pplpod

Imagine being 17 years old and getting hired by Miles Davis to revitalize his band. That was the reality for Tony Williams, the drummer who pulled the drum kit from polite timekeeping in the background to the very front of the stage. This episode traces his path from a Boston child prodigy studying limb independence with Alan Dawson at age 11, to gigging with Sam Rivers at 13 and Jackie McLean at...

The man who built the bridge between Dixieland and big band swing moved to New York in 1920 to become a chemist. This episode follows Fletcher Henderson from Cuthbert, Georgia, where his father, a normal school principal, locked him in a room to practice piano, through a chemistry and mathematics degree at Atlanta University, a lab assistant job in Manhattan, and the sick roommate whose riverboat...

In the winter of 1973, five musicians at the peak of their commercial success walked off a London stage and refused to speak to one another. This episode traces John McLaughlin from his tenure as a key architect of Miles Davis's electric period and his devotion to guru Sri Chinmoy, who gave him the name Mahavishnu, through a scrambled recruitment that yielded Billy Cobham, Rick Laird, Jan Hammer,...

On Friday, January 24, 1975, Keith Jarrett stood in the wings of the Cologne Opera House exhausted, strapped into a back brace, and facing a small, out-of-tune rehearsal piano instead of the Bösendorfer 290 Imperial he had requested. This episode reconstructs the night behind the best-selling solo piano album in history, from 18-year-old promoter Vera Brandes selling out 1,400 seats at four Deutsc...

He called electronic instruments toys yet played them for Miles Davis; he demanded pin-drop silence from audiences yet moaned and grunted over his own playing. This episode explores Keith Jarrett, born with absolute pitch in Pennsylvania, on television by age five, playing Bach and his own compositions in recital at seven, and studying at the Curtis Institute before a Dave Brubeck concert pulled h...

In 1930, an 11-year-old blind clarinetist played in a Chicago brothel; he would go on to record the first free group improvisation in jazz and the first improvised overdubbed recordings. This episode traces Lennie Tristano from the loss of his sight to glaucoma, a music degree earned with his aunt taking notes in his lectures, and his 1946 move to New York, where his advanced harmonies challenged...

One of the most relaxing records ever made was cut by musicians who could barely tolerate each other. This episode digs into the 1964 album Getz/Gilberto, starting with American jazz losing ground to rock and roll while João Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim stripped samba down to a whispered guitar style in 1958. We follow the records that traveled to New York in a bassist's suitcase, Stan Getz's...

In 1919, King George V laughed and applauded a rowdy American band playing Tiger Rag at Buckingham Palace; the same tour ended with the musicians sprinting for the docks at Southampton, chased by a furious British lord. This episode tells the story of the Original Dixieland Jass Band, from a Chicago promoter's attempt to clone Tom Brown's band in 1916, the mutiny against founding drummer Johnny St...

The whispery English vocal that introduced bossa nova to mainstream America was paid a flat $120, while saxophonist Stan Getz earned enough from the royalties to buy a 20-room mansion. This episode dismantles the accidental housewife myth around Astrud Gilberto, tracing her upbringing in Rio de Janeiro with a musician mother and a German language-teacher father, her place in the Copacabana circle...

At 11, Terri Lyne Carrington held a full scholarship to Berklee College of Music. This episode traces her from a Medford, Massachusetts home where her father led the Boston Jazz Society, through her grandfather Matt Carrington's drum set at age seven, her Wichita Jazz Festival performance alongside Clark Terry, study with Alan Dawson, and the 1981 recording TLC and Friends with Kenny Barron, Buste...

He shaped the careers of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Dizzy Gillespie and defined the sound of bebop, yet never became a household name. This episode uncovers Tadd Dameron, born in Cleveland in 1917, who began as pianist and arranger for Harlan Leonard and his Rockets and went on to bridge the orchestrated swing era and the fast, improvised world of bebop by applying Ellington- and Gershwin-inf...

At 19, Sonny Stitt tracked down his idol Charlie Parker in Kansas City, jammed with him for an hour at the Gypsy Tea Room, and was told he sounded too much like him. This episode follows the saxophonist born Edward Hammond Boatner Jr. in Boston in 1924 and raised by the Stitt family in Saginaw, Michigan, through the big bands of Tiny Bradshaw, Billy Eckstine, and Dizzy Gillespie, and the years of...

In the summer of 1959, one of the most celebrated jazz musicians alive vanished from public view to practice saxophone for up to 16 hours a day on the Williamsburg Bridge. This episode explores the life of Sonny Rollins, from a Harlem childhood in Sugar Hill surrounded by figures like Coleman Hawkins and Duke Ellington, informal mentorship from Thelonious Monk, and early bebop recordings, through...

A 13-year-old skateboarder in late-1980s Houston, obsessed with hip-hop and secretly trained in Suzuki-method classical piano since age six, hears Thelonious Monk's Round Midnight and realizes it sounds like a beat. This episode traces how Jason Moran grew from that moment into a MacArthur Fellow, drawing on a childhood in Pleasantville surrounded by his father's 10,000-album collection, family ti...

He won a Pulitzer Prize for shaping the sound of turn-of-the-century America, yet he died penniless in a psychiatric hospital and lay in an unmarked pauper's grave for nearly 60 years. This episode pieces together the life of Scott Joplin, from a railway laborer's family in post-Civil War Texas, a mother who cleaned houses so he could practice on wealthy families' pianos, and a German Jewish tutor...

By day a teenager playing piano for her Baptist church choir in Newark; by night sneaking into nightclubs to sing jazz. This episode follows Sarah Vaughan from an 18-year-old at the Apollo Theater's Amateur Night, where she won first prize singing Body and Soul and earned a week opening for Ella Fitzgerald, to Earl Hines hiring her as a pianist to sidestep union rules, placing her alongside Charli...

In 1999 at Electric Lady Studios, the horn player laying down the grittiest lines on D'Angelo's Voodoo was not a hip-hop insider but a bespoke-suited jazz purist. This episode traces Roy Hargrove from his boyhood in Waco and Dallas, where a school visit from saxophonist David Fathead Newman and a junior high teacher named Dean Hill taught him to improvise, through Wynton Marsalis hearing him at Bo...

A young Dizzy Gillespie once heard the 1939 recording Hot Mallets on the radio and was convinced the trumpet solo was his own. It was Roy Eldridge. This episode traces 'Little Jazz' from Pittsburgh, where his mother's death when he was 11 sent him into marathon bedroom practice sessions, modeling his trumpet on saxophonists Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter rather than Louis Armstrong, and landing...

Ron Carter holds a Guinness World Record as the most recorded jazz bassist in history, with 2,221 sessions. Drawing on the 2022 documentary Finding the Right Notes and decades of criticism, this episode follows him from a cello at age 10 in Ferndale, Michigan, through Cass Tech in Detroit, degrees from Eastman and the Manhattan School of Music, and the Pythodd Room in segregated Rochester, where t...

Robert Glasper has won a Grammy for Best R&B Album, played keyboards on Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly, covered Radiohead on acoustic piano, and earned an Emmy for a song in Ava DuVernay's documentary 13th. This episode follows the Houston pianist from the jazz clubs where his mother, a jazz and blues singer, brought him as a child, through Sunday mornings playing in Baptist, Catholic, a...

In 1962, a young saxophonist from Little Rock, Arkansas, was sleeping on New York streets and subways and selling his blood for food. This episode follows Pharoah Sanders from church hymns on clarinet and an early devotion to visual art, through a fine arts degree in Oakland, to the moment Sun Ra took him in, gave him clothes and a place to stay, and urged him to embrace the name Pharoah, spelled...

In 1949, Norman Granz heard a live piano broadcast in a Montreal taxi and told the driver to turn around. This episode traces Oscar Peterson from the Little Burgundy neighborhood, where his railway porter father required his children to learn music, through the childhood tuberculosis that ended his trumpet playing, four to six hours of daily practice, and classical study with Paul de Marky in a li...

An extra in the background of The Ten Commandments and The Prodigal was one of the era's most innovative jazz arrangers. This episode follows Melba Liston from a trombone at age seven in Kansas City, folk songs and spirituals with her grandfather, and study with Alma Hightower in Los Angeles, to a union card at 16, Gerald Wilson's big band in 1943, and recordings with classmate Dexter Gordon, who...

On a sweltering 1946 day in the San Fernando Valley, two musicians listed wintry images to cool off and wrote The Christmas Song in 45 minutes. This episode explains how that financial safety net gave Mel Torme the freedom to pursue demanding jazz, and why he spent his life resisting the nickname 'The Velvet Fog.' We start in Chicago in 1925, where a four-year-old sang with the Coon-Sanders Orches...

In 1966, the pianist on A Love Supreme was studying for a taxi license in Philadelphia. This episode traces McCoy Tyner from the piano his mother installed in her beauty salon, lessons at the Granoff School, and a neighborhood where Bud Powell lived across the street, to his teenage conversion to Islam, his 1955 meeting with John Coltrane, and the pact that led him into the classic Coltrane Quarte...