pplpod

Exactly one musician has won Grammy Awards in both classical and Latin jazz categories, and this episode explains how Paquito D'Rivera became that person. Born Francisco de Jesus Rivera Figueras in Havana in June 1948, he was raised by a father, Tito, who played classical saxophone and sold instruments while spinning Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman records at home and taking his five-year-old son...

The closing theme of Sesame Street, the whistling in Old Spice commercials, jam sessions with Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, and the guitar that convinced a young John Lennon to play a Rickenbacker all trace back to one man: Jean-Baptiste Frederic Isidore Toots Thielemans. This episode follows the Brussels cafe owner's son who played a cardboard accordion at three, entered college as a mathematic...

Sketches of Spain got Miles Davis accused of theft by a living classical composer, enraged jazz purists, and drove a future rock critic to abandon jazz entirely, yet it became a platinum-selling, Grammy-winning masterpiece. This episode traces the 1960 album from a night out that Frances Taylor Davis insisted on, watching flamenco dancer Roberto Iglesias, to Miles clearing out the flamenco section...

Picture a 1960s jazz club where a musician lifts three saxophones strapped around his neck, puts all three mouthpieces in his mouth, and blows a perfectly harmonized chord, with a gong, a nose flute, an alarm clock and a section of garden hose within reach. This episode explains why Rahsaan Roland Kirk was not a novelty act but one of the most serious and inventive synthesizers of music who ever l...

The man widely regarded as the founding father of jazz does not exist on tape. Not a single second of Charles Buddy Bolden's cornet survives, even though his trombonist Willie Cornish remembered recording at least one phonograph cylinder. This episode separates myth from documented fact, beginning with his birth on September 6, 1877, a grandfather who had been enslaved, a father who died when Budd...

Ray Brown did not choose the upright bass out of passion. In 1940s Pittsburgh his high school was flooded with piano players, his father could not afford a trombone, and the one empty chair in the school orchestra was the bass. This episode follows how that pragmatic decision produced one of the most legendary bassists in jazz history. Brown hauled the school's instrument onto the bus every weeken...

On December 17, 1999, Grover Washington Jr. finished a four-song set on the CBS Saturday Early Show, walked into the green room, and collapsed from a fatal heart attack at 56. This episode looks past that abrupt ending to the universe of sound he built, starting in Buffalo, New York, where a church-chorister mother and a saxophone-playing, record-collecting father surrounded him with gospel and bi...

A teenager in a tailored tuxedo playing Dixieland in a Boston club does not look like the future inventor of jazz fusion, but that is where Armando Anthony Chick Corea started. This episode follows his path from Chelsea, Massachusetts, where his trumpet-playing father sat him at the piano at age four, through classical lessons with Salvatore Sullo, a drum kit at eleven, and a brief stop at Juillia...

A classically trained jazz saxophonist who wins a Grammy for Best Rap Song, scores a Japanese anime series, gets name-checked in one of the biggest hip-hop anthems of the decade, and records a Metallica cover sounds impossible on paper. This episode explains how Kamasi Washington did all of it without abandoning jazz. Born in Los Angeles in 1981, he studied at the Academy of Music at Hamilton High...

Dave Brubeck was a music major who could not sight-read, a cattle rancher's son who faked his way through his mother's classical piano lessons by ear, and a graduate who was only allowed his degree after promising never to teach. This episode traces how that same student went on to record the first jazz album to sell over a million copies, land on the cover of Time magazine, and rewrite the way li...

Imagine composing one of the most famous jazz standards in history, selling millions of records, and playing with Charlie Parker, yet being unable to read the sheet music for your own songs. This episode explores how Erroll Garner, born in Pittsburgh in 1921, began replicating his siblings' piano lessons at age three, played KDKA radio at seven and Allegheny riverboats at 11, and built an entirely...

A jazz musician claimed to have been teleported to Saturn nearly a decade before Roswell, at a time when the world was focused on the looming Second World War. For Sun Ra, born Herman Poole Blount in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, in 1914, this was not science fiction but a defining truth. This episode does not try to debunk the mythology. It asks how a chronically ill, isolated prodigy who trans...

In the late 1930s a broke man swept floors at a recreation hall in Savannah, Georgia, having pawned his custom suits to buy a meal. A little over a decade earlier he had been musical royalty, the architect of modern jazz and the mentor who taught Louis Armstrong. This episode explores the rise and rapid fall of Joseph Nathan Oliver, from a disputed birth year in rural Louisiana and early trombone...

A jazz trumpeter records what he considers disposable filler to finish an album, and it becomes a runaway crossover hit. Then Chrysler uses it in a World Series commercial without asking. Lee Morgan threatened a lawsuit, forced the ad off the air, and won a settlement. This episode follows Edward Lee Morgan from Philadelphia, where his sister gave him a trumpet on his 13th birthday and Clifford Br...

In an early-1920s vaudeville theater, an 18-month-old in a sailor suit played snare and bass drum to The Stars and Stripes Forever, then tap danced for the finale. By 15 he was earning $1,000 a week, the second-highest-paid child entertainer in the world behind Jackie Coogan. This episode explores how Buddy Rich, billed as Baby Traps the Drum Wonder, grew into one of the most technically gifted dr...

In Steven Spielberg's 2004 film The Terminal, Tom Hanks plays a man stranded in an airport seeking one final autograph from the 1958 photograph A Great Day in Harlem. The musician he is chasing is real and appears as himself: Benny Golson. This episode traces Golson's 95-year life from a Depression-era Philadelphia childhood raised by a seamstress mother, through classical piano dreams shattered b...

In 1945, a young girl repatriating to war-shattered Beppu, Japan, heard a record of Teddy Wilson playing Sweet Lorraine at a local collector's home, and it altered her destiny. This episode follows Toshiko Akiyoshi from a Ginza club in 1953, where Oscar Peterson heard her and called Norman Granz, to the debut album Toshiko's Piano recorded with Peterson's own rhythm section, to the cold-call lette...

In March 1947, undercover officers arriving to raid a California house heard Dizzy Gillespie playing trumpet from a tree in the front yard. The homeowner was Anita O'Day, a singer who fundamentally altered American vocal music. This episode traces her fractured Chicago childhood, her escape into Depression-era walkathons where she once covered 4,000 miles in 97 days, and the stage name O'Day, pig...

A Florida schoolboy with a voracious appetite was nicknamed Cannibal by his classmates, and over time the word softened into Cannonball. This episode follows Julian Cannonball Adderley from a Tampa household of educators, through teenage gigs in Tallahassee alongside Ray Charles, a job as band director at Dillard High School, and leading the 36th Army Dance Band, to the 1955 night at the Cafe Bohe...

Ask anyone to name the anthem of the Duke Ellington Orchestra and they will say Take the A Train. Ellington did not write it. It was composed by Billy Strayhorn, a five-foot-three, soft-spoken, openly gay prodigy who spent nearly three decades producing brilliance in the shadow of a giant. This episode traces his childhood in Pittsburgh with a violent alcoholic father, the sanctuary of a grandmoth...

In a smoky 1930s Pittsburgh club, a club owner pulled a gun on a teenage piano player and ordered him behind the drum kit so a young Erroll Garner could take the keys. That disputed but legendary story is the origin of Art Blakey, the self-taught pianist who became the thunderous architect of hard bop. This episode follows him from a childhood of profound hardship, through touring with Mary Lou Wi...

Say the word Storyville and you might picture a BBC documentary series, a blues-rock band, a Danish jazz label, a Boston nightclub, or an artisanal coffee company. All of those are correct, and this episode traces how a single proper noun detached from its geography and became a free-floating cultural signifier. It starts in 1897, when a New Orleans city ordinance created a legally sanctioned vice...

In 1964 a disciplined musician who did not smoke, drink, or use drugs collapsed in West Berlin. Hospital staff saw a Black American jazz musician, assumed a narcotics overdose, and left him to detox. He died of an undiagnosed diabetic coma at 36. That musician was Eric Dolphy, and this episode explores the paradox of a Los Angeles kid obsessed with symphonic classical music who dreamed of an orche...

Picture a military tent in Belgium in the winter of 1944, artillery rumbling outside, and a young English woman in a steel helmet and GI combat boots playing jazz on an accordion strapped to her chest. That woman was Margaret Marian Turner, who dropped out of London's Guildhall School of Music, took the stage name Marian Page, joined a vaudeville piano act, entertained Allied troops with the USO,...

Type the name Thomas Flanagan into Wikipedia and the site asks a strange question: are you looking for a 19th-century Catholic canon, an Irish-Australian gold prospector, a jazz pianist, a Sons of Anarchy actor, or the pathological liar Jon Lovitz played on Saturday Night Live? This episode treats a single disambiguation page as its source material, a bulleted list of 11 entities sharing one name...