This video shows the guitar player duo Attila Zoller and Jim Hall performing the jazz tune Carefull on a show for the german television from 1973. It is a quiet piece and shows the exquisite musical taste of both guitar players as well as their well achieved musical understanding of each other.
Attila Zoller can be considered as one of the most important german jazz guitar players of post-war Germany, if not the best. We encourage you to look for other examples of his playing on youtube.
Jim Hall is also a well known guitar player and has performed with many international jazz musicians such as Barney Kessel, Bill Evans and Sonny Rollins, among others.

This video clip shows Sarah Vaughn or Sassy, as she was called by frriends and fans, performing Perdido which has become a jazz standard to play for jazz musicians. The video is a scene taken from Rhythm and Blues Revenue, a movie made in 1955 which you can download without copyright infringement.
Sarah Vaughan was a very important singer in the jazz scene and has influenced the female jazz singer Anita Baker and many others. After she appeared at age 18 on an amateur contest at the Apollo Theater in New York and won first prize with her performance of Body and soul, another jazz standard, some jazz critics considered her as the most important singer of the bebop era.
In her beginning days as a jazz singer she formed part of Billy Eckstine’s big band where other jazz giants like Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie played in the brass section. Short time after singing in the big bands, Sarah Vaughan decided to form her own band and had almost inmediate success when in 1947 she became number one of the charts with ther performance of the song Tenderly. From thereon Sarah Vaughan also included some pop songs in her singing enlarging her audience and gaining more popularity. However, at the end of the 60s, Sarah Vaughan dropped the pop singing and returned to pure jazz music singing with jazz legends as Louie Bellson, Don Cherry, J.J Johnson, Oscar Peterson and Herbie Hancock, to mention just a few.
Among the best known songs associated with Sarah Vaughan are the tastefull ballad Misty and several songs by Duke Ellington and George Gershwin. She did not loose her singing talent until her sixties when she was still performing for large audiences until her passing away in 1990 at the age of sixty-six.

Watch this video with some of the greatest jazz musicians ever playing and singing the blues. Listen to Coleman Hawkins sweet mellow tone and enjoy Lester Young leaping in on this song.
At the beginning of the video, Billie Holiday is talking about the blues music, dividing it into sad blues and happy blues and stating that everything she sings is part of her life.
The lineup is an all star band with the following personel in order of appearance: Ben Webster – Tenor Sax, Lester Young – Tenor, Dick Dickenson – Trombone, Gerry Mulligan – Baritone Sax, Coleman Hawkins – Tenor and Roy Eldridge onTrumpet. It’s interesting to look at Billie Holiday’s face while the cats are soloing, she really is with them. And of course, listen to her voice when she is singing.
We know that the video’s sound quality isn’t the best, but this was recorded around the mid fifties, so please be indulgent… As always in these cases, we believe that it is much better to know and listen to the original versions even though they have less sound quality than listening to perfectly dolbey stereo recorded sound with poor content. If you can’t enjoy the music because of the sound impurities, we feel sorry for you but we suspect you also like studio made porn pictures better than an original photograph showing an american indian at the beginning of the 20th century, just because the porn pic is very well produced while the grain and contrast of the photo from the early days of photography is relatively coarse.
As always when I post about saxophone players, I like to mention our poll about the best tenor saxophone player ever. Go there and speak up.

Watch this video of Charlie Parker playing the famous George Gershwin song ‘Summertime’ while a slide show of a few Charlie Parker photos is passing. This blues is well known in the jazz world and many of the jazz players have recorded their version. The video we are showing you here is one of the best versions we think. Listen to Charlie Parker’s sensual alto saxophone sound which is dropping out of his horn sweet as honey. Like John Coltrane for the tenor saxophone, Charlie Parker has become an idol of jazz alto saxophone playing. All younger alto sax players want to play like Charlie Parker.
The song here belongs to Porgy and Bess, work of the composer George Gershwin who in his work has combined classical symphony orchestra sections with jazz combo parts. Other famous musicians who have recorded this song are Stephane Grappelli, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis, among others.
Charlie Parker is best known for his interpretations of fast bebop themes. He usually shows up on stage playing in a virtuoso style, but always with his very personal saxophone tone. In this video clip we can listen to him playing a ballad and we are surprised that Charlie Parker played this slow melody in a very convincing manner.
We think this comment from one of the people who watched this video of the great alto player Charlie Parker performing Summertime by George Gershwin: “if this doesn’t make yo feel warm inside then you should not listen to music for you have no soul”.

Watch this video of two jazz giants treating the classical blues theme ‘Stormy Weather’. As always, Joe Pass plays his guitar in a superb manner and building an excellent base for the divine voice of Ella Fitzgerald. This video was recorded around 1975 in a german television studio.