Jazz Podcast
2024.02.19 Frank London on Mongezi Feza
The stories that Black South African musicians tell about life under apartheid are searing. Such oppressive and demeaning conditions are difficult to [...]
2024.02.05 William Hooker on Sonny Sharrock
Not all of our heroes have streets named after them but this one does. So, will we be playing recordings of Sonny Sharrock on Deep Focus this Monday [...]
2024.01.22 Steven Bernstein on “The Don Cherry Tapes”
Tonight's Deep Focus (Jan. 22) is on Don Cherry, a wonderful and deeply missed friend of WKCR. Back in the Eighties, Don was a frequent guest on Mitch [...]
2024.01.08 Peter Apfelbaum on Andrew Hill
This music is at its best when the artist is telling you exactly who they are. Pianist Andrew Hill always seemed able to take us inside his internal [...]
2023.10.09 Matthew Shipp on Albert Ayler
There is a point at which the usefulness of language ends. You are simply not going to be able to express in words the sense of awe that you feel when [...]
2023.09.25 Henry Threadgill on John Gilmore and Von Freeman
"Easily Slip Into Another World," Henry Threadgill's recent memoir, is required reading for a full appreciation of tonight's Deep Focus. It reveals the [...]
2023.09.04 Craig Harris on Sam Rivers
In the sixties, they explained evolution to us with that March of Progress illustration, a lockstep development from the proto-human Dryopithecus to modern [...]
2023.08.21 Roy Nathanson on Eric Dolphy
If Eric Dolphy's music were a school of painting it would be analytical cubism: planar and angular, multi-directional and austere, But it's not [...]
2023.08.07 Steven Bernstein and Scotty Hard on Miles Davis 1970
You're Miles Davis. It's March of 1970 and you're about to release Bitches Brew, your most incendiary album yet. You have an electric band of [...]
2023.07.24 Ahmed Abdullah and Monique Ngozi Nri on Sun Ra, Abbey Lincoln
The future that Sun Ra sang of has arrived in so many ways. No one knows this better than the musicians who made the music with him. Ahmed [...]