Kevin Whitehead
Kevin Whitehead is the jazz critic for NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Currently he reviews for and .
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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The jazz singer's 1960s concert career is amply documented on record, with live albums from Berlin, LA, Tokyo and the French Riviera. Now comes a newly released concert of Fitzgerald in Oakland, Calif.
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Born March 13, 1925, Haynes was a drummer who liked to prod his fellow players. Over the course of his career, he played with Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan, Chick Corea and many others.
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From music producer Quincy Jones, to critic and archivist Dan Morgenstern, jazz historian Kevin Whitehead remembers just a few of the influential musicians and personalities we lost this year.
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The Philadelphia bandleader didn't always connect with traditional jazz audiences, but he found a second home doing so in Baltimore. A new double album revisit a show he and his "Arkestra" gave there.
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Haynes, who died Nov. 12, was a heavy hitter, whose limber beat could lift the bandstand. His 65-year recording career was studded with more classics than we have time to even hint at.
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Born Sept. 27, 1924, Powell helped set the style for jazz piano after WWII. While earlier pianists played busy bass patterns, he helped establish a more fragmented, punctuating role for the left hand.
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In 1959, Rollins was a few years into one of the great hot streaks in jazz history when he took a three-week trip to Europe. Three hours from that tour are heard on a new Rollins-approved reissue.
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Born in 1924 in Newark, N.J., Vaughan came up in the '40s, alongside bebop, a new jazz style she instantly took to. In the following decades, she proved to be one of the best singers of any genre.
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Bley, who died Oct. 17, led her own large and small touring bands from the 1970s until a few years ago — but jazz musicians had been playing her enigmatic compositions long before that.