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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Fred Hersch pulls together jazz piano traditions that have little in common. Kevin Whitehead says the classic piano, bass and drums trio format suits Hersch best of all in a review of Floating. -
The brass players' debut album is a set of pieces by Seattle-based composer and improviser Wayne Horvitz
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Jazz pianist, bandleader and composer Horace Silver died Wednesday at age 85. Fresh Air critic Kevin Whitehead says that Silver had been off the scene awhile, but his influence is as strong as ever.
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Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society's Man Dance and its sequel Barbeque Dog are now available again as downloads, after being out of print for ages.
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Rosenthal has played George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" solo and with symphonic and jazz orchestras. Now he's recorded a version for jazz trio as part of an all-Gershwin album.
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That June, Miles Davis played four nights at the New York rock palace Fillmore East. Those performances are now out in full for the first time.
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On Feb. 5, 1953, Powell was uncommunicative face to face at the New York jazz club Birdland. But when he sat at the keys, it was a whole other story. -
Starting in the late 1960s, the jazz saxophonist produced a series of recordings that came out on the musicians-owned Strata-East label. Those seven albums are now collected in a box set.
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Eric Dolphy's creativity was exploding early in 1964, and he was finding more players who could keep up. Out to Lunch is free and focused, dissonant and catchy, wide open and swinging all at once. -
There's something tender and specific about the ways elders like Frank Wess shaped their notes.
