Kevin Whitehead

The trumpeter starts his Green Dolphin Street solo with his signature harmon mute stuck in the bell.

When he takes the mute out, you can just hear him do it.

The change in sound and attitude is so dramatic, it's like a different soloist steps up.

Call it his own anti-music turn.

During their two-week stand in Chicago, Miles neither called out his players on their antics, nor did he fire their mutinous asses.

Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams had thoroughly modernized the leader's sound, and that quintet had a few excellent years and classic albums still ahead.

And at the plug nickel, Miles Davis did show he could hold his own in such fast company on stretched-out versions of their set-closing theme.

There he and Shorter would improvise together as close as Miles had inched toward free jazz.

Many, many bands would imitate this quintet over the decades, but precious few ever get as rambunctious as things got at the Plug Nickel.

Christmas Week, 1965.

Sheila Jordan, who grew up partly in western Pennsylvania, as she tells us on Sheila's Blues from 1984.

Jordan, who died in 2025 at 96, started singing as a kid and never stopped, building on Charlie Parker's bebop to find her own confident voice in all sorts of musical settings.

She also taught and inspired countless other vocalists.

When Sheila sang, you could hear the joy she found in jazz, which kept her eternally young.

Other veteran singers who passed this year include Cleo Lane, Nancy King, and Lillian Boutte.

Also the buttery smooth baritone Andy Bay, who lingered over slow ballads.

But Andy Bay also had a way with rhythm tunes, like this 1970 Duke Pearson number.

Musicians from the jazz rhythm section who died in 2025 include guitarist George Freeman, pianists Hal Galper, Mike Wofford, and Mike Ratlidge, drummers Al Foster, Greg Bandy, and Louis Maholo Maholo, tuba players Joe Daley and Jim Self, and one of the great bass players of our time, whose appointment book was always full, Ray Drummond.

Bass violin is a big instrument, and Drummond was a big man who handled it with effortless grace.

Another influential teacher who passed this year was alto saxophonist Bunky Green, who taught in Jacksonville for a couple of decades after a long spell in Chicago.