Results for "Bill Russo"

Bill Russo

Tobias Hoffmann Jazz Orchestra: Conspiracy

by Jack Bowers
October 29, 2022

While listening to Conspiracy, German-born composer-arranger Tobias Hoffmann's second album, the thought arose that “Stan Kenton would have loved this." Like Kenton, Hoffmann is an explorer who approaches music from a cerebral point of view but never overlooks the need to swing and to keep an audience engaged by varying the tone, tempo and color of ...

Stan Kenton and His Orchestra: In a Lighter Vein

by Jack Bowers
December 13, 2020

Stan Kenton was a man of many moods, as was his intrepid and popular orchestra, which endured until his passing in August 1979 and whose renown is kept alive even today by the Stan Kenton Legacy Orchestra. Kenton dons his carefree hat on In a Lighter Vein, an assortment of straight-ahead themes from the orchestra's jazz ...

The Very Singular Mr. Ran Blake

by Duncan Heining
January 23, 2020

There have been few American composers and musicians, with the ability to encapsulate their country's music in all its racial and ethnic complexity. We might perhaps point to Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Charles Ives and perhaps, in their own distaff ways, Harry Partch and Steve Reich. In jazz, their number is fewer still--Duke Ellington and George ...

Stan Kenton: A Kenton Trilogy, Part 2 / The Sound of Jazz

by Jack Bowers
January 13, 2020

The Sound of Jazz by the legendary Stan Kenton Orchestra follows Part 1 of a Kenton Trilogy, Dance Time, and hopefully precedes a third component yet to be named. Although Kenton has been gone for more than forty years (he died in August 1979), he has hardly been forgotten, with reissues of concert and studio sessions ...

Rick Lawn: The Evolution of Big Band Sounds in America

by Victor L. Schermer
July 2, 2019

From the latter part of the Jazz Age through the Swing Era, big bands dominated the jazz scene and a large part of the entertainment industry. After World War II, their fortunes declined, but their music soared to new heights, spurred on by innovative leaders, instrumentalists, and very importantly, the composers/arrangers who worked behind the scenes ...

Stan Kenton and His Orchestra: Jazz Journey

by Jack Bowers
November 5, 2018

For those who thought that reissues of albums by the Stan Kenton Orchestra had faded away as the well ran dry, think again: from Sounds of Yesteryear comes a welcome and invigorating Jazz Journey, traversing half a dozen concerts by the superb Kenton Orchestra that consist for the most part of unissued material from the years ...

Bill Russo: 'School of Rebellion'

June 9, 2014

Bill Russo is best known to jazz fans as one of Stan Kenton's top arrangers in the early 1950s. But from time to time, Russo led his own orchestras on recording sessions. His first leadership date came in 1947, and from 1947 to 1950 he led a rehearsal band known as Experiment in Jazz. Russo's arrangements ...

Jazz Orchestras

by Nick Catalano
August 7, 2009

This excerpt appears in New York Nights: Performing, Producing and Writing in Gotham (IUniverse, 2008). In addition to the productions of the dance band shows, being a Performing Arts producer meant that I had the opportunity to present artists from every genre imaginable. I steadfastly tried to adhere to some sense of objectivity listening ...

Vic Lewis (1919-2009)

February 12, 2009

Vic Lewis, a British bandleader whose intensive admiration for Stan Kenton and other West Coast jazz artists led him to form one of Britain's most admired American-sounding jazz orchestras of the late 1940s and 1950s, died on Monday in the U.K. He was 89. Most American jazz fans are unfamiliar with Lewis, primarily because the bandleader ...