At 62, the boyishly enthusiastic jazz singer and songwriter Mark Winkler has the moxie and perspective to mine and enlarge the jazz elements of pop songs from the 1960s and ’70s.
Audrey Koz was a pharmacist, but her best medicine was the love she baked into her chocolate chip cookies.
\”It\’s the harmonies of Ravel and Debussy that attract jazz musicians,\” he said. \”I once showed Dizzy Gillespie Ravel\’s \’Histoires naturelles\’ for voice and piano. He heard one passage and said, \’Oh, this will go well with Monk\’s \’Round Midnight.\’ From then on we had to play it with the Ravel chords.\”
One of the great joys of L.A. jazz, from the mid-1970s to the mid-\’80s, was the blossoming of jazz pianist Dave Frishberg into a singer-songwriter of quirky, yet warmly satisfying, material.
In 1945, the hippest Hollywood nightlife destination was Billy Berg\’s, on the corner of Vine and DeLongpre. A tall, suave black man named Slim Gaillard, who favored pinstripe suits, held court there. Black entertainers were seldom booked west of Western Avenue in those days, and Gaillard\’s appearances at Berg\’s were, in a very real sense, where Hollywood\’s racial integration began.
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