John Kruth News Today

Les McCann, a jazz titan best known for his performance with musical partner Eddie Harris of the protest song "Compared to What," has died at age 88, his manager said.

Discover 10 spots where the jazz legend learned, performed, found inspiration and more.

As the 50th anniversary of a legendary local performance approaches, it’s time to revive the memory of the city’s greatest musical genius.

The East Side music and club scene was a relatively safe place to suck and figure out who I was as a musician while living in a cheap, cat-box-scented flat on Bartlett Street.

Though Laura Nyros songs are familiar to millions of people–through hit versions by Three Dog Night, the 5th Dimension and others–she herself remained in the shadows during her remarkable career as a singer, songwriter, arranger

Musician and writer John Kruth met with Allen Ginsberg two months before the great poet’s death. He was there ostensibly to talk about Rahsaan Roland Kirk while researching a book on the jazz musician. But in going through old files, Kruth found the never-published interview transcript and realized it contained some real gems of wisdom and honesty. Facing imminent death, Ginsberg did not hold anything back. Kruth shares the transcript for the first time with PKM.

Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, was a folk-blues giant whose music and persona transformed American culture. He sang what he lived (poverty, prison, violence) in songs like ‘Gallow’s Pole’ and ‘Black Betty,’ but

Ornette Coleman (1930-2015), undoubtedly a great musician and composer who freed jazz from nearly all constrictions, was also a homespun philosopher. In the times he spent talking and playing with Coleman, John Kruth came to that latter conclusion. He also discovered that Ornette Coleman was a damn good pool hustler. John shares the last conversation he had with the jazz master.

Reverend Gary Davis (1896-1972), guitar virtuoso and folk-blues giant, moved from Durham, N.C. to NYC, where he struggled for years as a blind street singer and storefront preacher. An instructor at Brownie McGhee’s Harlem-based folk music school, Davis served as a mentor to a generation of acoustic players, including Happy Traum, Eric von Schmidt, Patrick Sky, David Bromberg and Bob Dylan.

One scene in the miniseries The Queen’s Gambit was all it took to put the Dutch rock band Shocking Blue, and the band’s sultry singer, Mariska Veres, back on the media map.