John Richards

Good morning and happy Friday. You're listening to The Morning Show with John Richards on International Jazz Day. -- "Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith. In music, especially this broad category called Jazz, there is a stepping stone towards all of these." - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. -- Here'es the complete text of Amanda Gorman's "The Hill We Climb": bit.ly

This song was written by Billy Strayhorn, who played piano and wrote arrangements for Duke Ellington's band. Strayhorn recalled that the song that became the signature opening piece for Duke Ellington and his Orchestra came to him with very little effort. In fact, he said that the music and lyrics for "Take the A Train," originally recorded on February 15, 1941 by Ellington for Victor Records, came more quickly than the subject of the song itself – the New York subway line to the Sugar Hill District of Harlem. It was so easy for him, he said it was "like writing a letter to a friend."

Madhouse was a jazz-funk project from Prince and his horn player Eric Leeds. -- Prince composed and performed the bedrock of every track. Eric Leeds added lead melodies on woodwinds, and a few other associates like Sheila E. made occasional contributions, but this was a Prince project with Prince’s name purposefully left off. Leeds, a part of Prince’s entourage since the Purple Rain tour, recalls that his collaborator “wanted the music to be related to on its own merits, and perhaps was concerned that if it was released as a ‘Prince jazz album,’ it would draw more attention to the idea that Prince would play jazz than to the value of the music itself.”: jazztimes.com

This classic was composed by swing era trumpeter and bandleader (later king of Las Vegas lounge acts), Louis Prima. Many years after it was composed, Prima recalled how the tune came to be: “I was out at the race track back in 1936 with Bing Crosby and George Raft. On the way home, the phrase ‘Sing, Bing, Sing,’ kept running through my mind. By the time I got home, I decided that wasn’t very commercial, and I changed it to ‘Sing, Sing, Sing.'” Read the story of the song that propelled drummer Gene Krupa and trumpeter Harry James to stardom: swingandbeyond.com

This one's for you, Roscoe! -- Known for his idiosyncratic music and eccentric behavior, Thelonius Monk was one of the true jazz innovators. Monk's radical idea was not to add more notes to chords but rather take them away, creating much more dissonance.: www.theatlantic.com

"Jazz is indefinable. To understand jazz, you need to merge yourself with its pulse and lose yourself to its sounds and let it flood your soul. It is the most democratic form of music: it has taken the sounds, movements and cadences of whatever form of music from whichever countries it travelled to." - Shankar Mahadevan --- Read about the life and career of this remarkable Brazilian musician who "makes music out of anything": bit.ly

Before becoming successful, Piazzolla struggled with making ends meet, and it was during a particularly trying tour in Central America in 1959 when he learned of his father’s death. This triggered a bout of depression, and upon his return to New York after the tour he composed 'Adíos Nonino' as a tribute to his father. As his son Daniel recalled, “Dad asked us to leave him alone for a few hours. We went into the kitchen. First there was absolute silence. After a while, we heard dad playing the bandoneon[a kind of concertina]. It was a very sad, terribly sad melody. He was composing ‘Adiós Nonino’.”: interlude.hk

Have you ever seen/heard that version of "Golden Brown" done as if the Dave Brubeck Orchestra played it? It's awesome! Jon in San Diego -- In May, 2020, Dave Greenfield (keyboardist with The Stranglers), best know for the mega hit “Golden Brown” died at the age 71 after contracting Covid. Greenfield wrote the piece of music that would become "Golden Brown." His bandmates initially discarded the song not considering it a potential single, yet once released, the track became their biggest hit eventually winning the band an Ivor Novello award. A week following Greenfield’s death, British musician Laurence Mason puts together this off the wall idea of editing together two of his biggest musical heroes, namely Greenfield and Dave Brubeck. The result, this montage of Brubeck’s classic Take 5 and the Golden Brown.: jazzineurope.mfmmedia.nl

"At age eleven, he had just begun to play the saxophone. At age twenty he was leading a revolution in modern jazz music. At thirty-four, he was dead from years of drug and alcohol use. Today, Charlie “Yardbird” Parker is considered one of the great musical innovators of the 20th century. A father of bebop, he influenced generations of musicians, and sparked the fire of one of the most important and successful American artistic movements.": www.pbs.org

"We all want to live in a jazz world where we all work together, improvise together, are not afraid of taking chances and expressing ourselves." - Herbie Hancock -- MC Solaar is the stage name of francophone hip hop artist Claude M'Barali (born March 5, 1969). By far the most internationally popular French rapper, he was born in Dakar, Senegal to parents from Chad.