The Stereo Image

This week Quentin Walston, pianist, author, and jazz educator, joins Jonesy for a conversation about a simple idea: people enjoy the music more when they understand what is going on inside it.  He would know.  He broke down Take Five into a short video and four and a half million people watched. 
They trace Quentin's path from a bluegrass corner of Virginia to a self-taught start on ragtime and boogie woogie, the moment in high school when the sound he was chasing finally clicked as jazz, and the wineries and cigar shops where he built his solo chops. Along the way: his book Jazz Piano Like a Pro, his vinyl album Retro Future, the joy he hears in Errol Garner and Duke Ellington, and a new project bringing 1920s stride piano back without a trace of corniness. 
Buy Quentin's books or check out more info at his website:
https://quentinwalston.com/store

This week Jonesy sits down with the great Skip Heller: composer, guitarist, bandleader, arranger, and one of the most restlessly curious musicians you will ever meet. Skip grew up in Philadelphia a few blocks from Dizzy Gillespie's old house, never took a real music lesson, and built a life in music that runs from bebop to rockabilly to exotica.
They get into his new Dizzy Gillespie project with his band Voodoo 5, why joy is the fuel in the music he loves, growing up on the Smothers Brothers and John Hartford, learning harmony from chord diagrams in a music store, the day Stevie Wonder's "I Wish" turned a Philadelphia block into a dance scene, and a wild year on the road with Yma Sumac that ended at the Montreal Jazz Festival with the copyists still passing music up to the bandstand.
Skip on the heart of it all: "Art doesn't have to be serious and heavy. Art can have a joyous component to it."
Listen to Skip's band Voodoo 5.

This week Jonesy sits down with Michael Jackson: photographer, musician, writer, visual artist, and the guy with his finger on the pulse of every jazz event in Chicago. From playing saxophone at London’s Royal Festival Hall as a kid to graduate school at the School of the Art Institute, from iconic Downbeat shoots to late nights at the Green Mill, Michael has done a bit of everything, and he still never stops.
They dig into his 32 years in Chicago, tracking down von Freeman on a snowy February night, his first big Downbeat piece on Ronnie Scott, recording 15 tracks in 6 hours and cutting a new record with his daughter, why the physical record still matters, and what it means to be an advocate for a music that lives on the fringe.
Michael on his life's work: "I'm interested in every aspect of people and their art form: where people come from, why they get into it, why it means so much to them."
Visit his website: Jackojazz.com 👈
Listen to some of Michael's music 🎶
 
Chapters
00:00 Welcome: the great Michael Jackson
01:28 Recording with his daughter (the "Easy Evil" sessions)
05:01 Detroit Jazz Festival and a blindfold test with Joe Lovano
06:37 Off the boat in 1994: the London jazz years
07:59 Printmaker to Chicago: the School of the Art Institute
09:01 Finding von Freeman and the Green Mill decision
11:33 Writing for Downbeat: the Ronnie Scott story
14:53 How a wedding gig led to journalism
16:57 A musical family
20:16 Teenage gigs, vinyl, and living on the streets of New York
27:21 Slim Cooper's: a baptism of fire in Philly
30:52 The Checkerboard Lounge and the warmth of the scene
33:54 Photography now, and why he shoots musicians
38:49 Why the physical record still matters
40:31 Jonesy's new records and the LA rhythm section
48:14 George Garzone and championing the unsung
53:46 The night Penn got stage fright at the Green Mill
59:03 The Sheik of Araby and a tribute to Dave Jemilo
1:04:42 Two new albums, vinyl only