Pieces of Silver

By Matt Silver

Originally published in Oct. 2023. I'd known for several weeks that Gordon Goodwin and his Big Phat Band (BPB) would be bringing their celebrated stage show to City College's Saville Theatre as part of our just-recently-rebooted signature concert series, Jazz Live. And I knew they'd pack a punch; you don’t become one of the world’s preeminent large jazz ensembles without blowing the doors off a few concert halls. Still, I didn't quite understand fully what I was in for until the musicians hit it, and their sound hit me. 

Gordon Goodwin won Emmys for the music he wrote and arranged for TV. He won Grammys for the music he wrote and arranged both for the silver screen and his 18-piece Big Phat Band. He didn’t win a Marconi for "Phat Tracks," but he did win a devoted following from KSDS’s audience and the admiration and respect of his colleagues here. Photo by Larry Redman.

By Matt Silver

It's with extremely heavy hearts that we announce the passing of Gordon Goodwin. Gordon, who was without question one of the most innovative big band composers and arrangers of his time, died Monday afternoon, Dec. 8, of complications from pancreatic cancer. He was 70 years old.

Frank Sinatra and Jane Powell look on tenderly and admiringly, as Irving Berlin performs on the "Songs by Sinatra" radio show on CBS radio, 1947.

By Matt Silver

Holiday season programming alert! Back by popular demand...it's the 2025 edition of KSDS's "12 Days of Sinatra."

Beginning MONDAY, Dec. 1, and continuing EVERY WEEKDAY from NOON to 2 p.m. through Tues., Dec. 16, KSDS will bring you a new expertly — and exhaustively — curated Sinatra show each day.

*The WDR Big Band's "Bluegrass" (MCG Jazz), feat. mandolinist Mike Marshall, violinist Darol Anger and saxophonist/ WDR music director Bob Mintzer, earned plenty of spins on "Breaking Jazz" over the last year. But was it good enough to earn being called Breaking Jazz's Top Album of the Year? Here's a hint, it's on the list, but you'll have to keep checking to see if it earns the top spot.

By Matt Silver

Between now and the end of the calendar year, I’ll be revealing my favorite albums of the past year. I’ll present a new one each day or every couple of days, one at a time. It’ll be a list that will continue to grow as we approach the final day of 2025. Whether on paper or on digital screen, lists are inert, but for our purposes you might liken this list to something organic, a thing you can almost see growing in real time, like jazz itself.

This first group of ten albums comes from a group of musicians I call The Varsity. These are artists of proven, consistent excellence. They don’t audition for anyone anymore. They’ve developed signature sounds — and yet, they’re always evolving.

By Matt Silver

On Saturday night, Nov. 29 (two days after Thanksgiving), the 2025-26 season of the San Diego Symphony’s “Jazz @ The Jacobs” concert series opens with trumpeter Gilbert Castellanos at the head of a stacked sextet interpreting John Coltrane’s one and only recording for Blue Note Records, 1957’s iconic Blue Train. 

Joining Castellanos are A-list musicians from both coasts: Brian Levy, the director of SDSU’s jazz studies program, plays tenor sax; Mike Gurrola (Eric Reed, Benny Green, Terry Gibbs, Benny Golson) plays bass; Ivan Malespin (Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra) plays trombone; Grammy nominee Victor Gould (Jeremy Pelt, Jazzmeia Horn, Black Art Jazz Collective, Wallace Roney) plays piano; and rhythmic royalty in the form of Joe Farnsworth (Eric Alexander, Harold Mabern, Cedar Walton, Benny Golson) plays drums.

Together they’ll revisit the period during which John Coltrane went from promising to pre-eminent. 

”Inside Art” with Dave Drexler airs Sunday evenings from 6 to 6:30 p.m. PT on KSDS Jazz 88.3 FM San Diego and jazz88.org.

By Matt Silver

Dave Drexler's "Inside Art" has done it again, earning yet another win at last week's (Oct. 28) 52nd annual San Diego Press Club Excellence in Journalism Awards.

For KSDS’s Matt Silver, Ron Shelton’s “Bull Durham” is a perfect game.

By Matt Silver

“Relax, all right? Don’t try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring! Besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls — it’s more democratic.”

By Matt Silver

"I see great things in baseball. It's our game — the American game. It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us." -Walt Whitman

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One great thing about the American experiment in federalism and representative democracy is that the highest expression of its brilliance isn't obvious. It’s not the free market or the social safety nets meant to mitigate its savageries. It’s not working or paying taxes or running for that seat on the school board. It’s not governing or legislating or administering the laws of civil society as they’ve been enumerated. It’s not even when we vote, even if the cloyingly precious stickers — now hallmarks of polling place egress — suggest county election boards are united in thinking otherwise. It’s when we are at leisure, when we are exercising a right that the founding fathers, in a departure from virtually every set of expression of political philosophy to precede it, considered inalienable — the right to pursue happiness, to have some ownership of the most valuable commodity to mortal man: time. 

Our Fall 2025 Membership Drive begins this Friday, Sept. 26. Our theme is Jazz & Baseball. Twin pillars of classic American culture, both quintessential representations of democracy in action and the twin engines of individual creative expression and teamwork.

By Matt Silver

Sometimes it’s easy to forget how social this music can be. On Tuesday evening, Aug. 12, Eric Reed reminded us, with a Hampton Hawes-inspired performance that was charming in a way that feels much less common today than maybe it once was.