Although the trumpet and the trombone are the most popular brass instruments used in jazz, there are lots of other, lesser known, instruments that have been used over the years. The cornet was popularised by Buddy Bolden and King Oliver, and was played by Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke before falling out of fashion. Nat […]
In the early days of jazz, musicians went to photographic studios to pose for pictures. During the 1920s there was a craze for ‘doing something zany’, so some of the photos involved musicians doing unusual things, kind of like a still version of the Harlem Shake. Other than the posed group photographs, […]
The history of gypsy jazz begins with Django Reinhardt, though many would argue that gypsy jazz is Django Reinhardt. Django was born in 1910 into a Manouche-Romany family and although born in Belgium, Django spent most of his childhood in the gypsy camps on the outskirts of Paris where he learnt to play […]