Stuff Smith News

Once, as they were jamming, Duke Ellington 's drummer Sam Woodyard called out to Danish violinist Svend Asmussen, "Man, you play your ass off," to which The Fiddling Viking replied, with that charmingly naively innocent wit so typical of his homeland, "From now on then my name is only Mussen." There is just one Svend Asmussen and today, at the age ...

It could easily be argued that the "loft jazz" era of the '70s was a direct product of Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians , both in its moral structure and its eventual fragmentation.

The next two jazz columns are exercises in subjectivity. Today, we will focus on the most underrated musicians in jazz .

Ever since banjo virtuoso Bela Fleck discovered many years ago that his instrument has origins in Africa, he has longed to make an album of traditional African folk music.