(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Stills)
Mon 23 June 2025 1:00, UK
Four years before Jools Holland presented the first episode of Later… with Jools Holland here in the UK, he spent time as an advisor and musician on a similarly-minded but short-lived programme in the United States called Night Music. That show, which Holland also co-hosted with the late American jazz saxophonist David Sanborn, ran from 1988 to 1990 and was produced by Saturday Night Live showrunner Lorne Michaels.
Its premise was to bring some of the world’s most talented and eclectic performers together – often ones too far off the mainstream for the SNL stage – and to give them a platform to bounce their ideas off one another. This included some bonkers, one-off collaborations that helped give Night Music (also known as Sunday Night) a god-tier cult status over the ensuing three decades.
As an example, in one episode, Leonard Cohen performed a haunting rendition of ‘Who by Fire’ backed by jazz legend Sonny Rollins. A week later, Lou Reed, Gladys Knight and a young Harry Connick Jr all shared a stage. More incredibly for a show that aired on network television in America, you could find Miles Davis hanging with an upstart Red Hot Chili Peppers; Pere Ubu somehow jamming with Phillip Glass; and the notorious avant-garde outfit The Residents, dressed as giant eyeballs, serving as the backing band for the soft-serve country stylings of Conway Twitty.
“We’d go down our wish list of musicians and try to put together what we thought would be an interesting show, an interesting mix of people,” Sanborn told me back in 2013 in a chat about Night Music’s legacy. “And for the most part, everybody we asked said yes. I think some of it had to do with the fact that Lorne Michaels had, and has, a great amount of prestige in the television business. That was a tremendous draw. But overall, we just had an appealing format, a great house band, and this very credible approach for making interesting music on television.”
Today, Far Out is nominating another long-lost performance from Night Music for your approval, featuring prime, Doolittle era Pixies taking the stage in 1989 for their first ever appearance on American television. The band performed a couple of songs in the unlikely confines of a Rockefeller Centre studio, introducing themselves to a wider audience with ‘Monkey Gone to Heaven’ and ‘Tame’. Everything is in its right place for what you’d want here. A mulleted Frank Black even gives guitarist Joey Santiago the “Rock me, Joey” instruction before the solo on ‘Monkey’, inspiring a side-eye from Kim Deal.
The only sad footnote from this fine performance is that the band didn’t return to the stage to jam with the other guest musicians at the close of the show, as was usually the tradition. If they had, we would have been gifted the strange delight of seeing the Pixies shoulder to shoulder with indie songstress Syd Straw, soul legend Al Green, and the greatest jazzman to hail from the planet Saturn, none other than Sun Ra himself. Like I said, this show was next level.
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