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.
-
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. -
On Sixteen Sunsets, the soprano saxophonist varies and honors melody like Billie Holiday. -
On Gilchrist's The View From Here, go-go dance beats inform his piano the same way freight-train boogie-woogie does. -
You could look at Rosewoman's New Yor-Uba band as reuniting cousins who've drifted apart: jazz and folkloric Cuban music with its own family ties to the slave coast of West Africa. -
"This is it," Webb said of Fitzgerald. "I have a real singer now. That's what the public wants." -
With six concerts spread over eight discs, Wood Flute Songs documents the bassist's exhaustive and creative live output. -
Down-home and majestic, the tenor saxophonist's sound was like a cane stalk shooting up out of rich earth. His 1960 album The Book Cooks features fellow sax-man Zoot Sims in a friendly square-off. -
Alchemy is a step forward in defining and refining the trumpeter's mix of jazz and Iraqi rhythms. -
The jazz pianist uses his new record to recall works of yesteryear and simultaneously illustrate his new sense of direction. Jamal isn't playing the way he did 60 years ago, now that he's finished warming up.
