Pieces of Silver

From left: Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Rev. Martin Luther King, and John Lewis, student leader of the Freedom Riders and future U.S. congressman from Georgia. May 23, 1961. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, NYWT&S Collection.

By Matt Silver

On this MLK Day, we honor not just Dr. King’s words and actions but those of the broader struggle for civil rights. And we do so, in our small part, by pairing the stories of that era with the music they inspired.

Read a bit about the Freedom Riders below, and pair with the following tunes, handpicked by our on-air hosts for the occasion:

Art Blakey’s “The Freedom Rider”

Chico Hamilton’s “Freedom Traveler”

Kenny Burrell’s “Freedom”

Dannie Richmond’s “Freedom Ride” (begins @ 8:30)

Civil rights marchers rest along the route from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. in March 1965. Photo by Peter Pettus. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

By Matt Silver

In March 1965, beaten and bloodied, civil rights leaders and ordinary citizens persisted in marching from Selma, Ala. to the state capital of Montgomery. Even after being turned away not once, but twice—first by physical force, then by the legal force of a federal injunction. 

By Matt Silver

We at KSDS Jazz 88.3 are always, just by the very nature of our jobs, celebrating Black history — at least implicitly. But as one of the few remaining radio stations devoted entirely to presenting jazz and blues, we have a special responsibility, especially during Black History Month, to illuminate the central role Black artists have played in the creation, development, and continued evolution of the music we champion here every day.

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.