Kevin Whitehead
Kevin Whitehead is the jazz critic for NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Currently he reviews for The Audio Beat and Point of Departure.
Whitehead's articles on jazz and improvised music have appeared in such publications as Point of Departure, the Chicago Sun-Times, Village Voice, Down Beat, and the Dutch daily de Volkskrant.
He is the author of Play the Way You Feel: The Essential Guide to Jazz Stories on Film (2020), Why Jazz: A Concise Guide (2010), New Dutch Swing (1998), and (with photographer Ton Mijs) Instant Composers Pool Orchestra: You Have to See It (2011).
His essays have appeared in numerous anthologies including Da Capo Best Music Writing 2006, Discover Jazz and Traveling the Spaceways: Sun Ra, the Astro-Black and Other Solar Myths.
Whitehead has taught at Towson University, the University of Kansas and Goucher College. He lives near Baltimore.
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From music producer Quincy Jones, to critic and archivist Dan Morgenstern, jazz historian Kevin Whitehead remembers just a few of the influential musicians and personalities we lost this year.
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The Philadelphia bandleader didn't always connect with traditional jazz audiences, but he found a second home doing so in Baltimore. A new double album revisit a show he and his "Arkestra" gave there.
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Haynes, who died Nov. 12, was a heavy hitter, whose limber beat could lift the bandstand. His 65-year recording career was studded with more classics than we have time to even hint at.
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Born Sept. 27, 1924, Powell helped set the style for jazz piano after WWII. While earlier pianists played busy bass patterns, he helped establish a more fragmented, punctuating role for the left hand.
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In 1959, Rollins was a few years into one of the great hot streaks in jazz history when he took a three-week trip to Europe. Three hours from that tour are heard on a new Rollins-approved reissue.
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Born in 1924 in Newark, N.J., Vaughan came up in the '40s, alongside bebop, a new jazz style she instantly took to. In the following decades, she proved to be one of the best singers of any genre.
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Bley, who died Oct. 17, led her own large and small touring bands from the 1970s until a few years ago — but jazz musicians had been playing her enigmatic compositions long before that.
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Bass improviser Richard Davis, trombonist Curtis Fowlkes and saxophonists Charles Gayle and Peter Brötzmann are among the notable musicians we lost this year.
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No matter how much (or little) pre-planning occurs, the success of improvised music hinges on the chemistry of the players. In Extra Extra, Bergonzi's crew creates in the moment, without distractions.