Curated playlist
American male jazz composers
- Louis ArmstrongAmerican jazz trumpeter and singer (1901–1971)
- Duke EllingtonDuke Ellington wrote his first composition in the summer of 1914, working as a soda jerk at the Poodle Dog Cafe in Washington, D.C. He had not yet learned to read or write music. The piece, "Soda Fountain Rag", he played as a one-step,…
- Clint EastwoodClinton Eastwood Jr. entered the world at Saint Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco on the 31st of May, 1930, weighing 11 pounds 6 ounces. The nurses at the hospital nicknamed him "Samson." Nobody in that delivery room could have…
- George GershwinGeorge Gershwin's last words were "Fred Astaire." He spoke them on the night of the 9th of July 1937, as he collapsed in a borrowed house in Beverly Hills, working on the score of The Goldwyn Follies. He was 38. Two days later, in the…
- John ColtraneJohn William Coltrane was born on the 23rd of September 1926, in his parents' apartment at 200 Hamlet Avenue in Hamlet, North Carolina. He died at 40, of liver cancer, on the 17th of July 1967. In the four decades that followed his death,…
- Miles DavisMiles Dewey Davis III was born on the 26th of May 1926 in Alton, Illinois, to a family that owned a 200-acre estate in Arkansas with a profitable pig farm. He died on the 28th of September 1991 in Santa Monica, California, after a stroke,…
- Aaron CoplandAaron Copland grew up above a Brooklyn shop at 628 Washington Avenue, in a family of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants who had traveled through Scotland just to afford the boat fare to America. His father had no interest in music. His mother…
- John WilliamsJohn Williams played two notes for Steven Spielberg, alternating, low and ominous, and Spielberg laughed because he thought it was a joke. The film was Jaws. Williams stood his ground. The simple idea won, and that two-note pattern became…
- Herb AlpertHerb Alpert is the only musician in history to reach number one on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 as both a vocalist and an instrumentalist. That distinction alone would earn a place in the record books. But the fuller story of Alpert is…
- Michael GiacchinoMichael Giacchino was ten years old when he started building worlds out of stop-motion animation in his family's basement in New Jersey, recording his own homemade soundtracks to go with them. Nobody asked him to. Nobody paid him. He just…