Articles by Tom Dwyer

Dan Morgenstern: Jazz Master Award

by Tom Dwyer
January 31, 2007

I first met Dan Morgenstern more than five years ago when I picked him up one Saturday morning outside his Journal Square apartment in Jersey City. Our destination was the Catskill Mountains home of the late George Handy, a genius experimental jazz composer/arranger from the 1940s' and 50s' with whom I had studied piano after getting out of the Army in 1970. Dan and I had never met until Handy's widow, Elaine, asked us to drive up together that day ...

Swingadelic at Maxwell's

by Tom Dwyer
August 23, 2006

Swingadelic Maxwell's Hoboken, NJ June 24, 2006

It's a Monday evening around 8:30 pm when a group of musicians wanders into Maxwell's, the venerable music club in Hoboken, NJ and start tuning up. Swingadelic, an eleven-piece “little big band has been gigging the front room at Maxwell's every other Monday for the past three years--playing some of the most infectious jazz/blues out there in a free-for-all setting that's part improvisational workshop and part ...

Barry Harris in New York

by Tom Dwyer
March 16, 2006

Barry Harris is one of the world's most respected jazz piano players and teachers, considered by many to be the foremost interpreter of the music of Bud Powell, Tadd Dameron and Thelonious Monk. For more than half a century, Harris has played with the giants of jazz including Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, Cannonball Adderley and Coleman Hawkins, traveling the world over as an ambassador of jazz. But for forty-some years, no matter where he's been, Harris ...