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Jazz Articles about Bob Brookmeyer

About Bob Brookmeyer

317

Album Review

The Bob Brookmeyer New Art Orchestra: Waltzing with Zoe

Read "Waltzing with Zoe" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
July 1, 2002

Spectacular. There’s no other way to describe “Seesaw,” the opening number on the second album by Bob Brookmeyer’s German–based New Art Orchestra. A shame the Grammy Awards don’t include one for best big–band composition (even though there is a ludicrous prize for “best Jazz solo”), as “Seesaw” would win the honor going away. The highest compliment this reviewer can pay Brookmeyer’s “dialogue between drums and band” is that it brought to mind some favorite themes (“Playground,” “Big Swing Face,” “555 ...

315

Album Review

Bob Brookmeyer: Plays Piano: Holiday

by Dave Nathan
November 1, 2001

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 ...

181

Album Review

Bob Brookmeyer with the Ed Partyka Jazz Orchestra: Madly Loving You

Read "Madly Loving You" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
November 1, 2001

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 ...

258

Album Review

Bob Brookmeyer: Electricity

by Douglas Payne
May 1, 1997

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, ...