Jazz Articles

Q'd Up: Going Places

by Jack Bowers
September 14, 2021

Q'd Up is a quintet comprising faculty members at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. The group's latest album, Going Places, marks the end of an era, as two of its longest-serving members—multi-instrumentalist Ray Smith and pianist Steve Lindeman--are indeed “going places." In other words, they are retiring and making their final recorded appearance with the group, co-founded by Smith in 1983 as the Faculty Jazz Quintet, save for a companion album, Dawn Fire Mist, which is edgier and more ...

Stan Kenton Orchestra / BYU Synthesis Big Band: A Kenton Celebration

by Jack Bowers
October 28, 2016

Fasten your seat belts, Kenton fans. Just when you feared the once-overflowing wellspring of material from the Stan Kenton Orchestra's archives may have run dry, along comes Tantara Productions with this jet-propelled and emphatically pleasurable two-disc set, the first half of which reclaims a long-lost concert date recorded in February 1959 at Brigham Young University, a dozen years before another concert at the Provo, Utah, campus was safeguarded on the album Live at Brigham Young University. The second half of ...

Stan Kenton Orchestra: Kenton Roars! At the Golden Lion

by Jack Bowers
November 13, 2014

1969 was a year of transition for Stan Kenton and his orchestra, one in which Kenton's long-term contract with Capitol Records was ended, which led in turn to the establishment of his own label, Creative World. The orchestra itself remained active, motoring back and forth to one-night stands and brief engagements in various locales. What it did not do was enter a studio to produce a lasting narrative of its prowess. Luckily, a blemish-free tape of one of the orchestra's ...

Stan Kenton: Road Shows

by Jack Bowers
October 28, 2013

For younger readers: yes, there was a time long ago when large groups of talented jazz musicians traveled without respite from city to city and town to town, braving one-night stands or more night after night in (mostly) sold-out concert halls, dance halls, pavilions, nightclubs, schools and other venues. They were known as big bands, so enormously popular that they even had their own “era," and the world may never see their like again, at least not on the road. ...

Stan Kenton: Cool Hot & Swingin'

by Jack Bowers
July 18, 2007

Cool Hot & Swingin', the seventh in an ongoing series of Stan Kenton treasures unearthed by Bill Lichtenauer's ever-resourceful Tantara Productions, recaps a splendid concert performance in February 1956 at the Civic Auditorium in San Bernardino, CA.

This was a time when Kenton had pared the trombone and reed sections to four members each and added two French horns and a tuba, a departure that lasted about a year. It was also a time when the great Bill Holman, with ...

Kenton Portraits: A Loving Salute

by Jack Bowers
July 2, 2006

Various Big Bands Kenton Portraits - A Loving Salute Tantara Productions 2006

The word breathtaking is over-used these days, so I must beg your indulgence as I use it to describe Kenton Portraits - A Loving Salute, which is indeed a loving and, yes, often breathtaking salute to one of the most admired and innovative bandleaders who ever lived, Stanley Newcomb Kenton. True, all of the material on the first disc in this two-disc ...

The Neophonic Orchestras: New Horizons, Volumes 1 and 2

by Jack Bowers
July 20, 2005

The Neophonic Orchestra New Horizons, Volumes 1 and 2 Tantara Productions 2005

The date was January 4, 1965, and the audience that waited anxiously in the newly christened Dorothy Chandler Pavilion hardly knew what to expect. They had come to hear the first-ever performance by the Los Angeles Neophonic Orchestra, led by the incomparable Stan Kenton and featuring a number of the most prominent studio and Jazz musicians in southern California. Before the evening ...

Ray Starling's NY Soundstage Orchestra / Joel Kaye's NY Neophonic Orchestra: Alternate Routes

by Jack Bowers
December 1, 2002

It was Stan Kenton who coined the term “neophonic” to describe the music created by his adventurous L.A.–based orchestra in the mid-’60s. He also introduced the mellophonium as part of a Jazz orchestra. This exhilarating two-disc set deftly employs and amplifies Kenton's groundbreaking concepts in splendid recordings made by two of his former sidemen, Ray Starling (Disc 1) and Joel Kaye (Disc 2).

Starling, whose middle name must be “versatile” (he later played piano with the Buddy Rich Big Band), ...