To have been young and Danish in the ‘60s! If you happened to live in Copenhagen during that period, then you had a strong chance of catching the great Ben Webster performing live in a random club, or ...

Welcome back to Jazz & Juice—after last month's venture into the opulent, it's a perfect time to venture into the idea of less being more. When something is transparent, we see beyond it. In a way, ...

When tenor saxophonist Scott Hamilton first came up in the 1980s, his style was so, well, unusual, that a live audience would sometimes tentatively ask “Ben Webster?" Whether Hamilton regarded that as ...

A photograph on the inside of Soulville 's CD cover shows Webster with his head tilted back, eyelids drooping and a cigarette dangling from his mouth. It’s a great photo, simply because Webster ...

In A Mellotone; In A Mellotone; Blues in Bb; Cottontail; Nasty Attitude; Dancing On the Ceiling; Indiana; The Man I Love; Sometimes I'm Happy; Things Ain't What They Used To Be; Sweet Georgia Brown; ...

Havin' A Good Time documents a concert that never should have happened. In the winter of 1964 Providence was socked with a blizzard that kept eager concertgoers away from the club where Joe Williams ...

The latest edition of Bret “Jazz Video Guy" Primack’s blog is “Billy Taylor Meets Ben Webster.” In the fall of 1944, the very first night twenty-three year old Billy Taylor arrived in New York from ...

For me, jazz is divided between those who recorded with Art Tatum and those who didn't. Tatum remains king of the jazz piano—a briskly shaken cocktail of unrivaled technique, impeccable taste and a ...

Rifftides reader Nina Ramos listened to Carol Sloane's newest recording, encountered something that disturbed her, and sent this message: Just finished reading your liner notes and listening to Carol ...

Alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges and tenor saxophonist Ben Webster were a perfect pair. Hodges played with a smooth, bluesy sweetness while Webster offset that with his breathy, husky tone. Both ...

One of my favorite Ben Webster albums from the tail end of his career is Webster's Dictionary, recorded in London for Ronnie Scott Records in October 1970. The label was founded by Scott, the famed ...

Ben Webster refused to fly. When he visited Norway from Denmark, his adopted homeland, he went by boat and when he got there would blame his somewhat uncertain gait on his "sea legs," rather than the ...