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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A new four-CD set highlighting the music of the jazz keyboardist and drummer contains two discs that are gems and another two that have their moments.
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Critic Kevin Whitehead reviews a new, seven-disc Charles Mingus box set chronicling the jazz legend's mid-'60s live performances. The records, Whitehead says, "can be a little raw, as if the explosive music caught the engineers by surprise."
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The violinist attempts to mix jazz, classical and traditional Chinese music with his octet on Burning Bridge.
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"The Empress of the Blues" gave voice the listeners' tribulations and yearnings of the 1920s and '30s. A new 10-CD box set collects the complete works of the colossus who straddled jazz and blues.
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In the 1970s and '80s, Cables was the pianist of choice for saxophonists Dexter Gordon and Art Pepper; Pepper called him his favorite pianist. Critic Kevin Whitehead says Cables' new trio album, My Muse, is so unassumingly good, you could miss just how good it is.
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For Miles, the better he knows how a tune works, the less he has to play to put it across.
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The freewheeling saxophonist and his small group from the 1970s came together for a live concert in 2007 — their first together in more than two decades. Now, a recording has been posthumously released on CD, and critic Kevin Whitehead says it's like they never went away.
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Guaraldi had range, as well as an instrumental hit right when jazz was vanishing from AM radio.
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The jazz trio returns to covering classic rock, folk and pop tunes on its latest album, Where Do You Start. Fresh Air critic Kevin Whitehead reviews the band's take on Elvis Costello, Nick Drake, Sonny Rollins and more.
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Julio Cortázar's book Rayuela is expansive, smart, breezy, romantic and occasionally reminiscent of a disturbing dream. Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead says that Miguel Zenon and Laurent Coq's Rayuela-inspired album lands on all those squares.