My plan to start off the year with these Monday Mixtapes was to do some different things with them and really experiment a bit with some of the sonic pallets. In years past I’ve done mixes that speak to the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The rights movement opened the way for a lot of African-Americans to make greater contributions to American culture. Black performers are a true part of the entertainment iconography in this country, but despite their early impact on jazz, blues and evewn rock and roll, they were not always treated with the same respect the would have earned. It is sad that some of our national treasures were at points second-class citizens, but thanks to the work of King and others the number is slowly being diminished as social rights issues continue to take on even greater meaning.
To that end, I coincidentally found myself listening to many of those early innovators lately and sketched this list together out of some of the songs that were playing back in my mind. It probably isn’t as definitive as I would make it if I were going to air it on the radio, or a cleanly segued, or remotely thorough, but my home listening, believe it or not, isn’t always super constructed and the occasional train-wreck transition is actually welcome (because it in fact keeps me interested and on my toes)
Billie Holiday “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues”
Count Basie “Whit a Little Help from My Friends”
John Coltrane “Blues for Tomorrow”
Duke Ellington ”
Cannonball Adderly “If Life Were All Peaches and Cream”
Miles Davis “Don’t Lose Your Mind”
Louis Armstrong “What a Wonderful World”
Ella Fitzgerald “I’ve Got the World on a String”
Thelonious Monk “Black and Tan Fantasy”
and for good measure, Sammy Davis, Jr. doing a Porgy & Bess medley
