Pieces of Silver

By Matt Silver

This past Sunday evening (Jan. 5), I hosted the first "Breaking Jazz" of the new year, which gave me the opportunity to present KSDS listeners with the music and musicians resonating most acutely with me right now, in this first week of 2025. 

Hours before most of us woke up to a new year last Wednesday morning, a man whom authorities say was “hellbent on destruction” turned an everyday pickup truck into an instrument of warfare, plowing it through a dense crowd of New Year’s party goers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Claiming allegiance to the Islamic fundamentalist terror group ISIS and flying its flag from the back of that pickup truck, this man had seemingly come to believe that he could find spiritual repair for whatever had profoundly broken in his life by killing a bunch of people he didn’t know in a place that’s internationally famous for celebrating everything — and, maybe more meaningfully, nothing at all — to excess.

*Pictured above: Trumpeter Riley Mulherkar. Photo by Zenith Richards.

By Matt Silver

As we approach Thanksgiving, I feel compelled to share my abundant gratitude for all the great new music that’s come out this past year, and especially this past six months since I began hosting Breaking Jazz (Sundays, 6:30 to 8 p.m. PT). In keeping with year-end traditions, this gratitude will take the form of a “best of” list. But this particular list is exciting because it will be starting a new tradition. Behold! The inaugural Breaking Jazz Best Albums of the Year!

The November 5, 1964 edition of Downbeat with a cover titled “Dizzy’s Dream Inauguration Day, 1965.” Gillespie, of course, was never actually inaugurated – he never even made it on the ballot – but his humor-filled campaign sparked important conversations about the urgency and efficacy of the Civil Rights Movement to that time.

By Matt Silver

By now, you’ve heard it several times: Sixty years ago, Dizzy Gillespie ran for president. And it was kind of a joke but also kind of serious and ultimately not ever fully viable. All that’s true enough, but it doesn’t really tell the whole story.

Portrait of Charlie Parker, Red Rodney, Dizzy Gillespie, Margie Hyams, and Chuck Wayne, New York City, c. 1947. Photo by William Gottlieb, courtesy of Library of Congress.

By Matt Silver 

There’s a famous quote attributed to Miles Davis. It goes, “You can tell the history of jazz in four words: Louis Armstrong. Charlie Parker.” Whether that statement is fair or not — whether it does justice to anyone not named Armstrong or Parker — is beside the point. By most credible accounts, Davis, setting all the musical genius aside, was a brilliant provocateur, a hot-take pioneer whose aloof, disagreeable, superior demeanor was carefully and consciously constructed. Whatever Miles Davis played was what he genuinely believed; everything else was in service of a different department of the corporation.

Nevertheless, Davis's declaration — glib, reductive, and disingenuous though it may have been — resonates.

By Matt Silver

If there’s one thing that all the great jazz masters agree on, it’s that mimicry is not jazz, at least not good jazz. Maybe it’s part of the developmental process, but it’s the antithesis of what you strive to present to an audience.

By Matt Silver

There are some things in life you don’t want to perceive being made—laws and sausages chief among them. On the other hand, there are the yoga studio idealists whose wisdom suggests the opposite, that the process is everything, that life’s beauty resides in the journey, and that once you realize that, the destination becomes almost beside the point.

By Matt Silver

KSDS General Manager Ken Poston joined the Jazz Journalists’ Association’s (JJA) monthly podcast — “The Buzz” — this week for an authors’ panel discussing the three books published on and about Gerry Mulligan in the past year. One of those books—Being Gerry Mulligan: My Life in Music, the late baritone saxophonist’s autobiography as-told-to Poston—was a project thirty years in the making.

By Matt Silver

In 1957, Benny Golson wrote perhaps the most beautiful requiem in the jazz canon. Earnest and heart-wrenching “I Remember Clifford” is a bona fide standard, inspiring versions by Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Lee Morgan, Sonny Rollins, Quincy Jones, and nearly every jazz instrumentalist of consequence, including Golson himself.

But it begs the question: Do we follow the lead of Benny’s lament and do enough to remember Clifford ourselves? This year, we do. Here at KSDS, we aim to honor jazz’s great innovators, past and present. Clifford Brown, who tragically died four months shy of his 26th birthday in June 1956, is indisputably one of them.

By Matt Silver

One great thing about staff here at KSDS is their versatility. General Manager Ken Poston basically built a jazz museum from scratch; Production Director Michael Rovatsos plays bass in the West Coast’s premier U2 tribute band, and "Phat Tracks" host Gordon Goodwin has won four Grammys and been nominated for over 20 more. Which is why when I went to City College’s Saville Theatre last Tuesday night to see and hear Goodwin preside over a radio program broadcast before a live audience, I wasn’t that surprised when a full-fledged big band concert broke out.

Musicians…they just can’t help themselves.

The Christian Jacob Trio Doesn't Deconstruct Standards; They Reveal What's Been There the Whole Time

By Matt Silver

The Christian Jacob Trio. From left: Jacob on piano, Trey Henry on bass, Ray Brinker on drums. Photo by Larry Redman.

I’ve been writing about jazz since 2016, which is not an eternity but more than a minute, and I’m embarrassed to admit I’d never heard of pianist Christian Jacob until last Tuesday night. The reason I’m embarrassed is because Jacob’s chops, the staggering breadth of his musicality, warrant so much more than mere name recognition; they warrant the type of adulation given to all the other greats of today and yesterday— Brad Mehldau, Ethan Iverson, Joey Alexander, Chick Corea, Bill Evans, and even Monk before them—who approach jazz with the erudition of a classical concertmaster, a child’s playfulness, and an adolescent’s total disregard for boundaries.