KLOI- Gary Alexander Classic Jazz

This Week: We continue our five Fridays in May with the five stages of Duke Ellington’s 50-year career as bandleader and composer with the peak of his songwriting productivity during his second creative decade, from 1935 to 1945 (coinciding with the Big Band Era). At 4:00, in the second hour, we cover the convergence of the birthdays of Irving Berlin (May 11, 1888) and Fred Astaire (born Friedrich Austerlitz, May 10, 1899) in their movie scores of the 1930s. We also begin a three-part series on the 120th birthday of Thomas “Fats” Waller (May 21, 1904) with 10 unknown songs he wrote with Andy Razaf from 1928 to 1932 as sung by Rebecca Kilgore. Another new series we begin today is the Top 25 songs written in 1924, a century ago, beginning the countdown with songs #15 to 25 - all of them definitive of the Roaring ‘20s.