Jazz Articles about Andrew Danforth

About Andrew Danforth

Album Review

Sean Imboden Large Ensemble: Communal Heart

Read "Communal Heart" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
June 17, 2026

Communal Heart is the first album by saxophonist and composer Sean Imboden's superb Indiana-based Large Ensemble, recorded about a year before his second recording, Uncharted Realms (Self Produced, 2026). As before, all the compositions and arrangements are Imboden's, while the personnel in the eighteen-member orchestra remains virtually intact. If there is a difference between the two, it is that Imboden's themes are even more intriguing and intense the first time around, which is saying a lot, as Uncharted ...

Album Review

Sean Imboden: Communal Heart

Read "Communal Heart" reviewed by Dean Nardi

by Dean Nardi
June 8, 2025

Sean Imboden's Large Ensemble Has a Communal Heart Sean Imboden was bitten by the big band bug early on. It is understandable. Both his parents were musicians, and his father taught him to play clarinet when he was in sixth grade. As a teenager, besides playing in middle school and high school bands, he sometimes sat in on gigs with his father's ensemble. After college, he moved to New York City and became involved with the touring Broadway show circuit, ...

Album Review

Tom Johnson Jazz Orchestra: Time Takes Odd Turns

Read "Time Takes Odd Turns" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
September 28, 2024

Time is not the only thing that has taken odd turns in composer/trumpeter Tom Johnson's life and career. Even though a musician at heart, he chose a more practical and lucrative path, spending his adult years as a psychologist and full-time professor at Indiana State University, placing his dream of a musical career on hold while he earned a living elsewhere. But the dream never died, and Johnson continued to study music, play and occasional gig, and explore jazz arranging ...

Album Review

Buselli / Wallarab Jazz Orchestra: The Gennett Suite

Read "The Gennett Suite" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
June 6, 2023

This is where music for mass consumption--recorded music--started, in Richmond, Indiana, in the 1920s, in a piano factory by the railroad tracks in a glacier-carved gorge. Established in 1887, in the beginning Starr Pianos' bread and butter was pianos, but they branched out to selling other instruments and eventually photographs and records--their own records, recorded in the piano factory, taking breaks in the process when a train came by. At first, they called their recording side of the business Starr ...