Dec 17, 2024 9:58 AM
Tabla Master Zakir Hussain, 73, Succumbs to Illness
Tabla master Ustad Zakir Hussain, one of India’s reigning cultural ambassadors and a revered figure worldwide…
Jazz Line Distribution has re-released Eric Dolphy: Last Date, a film about the life and musical career of Jazz legend Eric Dolphy. Dolphy, best known for his revolutionary saxophone playing, introduced the flute and bass clarinet as lead instruments and pushed the boundaries of mainstream jazz improvisation. The film attempts to shed light on the innovations Dolphy made to Jazz and pays tribute his legacy.
The film traces Dolphy’s personal and professional lives, from his upbringing in Los Angeles all the way up to his success in New York as a member of both Charles Mingus’ and John Coltrane’s groups. However, the film’s focal point is Dolphy’s final recording session in Hilversum, Holland, on June 2, 1964. Through rare footage and interviews with his jazz contemporaries, Dolphy’s contribution to the genre is examined, as is his battle with diabetes. Eric Dolphy died following a misdiagnosis by a German doctor, collapsing into a diabetic comma. The jazz legend failed to receive proper treatment due to the Berlin doctors mistaking him for a junkie.
Eric Dolphy: Last Date was previously released in VHS format in 1991.The current DVD edition is enhanced with bonus material including additional photographs, a discography, and an interview with the filmmaker Hans Hylkema.
“Watching people like Max Roach or Elvin Jones and seeing how they utilize the whole drum kit in a very rhythmic and melodic way and how they stretched time — that was a huge inspiration to me,” Hussain said in DownBeat.
Dec 17, 2024 9:58 AM
Tabla master Ustad Zakir Hussain, one of India’s reigning cultural ambassadors and a revered figure worldwide…
“I love doing ballads,” Mike Stern says. “It’s just a part of me, some part of emotionally how I feel sometimes.”
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Stories of major shifts and rebirths among musicians during the past five years are common, from weathering the…
Gerald and John Clayton at the family home in Altadena during a photo shoot for the June 2022 cover of DownBeat. The house was lost during the Los Angeles fires.
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Roy McCurdy and his wife had just finished eating dinner and were relaxing over coffee in their Altadena home, when he…
Queen Latifah extols Harlem and the Apollo Theater at this year’s Kennedy Center Honors.
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On Musho (Intakt), her recent duo album with pianist Alexander Hawkins, singer Sofia Jernberg interprets traditional…
