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WICN Inquiry host Mark Lynch is sharing 3 Book Recommendations a Week For Everyone Who Has Sheltered in Place a Bit Too Long. We hope these help keep you occupied and entertained! 1) *Still* unhappy with the way Game of Thrones ended? DOUGLAS L. HOWARD holds the academic chair of the English Department on the Ammerman Campus […]
If legendary jazz musicians were collected together in one giant jigsaw puzzle and each musician was one piece – Thelonious Monk’s individual piece would be impossible to cut out. As a singular artist, his shape or place in jazz is too uniquely non-conforming. From a musical and historical standpoint, he is recognized as one of […]
To look at the career outline of Greg Abate, you’d get the sense that the art form of Jazz is riding as high as ever. He’s making songbook albums, concept records, live albums in Monterey and other swell spots; Christmas albums(!); summit meetings with his idols; guest appearances with newcomers…Abate checks all the boxes. Greg […]
February’s attention to African-American Heritage Month takes the form of declaring bandleader Jimmie Lunceford as our Artist of the Month. Lunceford was a starring figure in the Swing Era as the leader of a self-made, hard-working big band. Lunceford’s band was HUGE in its time (1933–47), especially among black audiences, but also with the general […]
By: Veer Mudambi Worcester Magazine “When I was a kid,” said David Ginsburg, Worcester resident, and radio host, “there was a definite sense of Worcester being jealous of Boston — wanting to be a big city and not really getting there.” Over the years, like an awkward teenager following in the footsteps of a famous […]
It’s always the right time to circle back to the majestic and poignant artistry of Shirley Horn, WICN’s Artist of the Month for January. The knowing way she delivers a song is a comfort and a lesson all at once. Horn’s been gone for fifteen years now, but her voice certainly was a special sort […]
Thankfully, guitarist Django Reinhardt has not fallen out of our 21st Century Jazz universe, though he’s been gone almost seventy years. That owes partly to the simple fact that his instrument remains ubiquitous in fields beyond Jazz: A musician with the chops that Django had will always be a marvel. Reinhardt also was a good […]
2020 is a time of heightened consciousness about “diversity inclusiveness.” That’s not wrong. Even in the seemingly open-minded field of Jazz, so-called minority players are routinely edged out, and programming decisions must be attentive—rightly—to redress those exclusions. The reason this is worth talking about for November’s WICN artist of the month, Mary Lou Williams, is […]
WICN’s October Artist of the Month For forty years now, Pat Metheny has been the emblem and the model for one particular vision of jazz creativity. It’s fresh and light, visionary, radio friendly, and unabashedly tech-savvy—in a way that not all jazz is comfortable with. Metheny is an unusual entry in the roster of jazz […]
It’s difficult to represent the importance of Charlie Parker on the development of Jazz in a brief overview. To give his musical impact the weight it deserves, we would have to review Parker’s music for a couple of hours every single day—alongside a balanced diet of 90 minutes of Duke Ellington, an hour of Louis […]