Jazz Archives - RadioPeng

Lucio Dalla: The Astronaut Who Played Clarinet in the Alley

Lucio Dalla looked like your eccentric uncle—the one who reads Rimbaud in dialect and believes jellyfish are psychic. He wore fisherman’s caps and round glasses like he was both blind prophet and jazz pirate. But behind that disarming appearance was one of Italy’s most unclassifiable musical minds: part chanson, part prog, part street ballad, part prayer. He didn’t write songs. He built them like strange, little cities—populated with time travelers, […]

July 10, 2025 10

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Jazz

Keith Jarrett: The Man Who Argued with Silence

If Keith Jarrett were a tree, he’d be a temperamental oak in a jazz forest, growling at birds for landing on his branches out of rhythm. There’s a reason his name triggers both awe and exasperation among music lovers. He is, after all, the pianist who once stopped a concert because someone in the audience coughed too much. Not as a joke. Not as protest. As a principle. Because when […]

July 9, 2025 13 2

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Ambient

The Holy Minimalist: Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru and the Sound of Sacred Solitude

In a world that rewards noise, speed, and spectacle, the music of Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru arrives like morning fog drifting through a sunlit chapel—gentle, quiet, and utterly unbothered by the demands of modern life. A classically trained pianist turned Ethiopian Orthodox nun, Emahoy’s life is a journey through war, exile, silence, and spiritual transcendence. Her compositions, mostly written in solitude and humility, feel like whispered conversations with the eternal. […]

June 20, 2025 11 1 2

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Avant-Garde Jazz

The Sonic Alchemy of Patricia Brennan

If Salvador Dalí played jazz, he might’ve sounded a bit like Patricia Brennan. In the wobbly, woozy dreamscape of modern improvised music, Patricia Brennan is less a player and more a conjurer—bending metal bars and wooden blocks into whispers, howls, and glimmering labyrinths of sound. Her weapon of choice? The vibraphone—a percussive instrument often thought of as jazz’s background shimmer. But in Brennan’s hands, it becomes a sentient creature, spitting […]

May 13, 2025 10 2

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Jazz

Cool, Crooked, and Full of Ghosts: Chet Baker Still Haunts Us

Let’s get this out of the way first:Giovanni doesn’t like Chet Baker. He says Chet’s trumpet playing sounds like it’s apologizing for existing, and that his singing is “what a ghost would croon after breaking up with another ghost.” And you know what? He’s not wrong—but that’s exactly why we love him. Beautiful Wreckage in a Tuxedo Chet Baker wasn’t just a jazz musician—he was the human version of a […]

May 8, 2025 57 2 2

Avant-Garde Jazz

Shabaka Hutchings: Shaking the Foundations, Rewriting the Future of Jazz

For jazz fans paying attention over the past decade, the name Shabaka Hutchings has become impossible to ignore. The British-Barbadian saxophonist and bandleader isn’t just part of the conversation—he’s leading it. Whether it’s through the swaggering horns of Sons of Kemet, the Afrofuturist psychedelia of The Comet Is Coming, or the spiritually charged depth of Shabaka and the Ancestors, Hutchings has positioned himself at the nexus of innovation, tradition, and […]

May 6, 2025 33

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Avant-Garde Jazz

Mary Halvorson: The Sonic Origamist of Jazz Guitar

Mary Halvorson doesn’t play the guitar so much as coax it into alternate dimensions. Her sound lives at the crossroads of jazz, avant-garde, and dream logic—a place where notes bend like clock hands in a Dali painting and melodies unravel just as you think you’ve caught them. She's like a musical origamist, folding harmony into improbable forms, sometimes with elegance, sometimes with delicious awkwardness. And somehow, it always lands. Listening […]

May 5, 2025 36 3

Jazz

Herbie Hancock and the Infinite Funkiverse

Herbie Hancock didn’t just play music. He hacked into the mainframe of sound itself and rewired the whole interface to groove harder, glitch weirder, and swing smarter. If jazz were a video game, Herbie would be the cheat code that unlocks secret levels in five different genres at once — plus an intergalactic bonus round. Let’s begin in the early ‘60s, when Herbie showed up on the jazz scene like […]

May 4, 2025 12

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General

Gerry Mulligan: The Baritone Buddha of Cool

Some jazz cats blast through the air like lightning bolts — fierce, fiery, untamed. But then there’s Gerry Mulligan, who’s more like a mischievous breeze whistling through the alleyways of sound. He didn’t just play the baritone sax; he romanced it, coiled his long limbs around it like a dance partner, and whispered secrets into its brass heart that still echo in smoky corners of old clubs and restless record […]

May 3, 2025 10 2