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Horizons Jazz Orchestra: Plays the Music of Lee Harris: The Brite Side
by Jack Bowers
One question that springs to mind when listening to The Brite Side, a tantalizing new CD by the South Florida-based Horizons Jazz Orchestra, is: who is Lee Harris? As it turns out, Harris was a composer, arranger and baritone saxophonist who teamed with trumpeter Dennis Noday a few years back to co-found an ensemble they named Superband. Shortly afterward, Harris became ill and was unable to continue, so Noday and Superband's lead trombonist, Michael Balogh, renamed the ensemble the Horizons ...
read moreHorizons Jazz Orchestra: Plays the Music of Lee Harris: The Brite Side
by Edward Blanco
The south Florida-based Horizons Jazz Orchestra (HJO), present their debut album, The Brite Side, performing five original Lee Harris compositions and also five standards sporting fresh new Harris arrangements, for a compelling package of big band music that is a pleasure to hear. Founded in 2016 by Stan Kenton alumnus Dennis Noday, and former baritone saxophonist & arranger (in the New York studio scene during the 1960s) Lee Harris, the group was known as the Superband before morphing into its ...
read moreSteven Mayer: Louis Moreau Gottschalk: A Night in the Tropics / Solo Piano Music
by C. Michael Bailey
New Orleans native Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829--1969) was the first important American composer and pianist. The son of a Jewish business man and a Creole mother, Gottschalk was urbane and cosmopolitan is a way not typical for the period. He composed and played on a Chickering piano as big as a house and heavy as a battleship with a showman's personality to match. He forged his reputation by fusing the European classical tradition with American musical elements like folk music, ...
read moreSteven Mayer: Art Tatum - Improvisations
by C. Michael Bailey
Art Tatum--Improvisations is a clever and completely appropriate bit of artist and repertoire marketing. Art Tatum (1909-1956) possessed perhaps the most complete and thorough knowledge of the Great American Songbook (and traditional classical music) and the most commanding piano technique of any American jazz artist. Anecdotal stories of his near-supernatural playing abound. With Art Tatum--Improvisations, the focus is not on the artist's original compositions, but his interpretations of other's compositions. This approach correctly casts improvisation as composition in real time, ...
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