pplpod

At the 2003 Grammys, a 23-year-old former New York lounge singer swept five awards in one night with a quiet acoustic blend of jazz, country, blues and folk, at the peak of the highly produced pop era. This episode follows Norah Jones from her birth in Manhattan in 1979 as Geethali Norah Jones Shankar, daughter of concert producer Sue Jones and sitar legend Ravi Shankar, through a remarkably ordin...

Vijay Iyer walked away from a physics PhD at UC Berkeley in 1995, after a Yale degree in math and physics and a Berkeley master's in physics, to build his own interdisciplinary doctoral program studying the cognitive structures of African and African-American music. This episode explores how he got there: born in 1971 in Albany, New York, and raised in Fairport near Rochester as the son of Indian...

João Gilberto, known in Brazil as O Mito (the myth), revolutionized global music by teaching himself to whisper into a microphone. This episode traces his path from a wealthy merchant family in Bahia, where a guitar gifted by his grandfather at 14 caused a permanent rift with his disapproving father, to his move to Salvador at 18 as a radio crooner and then to Rio de Janeiro in the early 1950s. Th...

Johnny Dodds was so serious, professional, and sober amid the roaring 1920s jazz scene that he stuck out among his peers, yet his blues playing was so gritty that colleagues nicknamed him "Toilet." Born in 1892 in Louisiana or Mississippi (the archives disagree), he grew up in a musical household, sang high tenor in the family quartet, and started on a toy flute meant for his younger brother Warre...

For a decade, Ornette Coleman was booed off bandstands, abandoned mid-solo by rhythm sections, and forced to haul boxes and run a department store elevator in Los Angeles. This deep dive explores how that wilderness period, from Fort Worth to New Orleans to LA between 1948 and 1958, led him to a philosophy he called harmolodics, in which melody is never subservient to chord progressions, and to a...

For nearly a decade, critics dismissed Ahmad Jamal as a "cocktail pianist" while Miles Davis sat in the front row taking notes and sending his band to study him. Born Frederick Russell Jones in Pittsburgh in 1930, he mimicked his uncle's piano notes at three, began rigorous classical training at seven, played Liszt in competitions at 11, worked professionally at 14 with praise from Art Tatum, and...

Paul Desmond wrote "Take Five," one of the most recognizable jazz melodies in the world, while joking that he was the world's slowest saxophone player. Born Paul Breitenfeld in San Francisco in 1924 to a working musician father and a mother with severe mental health struggles, he was sent to live with relatives in New York for nearly five years, was talked out of the violin by his father, took up...

When Bitches Brew was released in March 1970, jazz critics called it commercial garbage and Steely Dan's Donald Fagen dismissed it as out of tune, yet it won a Grammy, went platinum, reached No. 35 on the Billboard 200, and birthed jazz-rock fusion. This deep dive zooms in on the August 19 to 21, 1969 sessions at Columbia's Studio B, where Miles Davis, restless after In a Silent Way and absorbing...

Joe Henderson transcribed Lester Young solos so precisely that his professors assumed he had perfect pitch; it was actually obsessive work ethic. This deep dive follows the saxophonist from Lima, Ohio, where he was one of 14 children learning from his brother's record collection, through drums and piano before the sax, the mid-1950s Detroit scene, Wayne State University alongside Yusef Lateef and...

In May 1959 at Columbia's 30th Street Studio, Charles Mingus recorded his major-label debut, Mingus Ah Um, whose title playfully conjugates his own name like a Latin adjective. This deep dive treats the album as an intentional audio autobiography, opening with "Better Git It in Your Soul," a 6/8 evocation of the Holiness churches of his childhood, and moving through tributes to his musical ancesto...

In 1928 Paris, Sidney Bechet pulled a gun on a fellow musician over a chord change, missed, wounded a bystander, and served 11 months in prison before being deported. This deep dive explores how the man who was arguably the first great jazz soloist, recording "Wild Cat Blues" and "Kansas City Man Blues" in July 1923, months before Louis Armstrong's recording debut, ended up less famous than his pe...

Charles Mingus wrote a detailed 1954 mail-order manual for teaching a cat to use a toilet, and he was also the virtuoso bassist and composer known as "the angry man of jazz." Born in 1922 in Nogales, Arizona, and raised in Watts with a mixed Black, white, and Chinese heritage, he grew up in a strict household that allowed only Holiness Pentecostal church music, secretly absorbed Duke Ellington on...

Weather Report had no lead singer, refused a clear lead instrument, and threw out jazz's head-and-chorus format, yet ended up with a Billboard-charting crossover hit and stadium tours with lasers. This deep dive treats the band as a living biography, from its 1970 founding by keyboardist Joe Zawinul and saxophonist Wayne Shorter, both veterans of Miles Davis's electric era, alongside Czech bassist...

On December 7, 1941, 16-year-old Cal Tjader won a Gene Krupa drum contest playing "Drum Boogie" on the same morning Pearl Harbor was attacked. This deep dive traces how a Swedish-American kid born in St. Louis in 1925 to vaudeville parents became the most successful non-Latino musician in the history of Latin jazz. Raised in the Bay Area with a classically trained pianist mother and a tap-dancing...

Trumpeter Donald Byrd played hard bop with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and Sonny Rollins in the 1950s, then made Black Byrd, the best-selling album in Blue Note history, in 1973, all while earning a Juris Doctor in 1976 and a PhD in music education from Teachers College, Columbia University in 1982. Born in Detroit in 1932 to a strict Methodist minister father and...

Pianist Wynton Kelly played on Kind of Blue, the best-selling jazz album in history, was described by peers as the greatest supporting musician in the genre, and had trumpeter Wynton Marsalis named in his honor, yet he died at 39 in a Toronto hotel room with almost no money. Born in Brooklyn in 1931 to Jamaican immigrant parents, he started piano at four, was forced by his vocational high school t...

Joseph Rudolph "Philly Joe" Jones began as a child tap dancer on Philadelphia radio before becoming the drummer that both Miles Davis and Bill Evans called their favorite. This deep dive follows him from U.S. Army service in World War II to his 1947 arrival in New York as house drummer at Cafe Society, where the nightly pressure of playing with whoever walked in during the birth of bebop turned hi...

Charlie Christian died in 1942 at just 25, yet in roughly three years of national fame he invented the concept of the lead electric guitar, helped lay the groundwork for bebop, and influenced Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia, and even Black Sabbath's first song. Born in 1916 in Bonham, Texas, and raised in Oklahoma City, he tap danced on the street to support his family after a...

This deep dive explores the life of jazz saxophonist Stan Getz, born in Philadelphia in 1927 to Jewish immigrants who had fled pogroms in the Russian Empire. With only about six months of formal lessons and no training in music theory, he practiced eight hours a day on a $35 alto saxophone his father scraped together money for during the Great Depression, developing the pristine tone that led the...

In a crowded Army barracks in South Korea in the mid-1960s, a young soldier sat in headphones because his roommates could not stand the experimental music he played day and night. That soldier was Anthony Braxton, future MacArthur fellow and NEA Jazz Master. This episode traces how a kid from Chicago's South Side, born in 1945 and obsessed with rocket ships, television technology and wiring schema...

Roy Haynes kept time for Charlie Parker in the late 1940s, subbed for Elvin Jones in the John Coltrane Quartet in the 1960s, jammed with the Allman Brothers in the 2000s, and voiced a radio DJ in Grand Theft Auto V. This episode explains how one drummer authored so much of jazz history. Born in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood on March 13, 1925, to parents from Barbados, he grew up alongside a brothe...

Grant Green was so consumed by self-doubt that his first recording session as a bandleader for Blue Note Records sat in a vault for decades, released only in 2001 as First Session. This episode explores how that hesitant, self-taught guitarist from St. Louis became the label's most-recorded musician of the early 1960s and, long after his death, one of the most sampled artists in modern music. Born...

Millions of children heard Louis Prima as the scat-singing orangutan King Louie in Disney's 1967 film The Jungle Book, but the man behind the voice was a five-times-married Las Vegas showman who had spent fifty years transforming American music. This episode follows him from a Sicilian immigrant household in 1910s New Orleans, where he hijacked his brother Leon's cornet, through the neighborhood c...

In the late 1940s, Charlie Parker and a young Miles Davis sat on the floor of a cramped basement apartment behind a Chinese laundry in New York, and the man hosting them was a quiet, self-taught former boardinghouse kid named Gil Evans. This episode explains how that arranger engineered the DNA of cool jazz, modal jazz and jazz-rock fusion by treating the entire orchestra as his instrument. Born G...

Bill Evans brought an almost mathematical discipline to jazz improvisation and co-created the best-selling jazz album in history, while friends described his 51 years as a prolonged act of self-destruction. This episode looks past the tortured-artist cliche to the mechanics of how he transformed the piano. Growing up in a turbulent New Jersey home, he learned by watching his older brother Harry's...