Jazz Articles about Ike Quebec

Ike Quebec: Blue & Sentimental - 1962

by Marc Davis
May 14, 2017

Everyone loves a good comeback--especially if the second act is better than the first. Think of Tina Turner, Marlon Brando and George Foreman. Or tenor saxman Ike Quebec. Quebec isn't exactly a household name, but his seven Blue Note records are uniformly terrific, and Blue & Sentimental is among the best ever produced by the label. That it came after Quebec had already achieved success (if not fame) among the big bands of the 1940s, and ...

Ike Quebec: Easy Living

by Greg Simmons
August 28, 2013

Ike Quebec is one of those funny figures in Blue Note Records' history. By the late fifties, after he'd been out of recording for a number of years, he was too old to really be at the hard-bop vanguard (he was born in 1918) but not old enough to be a senior statesman like Coleman Hawkins or Duke Ellington. Much of his involvement with the record label in those years was as an A&R man, scouting for new talent for ...

Ike Quebec: Blue & Sentimental

by Chris May
April 12, 2008

Ill health and “personal problems" prevented Ike Quebec (1918-63) from becoming the star he could otherwise have been. The tenor saxophonist straddled 1940s swing-to-bop with as much style as his near contemporary, Dexter Gordon. His warm, weighty, approximately out-of-Coleman Hawkins playing was tailor-made for the hard bop era which followed--but he spent most of the 1950s silent, with a gorilla on his back, and his 1959 re-emergence on Blue Note, for whom he'd first recorded in the mid 1940s, was ...

Ike Quebec: Bossa Nova Soul Samba

by Chris May
October 4, 2007

This is quite a painful disc to listen to. Not because of the music--which is beautiful--but because of the events surrounding it. Recorded in October 1962, it was to be tenor saxophonist Ike Quebec's final album. Less than four months later he died of lung cancer. This fact rather sticks in the mind like a house guest who has outstayed his or her welcome.

Wistful, pretty and elegiac, the music is somehow a fitting final statement from a ...

Ike Quebec: It Might As Well Be Spring

by Chris May
September 1, 2006

A generation older than the tenor saxophone young Turks who helped define Blue Note during its 1955-65 heyday, Ike Quebec's style was fully formed a decade before the innovations of Hank Mobley, Wayne Shorter and Joe Henderson--and his legacy has been consistently overshadowed as a result. But while Quebec may not have been storming any barricades, his sumptuous, blues-drenched, swing-to-bop playing sounds as heartachingly beautiful today as it must have done all those years ago.

Born in 1918 and a ...

Ike Quebec: The Complete Blue Note 45 Sessions

by Chris May
October 19, 2005

It's hard enough finding any sort of jukebox in a bar these days, and as for one with some jazz on it, you can forget it, at least here in Inglan. But there was a time, in inner city US neighbourhood bars anyway, when both things were commonplace. The last gasp was the early '60s, when hard bop was still kicking and rock and soul had yet to knock it sideways.

The 26 good-time--but, as you'd expect from ...

Various Artists: Blue Note Connoisseur Series: The Lost Sessions

by C. Andrew Hovan
December 1, 1999

When it came to the music that he put out on record, Blue Note producer Alfred Lion was a stickler for tight ensembles, inspired performances, and musically appealing content. This sometimes meant, added to the sheer prolific nature of the label, that many decent sessions ended up accumulating in the vaults over the years. Of course, Blue Note began mining these resources back in the late '70s and early '80s, carrying on in some degree through the label's resurrection in ...