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Bob Brookmeyer: Plays Piano: Holiday
by Dave Nathan
Being able to play more than one instrument is quite common in jazz, especially these days. Even moving between reed and horn is not unusual as Benny Carter, Jay Thomas and others have demonstrated. But moving from a trombone to a piano with sufficient confidence to make an album with the “second" instrument is more than a challenge, it's a remarkable feat. And an album that's more than 70 minutes long to boot! That's what valve trombonist and jazz icon ...
Continue ReadingBob Brookmeyer with the Ed Partyka Jazz Orchestra: Madly Loving You
by Jack Bowers
Kansas City–bred valve trombone master Bob Brookmeyer is top–billed on this handsomely conceived and superbly performed album because it was a gift from Ed Partyka’s Jazz Orchestra and a number of prominent composer / arrangers to Brookmeyer on his seventieth birthday in December 1999. Partyka, a Chicagoan who has lived since 1990 in Cologne, Germany, had taken part in Brookmeyer’s Jazz Composers’ Workshops in Cologne, was deeply influenced by them and sought to repay the debt by producing a big–band ...
Continue ReadingBob Brookmeyer: Electricity
by Douglas Payne
Electricity is another one of an infrequent series of recordings by Bob Brookmeyer, who used to pop up all over the place throughout the 1950s and 1960s. While he's always been rooted firmly in the mainstream (Gerry Mulligan, the Concert Jazz Band, the Thad Jones / Mel Lewis Orchestra and his own records on Verve), Brookmeyer has also consistently approached creative music in unorthodox ways (his two-piano quartet with Bill Evans, and his trombone jazz samba records). His greatest gifts, ...
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