Join us for the next presentation of All This Jazz, beginning at 10pm on Saturday the 14th here on Public Radio 89.5-1. As ever, we'll offer two hours of modern jazz, both recent and classic --- absolutely top-shelf improvised music, we assure you, from start to finish and across a range of styles. (Likewise as ever, we'll air a Sunday-night re-broadcast of ATJ at 7pm on the 15th, on Jazz 89.5-2, which is our station's all-jazz HD Radio channel.)
Also, each week, our show carries a theme in its second hour, and this time around, that 11pm-till-midnight theme will be The Music of Jim Hall.
The guitar whiz died earlier this week; he'd just turned 83. As was noted of Hall's music-making in his New York Times obituary: "If the critics tended to use the same words over and over to describe Mr. Hall's playing --- graceful, understated, fluent --- that was as much a tribute to his consistency as to his talent. As Nate Chinen wrote recently in The New York Times, Mr. Hall's style, 'with the austere grace of a Shaker chair,' has sounded 'effortlessly modern at almost every juncture' of his long career."
Indeed, it's quite commonly held among jazz buffs that Jim Hall --- ever elegant and engaging, always tuneful and tasteful --- pretty much began his run as a professional musician at or near the top...and stayed there. For half a century.
We'll hear him, then, as both a leader and a sideman, on recordings made in the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, and beyond.
Hope you can tune in. It's all about the music; it's All This Jazz.
