Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah values cultural pluralism in American storytelling.
(Photo: Eric Ryan Anderson)Nov 15, 2019 9:01 AM
Long before Nina Simone told a Carnegie Hall audience that she meant every word of “Mississippi Goddam,” artists have been engaging in activism, creating music that confronts.…
Chet Baker (1929–1988)
(Photo: DownBeat Archives)Oct 26, 2019 4:47 PM
In the middle 1950s, Chet Baker was the young Lochinvar out of the West, the fair-haired boy of critics and laymen alike, riding in on his golden trumpet. Rising to prominence with Gerry Mulligan’s pianoless quartet, as the West Coast jazz movement began its popular sway, he won the New Star award in DownBeat’s first International Jazz Critics Poll in 1953. Then Baker formed his own quartet and went on to win both the DownBeat and Metronome readers’ polls for the next two years.
Now, approximately 11 years after the first flush of success, he…
