There has maybe never been a better time to critically examine the granting of special privileges to people for their talent, personality, or wealth. Yet, for all the harm wrought by fame, there have always been celebrities who use the power for good. By Josh Jones.

John Coltrane

Art Tatum

Harry “The Hipster” Gibson

Placing drum-standards very high.

Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, Charlie Barnet, Mel Powell, Tommy Dorsey

Caro Emerald

How one instrument went from being the backbone of American popular music to being a punchline in a joke about the ’80s. There’s no song in the Top 40 right now with a saxophone solo, there’s hardly a defined saxophone part on any of those songs at all.

Singer Barry Manilow has confirmed he is gay and married but never brought it up before for fear of upsetting his female fans.

In Jim Marshall’s Jazz Festival, we see dozens of the greats, musicians who made their names playing radically different kinds of music, performing or being caught by the camera schmoozing backstage between sets and enjoying each other’s company. Marshall had no idea while snapping these pictures, of course, that he was compiling a record of a vanished world, an America even more remote from us today than the one of the rock musicians and their fans that he covered in later years. By Charles Simic.

Randy Crawford

Les McCann and Eddie Harris

Adam Shatz reviews "Miles Ahead," a film directed by Don Cheadle, and “Bitches Brew" by George Grella Jr.

An amazing jazz album I fell in love with. It is aptly named.

The man who captured hundreds of jazz's greatest recordings — by Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk and Herbie Hancock — died Thursday at his home studio. He was 91.

Kamasi Washington

The veteran musician is ubiquitous again—with a surprising group of new collaborators. By Kelefa Sanneh.

Billy Paul, a jazz and soul singer best known for the No. 1 hit ballad and Philadelphia Soul classic Me and Mrs. Jones, died Sunday.