Jazz Articles about Bill Warfield

About Bill Warfield

Album Review

Bill Warfield and the Hell's Kitchen Funk Orchestra: Smile

by Jack Bowers
June 21, 2020

Having no idea what to expect from an ensemble labeled the Hell's Kitchen Funk Orchestra, the game plan must be to advance with caution, as any orchestra with trumpeter Bill Warfield at the helm can't be all bad. After listening, it becomes clear that the game plan was sound and the premise accurate: Smile, the HKFO's second recording, isn't all bad. The question is: did Warfield and the orchestra have its own game plan? If snatching every ingredient within reach ...

Album Review

Bill Warfield: For Lew

by Jack Bowers
April 18, 2018

The “Lew" referred to on Renaissance man Bill Warfield's latest big-band album, For Lew, is the late trumpeter Lew Soloff, whom Warfield remembers in the liner notes as “my mentor, colleague, friend and inspiration." The inspiration arrived when the teen-age Warfield, who had switched from trumpet to piano after losing his front teeth in an auto accident, heard Soloff's memorable solo on “Spinning Wheel" by the group Blood, Sweat & Tears. “I decided at that point," Warfield writes, “that I ...

Album Review

Bill Warfield Big Band: Trumpet Story

Read "Trumpet Story" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
August 20, 2014

Trumpeters Bill Warfield and Randy Brecker have been friends for twenty years; it's high time they joined forces in a recording studio and began making beautiful music together. On Trumpet Story, Warfield's big-band homage to trumpeters and other musicians who have influenced him through the years, six-time Grammy Award winner Brecker solos on eight of ten numbers, several of which were written by Warfield with him in mind. The result is what Joe Listener might expect--uniformly high-caliber jazz tastefully articulated ...