Jazz Articles about Benjamin Boone

About Benjamin Boone

Album Review

Integrating different cultural entities in music is always a difficult proposition; getting the right mix and balance so that one culture does not usurp others to make a new artistic product requires great skill and tact. The New Global Ensemble, made up of musicians from the U.S., Germany, Ghana, Mexico, and Ireland, pull from their respective music traditions for a creative fusion on their album Dream Walking. U.S. saxophonist Benjamin Boone got together with German violinist Stefan Poetzsch ...

Album Review

Benjamin Boone: Confluence: The Ireland Sessions

Read "Confluence: The Ireland Sessions" reviewed by Paul Rauch

by Paul Rauch
November 21, 2024

Saxophonist/composer/educator Benjamin Boone is known as a project artist in the first degree. His collaboration with major modern poets has produced a foursome of albums on the Origin Records label, including two with US Poet Laureate, Philip Levine. His saxophone approach could be described as colorful melodicism, a quality accentuated by Boone's open ended compositions that lack the confinement of dense chordal harmony. His playing can then function off the leash so to speak, darting off in a full spectrum ...

Liner Notes

Benjamin Boone: Confluence - The Ireland Sessions

by Jason Crane
August 24, 2024

"A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions." --Oliver Wendell Holmes “It's not that the Irish are cynical. It's rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody." --Brendan Behan The Oliver Wendell Holmes quote is loftier, but the Brendan Behan quote gets closer to the heart of the matter on saxophonist Benjamin Boone's new album Confluence: The Ireland Sessions, which finds Boone ...

Album Review

Benjamin Boone: Caught in the Rhythm

Read "Caught in the Rhythm" reviewed by Paul Rauch

by Paul Rauch
September 28, 2023

The connection between poetry and jazz music is a delicate one. It has been documented so infrequently, in performance and recordings, that one still conjures the flicker of an image of Jack Kerouac reading in some dark Greenwich Village cafe with Steve Allen or Zoot Sims, surrounded by beret-wearing, cappuccino-sipping beatniks. The work of Fresno-based saxophonist Benjamin Boone has assisted in widening that view through four albums recorded for the Origin Records label, including the fourth, Caught in the Rhythm ...

Album Review

Benjamin Boone: The Poets Are Gathering

Read "The Poets Are Gathering" reviewed by Paul Rauch

by Paul Rauch
December 31, 2020

Saxophonist Benjamin Boone continues his ambitious foray into jazz and poetry, this time recruiting an impressive cadre of poets for his aptly entitled release, The Poets are Gathering (Origin, 2020). The union of poetry and jazz has never been so powerfly presented, reflecting the past year of the worldwide Black Lives Matter movement, the universal role of the poet, and the power of art and voice to raise awareness and inspire change. The album employs the likes of US Poet ...

Interview

Benjamin Boone: The Poetry of Jazz and the Ghanaian Connection

by Duncan Heining
June 10, 2020

So, Down Beat picks your record, The Poetry of Jazz, as one of its year-end top three. You put out a second volume, which is similarly well-received. Now here's the conundrum. Do you lock into the niche and follow up with more of the same? Or do you go for broke with that program masterpiece you always dreamed of? If you're saxophonist-composer Benjamin Boone, the answer's neither of the above. Instead, Boone has opted for a set with ...

Album Review

Benjamin Boone: Joy

Read "Joy" reviewed by Chris M. Slawecki

by Chris M. Slawecki
May 20, 2020

Benjamin Boone's set with this band born and grown in Ghana is a genuine cross-cultural jazz Joy. The seeds of Joy were planted when composer-saxophonist Boone spent a year as a US Fulbright Scholar in Ghana in sabbatical from his professorship at California State University (Fresno), to study the country's music and musical traditions. The music Boone found made him feel at home: “These guys know American jazz inside and out--but with a definite Ghanaian twist," he explains. ...