Jazz Archives - RadioPeng

Watching Kahil El’Zabar at 229 and thinking of the older musicians: creative music in expansion.

Seniority and the strange acceleration of creativity There's a quiet revolution happening in plain sight: musicians who once embodied youthful rupture now carry their art deeper into age, as a new perspective on creativity. The surface story—legends touring stadiums—is easy to tell. The more interesting truth is internal: as the body slows, the internal listening ear gains momentum; experience pares away the unneeded flourish. What we call "seniority" is not […]

November 13, 2025 42

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Jazz

John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme: Recording & Pressings

Recording the suite On December 9, 1964, at Rudy Van Gelder’s Englewood Cliffs studio, John Coltrane’s classic quartet, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, Elvin Jones, tracked the four-part suite in a single, charged evening. Coltrane then explored an alternate “Acknowledgement” the next day with Archie Shepp and Art Davis, but the released album preserves the intimate quartet performance, including small postproduction touches like the doubled chant on “Acknowledgement” and a second […]

October 13, 2025 40 5 2

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Jazz

Bad Brains and the Discipline of Lightning

Bad Brains are a force-field in American music—speed, precision, and spiritual intent fused into a singular continuum that rerouted punk, widened metal, and folded reggae into the hardcore engine. Formed in Washington, D.C., in 1976 as the jazz-fusion outfit Mind Power, the core quartet—Dr. Know (Gary Miller, guitar), Darryl Jenifer (bass), H.R. (Paul Hudson, vocals), and Earl Hudson (drums)—began by studying the intricacies of Return to Forever and Mahavishnu Orchestra. […]

October 7, 2025 21 4 2

Funk

Betty Davis: Funk’s Untamed Catalyst

Betty Davis (born Betty Mabry, 1944–2022) exploded onto the 1970s with a raw, erotic funk that made both record executives and censors sweat. A songwriter first, model second, and performer by her own admission “pushed” onto the stage, she wrote and arranged fierce grooves that put desire, power, and female autonomy at the center of the mix. Her voice was a rasp, her image all skin, sequins, and defiant stare—and […]

October 5, 2025 18

Avant-Garde Jazz

Pete Cosey or the revolution of electric guitar

Pete Cosey (Chicago, October 9, 1943 – May 30, 2012) was a singular guitarist whose language fused South Side blues, psychedelic studio craft, experimental tunings, and pedal-driven orchestration. Revered among musicians and deep listeners, he stayed mostly off the mainstream grid, yet his impact marks him as a quiet architect of out‑there music. He began in an ebullient laboratory like Chicago in the late fifties, and he followed the transformations […]

September 27, 2025 431 1

Jazz

Jaco Pastorius: The Bright Comet That Burned Too Fast

Some bend the strings; Jaco Pastorius bent the entire instrument. He brought the electric bass out of hiding, stripped the frets off of it, and coaxed it to sing like a Coltrane horn or Mingus' heartbeat. With Weather Report, Joni Mitchell, or just soloing on stage with battered Jazz Bass in tow, he wasn't playing notes—he was painting with thunder. But like so many brilliant comets, Jaco's was turbulent. He […]

September 25, 2025 15 3

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Jazz

Cosmic Frequencies: Happy Birthday, John Coltrane

Some birthdays are more than just a way of marking time. They are resonant birthdays, vibrating through the center of the universe. And so it is today, for today is saxophonist John Coltrane’s birthday, the man who turned sound into a language for the spirit to speak. His music has always seemed to be some sort of communication from elsewhere. ‘Giant Steps’ dashing across impossible harmonic ground, ‘A Love Supreme’ […]

September 23, 2025 27 2 2

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Jazz

Goodbye, O Bruxo: Hermeto Pascoal, The Mad Sorcerer of Sound

Farewell to Hermeto (1936–2025) Hermeto Pascoal, Brazil’s beloved mago maluco (“mad wizard”), finally traded in his flute, pots, pans, pig squeals, and teapots for the Great Gig in the Sky on September 13, 2025, at the age of 89. Somewhere, the birds, frogs, and bus brakes of Rio are throwing a jam session in his honor — and you can bet RadioPeng would’ve been there with a mic to capture […]

September 15, 2025 19 2 2

General

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 40