Richard Havers Thames & Hudson, $95 In its heyday the Blue Note jazz label was just like a great band: a fortuitous combination of disparate skills and personalities. Its founder, Alfred Lion, produced the albums, and his partner, Francis Wolff, took the moody, evocative photographs gracing covers designed by the…
Category: Features – Archive
Ah, the concept album: the ultimate proof that rock got too big for its boots and needed punk to spit on it until it shrank back to size. The late ’60s and early ’70s was the concept album’s heyday, with Jethro Tull trumping the rest by releasing a 44-minute piece…
It was the music she heard each week when her mother was ironing: Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, John Coltrane, Abbey Lincoln, Miles Davis and more. They seeped into Dee Alexander’s pre-school consciousness and heart and stayed there. So years later, when she took to singing, perhaps it was inevitable…