he never lost the sense of discovery in his music.  Put an instrumental band together and get it played on the radio?  Sure, why not?  Collaborate with Stevie Wonder and Tina Turner?  I'll try that!  Introduce a whole new audience to the music of Charles Mingus? That...

Jeff Beck arrived at a time when all the rules were being questioned.  Unlike many of his contemporaries (and many in his audience), he never lost the sense of discovery in his music.  Put an instrumental band together and get it played on the radio?  Sure, why not?  Collaborate with Stevie Wonder and Tina Turner?  I'll try that!  Introduce a whole new audience to the music of Charles Mingus? That...

Meet Karl Berger and Ingrid Sertso.  In 1965, they traveled from West Germany to Le Chat Qui Pêche in Paris and found Don Cherry there.  What flowed from that encounter is a tale of discovery and evolution that is still unfolding, still reaching new ears and new minds.  Let's hear about it from them firsthand.  Hey, have you got any music we've never heard, Mitch?  Do I?  Do I! #WKCR #DeepFocus #D...

Meet Karl Berger and Ingrid Sertso.  In 1965, they traveled from West Germany to Le Chat Qui Pêche in Paris and found Don Cherry there.  What flowed from that encounter is a tale of discovery and evolution that is still unfolding, still reaching new ears and new minds.  Let's hear about it from them firsthand.  Hey, have you got any music we've never heard, Mitch?  Do I?  Do I! #WKCR #DeepFocus #D...

Jimmy Smith didn't invent the electric organ but, for several decades at least, you wouldn't know it.  The response to his Blue Note and Verve LPs in the Fifties and Sixties made him a festival headliner and earned him the nickname "The Incredible Jimmy Smith."  To this day, no one in the Jazz idiom can sit down at a Hammond B3 without contending with his influence or his very life force, even 17...

Jimmy Smith didn't invent the electric organ but, for several decades at least, you wouldn't know it.  The response to his Blue Note and Verve LPs in the Fifties and Sixties made him a festival headliner and earned him the nickname "The Incredible Jimmy Smith."  To this day, no one in the Jazz idiom can sit down at a Hammond B3 without contending with his influence or his very life force, even 17...

Jimmy Smith didn't invent the electric organ but, for several decades at least, you wouldn't know it.  The response to his Blue Note and Verve LPs in the Fifties and Sixties made him a festival headliner and earned him the nickname "The Incredible Jimmy Smith."  To this day, no one in the Jazz idiom can sit down at a Hammond B3 without contending with his influence or his very life force, even 17...

Mitch Goldman's Deep Focus this Monday (12/12) is on Miles Davis with guest David Soldier.  Soldier's punk chamber music, elephant orchestra (yes, the elephants play the instruments), Most Unwanted Song (which we absolutely love!) and tons of other off-center music had to come from someplace, but where?  What inspires an emerging composer to take such brash risks and leaps of musical derring-do? ...

Mitch Goldman's Deep Focus this Monday (12/12) is on Miles Davis with guest David Soldier.  Soldier's punk chamber music, elephant orchestra (yes, the elephants play the instruments), Most Unwanted Song (which we absolutely love!) and tons of other off-center music had to come from someplace, but where?  What inspires an emerging composer to take such brash risks and leaps of musical derring-do? ...

Mitch Goldman's Deep Focus this Monday (12/12) is on Miles Davis with guest David Soldier.  Soldier's punk chamber music, elephant orchestra (yes, the elephants play the instruments), Most Unwanted Song (which we absolutely love!) and tons of other off-center music had to come from someplace, but where?  What inspires an emerging composer to take such brash risks and leaps of musical derring-do? ...

In 1972, as Miles Davis was rewriting the genetic code of musical possibilities in NYC, Carlos Santana, his labelmate, was doing the exact same thing in San Francisco.  Blazing electric keyboard player? Check. Hard-swinging drummer? Check.  Inventive electric bassist? Check.  Fathomless well of creative ideas and the fearlessness to apply them? Check and double-check.  One aspirant who was so move...

In 1972, as Miles Davis was rewriting the genetic code of musical possibilities in NYC, Carlos Santana, his labelmate, was doing the exact same thing in San Francisco.  Blazing electric keyboard player? Check. Hard-swinging drummer? Check.  Inventive electric bassist? Check.  Fathomless well of creative ideas and the fearlessness to apply them? Check and double-check.  One aspirant who was so move...

In 1972, as Miles Davis was rewriting the genetic code of musical possibilities in NYC, Carlos Santana, his labelmate, was doing the exact same thing in San Francisco.  Blazing electric keyboard player? Check. Hard-swinging drummer? Check.  Inventive electric bassist? Check.  Fathomless well of creative ideas and the fearlessness to apply them? Check and double-check.  One aspirant who was so move...

"Lester Bowie": instead of thinking of that sound as a person's name, maybe we should start thinking of it as a verb.  Here's one definition: to change the orientation of something familiar so that it becomes unimaginably magnificent. Example: "I'm going to Lester Bowie this pebble and make a beautiful jewel out of it" or "I'm going to Lester Bowie these old tires into a holiday feast." It helps i...

"Lester Bowie": instead of thinking of that sound as a person's name, maybe we should start thinking of it as a verb.  Here's one definition: to change the orientation of something familiar so that it becomes unimaginably magnificent. Example: "I'm going to Lester Bowie this pebble and make a beautiful jewel out of it" or "I'm going to Lester Bowie these old tires into a holiday feast." It helps i...

"Lester Bowie": instead of thinking of that sound as a person's name, maybe we should start thinking of it as a verb.  Here's one definition: to change the orientation of something familiar so that it becomes unimaginably magnificent. Example: "I'm going to Lester Bowie this pebble and make a beautiful jewel out of it" or "I'm going to Lester Bowie these old tires into a holiday feast." It helps i...

This Monday night on Jazz Alternatives, Mitch Goldman welcomes drummer Don McKenzie back to the studio for a very special Deep Focus on the supergroup Last Exit (Peter Brotzmann, Sonny Sharrock, Bill Laswell, Ronald Shannon Jackson), a rebroadcast from 2015. The band was known for its uncompromising musical ferocity, fueled by the band members' confrontational attitudes. Greg Kot wrote that they b...

This Monday night on Jazz Alternatives (6pm to 9pm) Mitch Goldman welcomes drummer Don McKenzie back to the studio for a very special Deep Focus on the supergroup Last Exit (Peter Brotzmann, Sonny Sharrock, Bill Laswell, Ronald Shannon Jackson), a rebroadcast from 2015. The band was known for its uncompromising musical ferocity, fueled by the band members' confrontational attitudes. Greg Kot wrote...

This Monday night on Jazz Alternatives, Mitch Goldman welcomes drummer Don McKenzie back to the studio for a very special Deep Focus on the supergroup Last Exit (Peter Brotzmann, Sonny Sharrock, Bill Laswell, Ronald Shannon Jackson), a rebroadcast from 2015. The band was known for its uncompromising musical ferocity, fueled by the band members' confrontational attitudes. Greg Kot wrote that they b...

No one will ever embody the concept of music as spiritual sustenance the way that Pharoah Sanders did.  William Hooker heard the call through the music and it changed his life.  William joins Mitch Goldman to remember this enduring moment of inspiration and to explore the WKCR archives.  Jewels abound.     The Pharoah Sanders Memorial Broadcast is all day Monday 9/26.  This segment is 6pm to 9pm o...

No one will ever embody the concept of music as spiritual sustenance the way that Pharoah Sanders did.  William Hooker heard the call through the music and it changed his life.  William joins Mitch Goldman to remember this enduring moment of inspiration and to explore the WKCR archives.  Jewels abound.     The Pharoah Sanders Memorial Broadcast is all day Monday 9/26.  This segment is 6pm to 9pm o...

No one will ever embody the concept of music as spiritual sustenance the way that Pharoah Sanders did.  William Hooker heard the call through the music and it changed his life.  William joins Mitch Goldman to remember this enduring moment of inspiration and to explore the WKCR archives.  Jewels abound.     The Pharoah Sanders Memorial Broadcast is all day Monday 9/26.  This segment is 6pm to 9pm o...

Every once in a while, an artist comes along who gets so caught up in the sweep of history that the world seems to create itself for the artist's work, rather than the other way around.  Dollar Brand came of age as a pianist in South Africa in the late Fifties, just in time for the multiethnic explosion of Johannesburg's Sophiatown.  In the wake of the repression that followed the Sharpeville Mass...