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Jazz Articles about Bob Mintzer
The Dave Stryker Trio: Groove Street
by Jack Bowers
Guitarist Dave Stryker's latest album, Groove Street, is in fact “The Dave Stryker Trio with Bob Mintzer," a combination that is a sure bet to enhance its merit and heighten its import--a sentiment that is equally true when applied to any album on which the acclaimed tenor saxophonist sits in. Stryker and Mintzer are longtime friends who somehow never recorded together, although Mintzer furnished the arrangements for Blue Soul, Stryker's splendid album with Germany's WDR Big Band. ...
Continue ReadingDewa Budjana: Joged Kahyangan
by John Kelman
Dewa Budjana may not be a household name outside of his native country, Indonesia, but with MoonJune Records picking up this exciting guitarist and composer, all that could be about to change. He's already garnered some serious attention with his first recording for the label, Dawai in Paradise, released earlier this year (2013), but at home, he's nothing short of a pop star. Lead guitarist and songwriter for the multi-platinum, million-selling Indonesian pop/rock group Gigi, the fifty year-old Budjana has ...
Continue ReadingSteve Khan: Patchwork
by Rafael Vega Curry
Few artists have been as successful as Steve Khan in achieving a genuine blend of jazz and Latin sensibilities, rhythms and sonorities. In fact, it can be suggested that no one else has done what he has accomplished for the jazz guitar, offering both the extensions of what Wes Montgomery, Kenny Burrell and Grant Green did in their day, plus the real sabor latino. Khan, of course, is one of the preeminent guitarists of the last few decades, ...
Continue ReadingThe Yellowjackets: Parallel Motion
by Peter Jones
Of the original 1977 members of the Yellowjackets, all but keyboards man Russell Ferrante departed long ago. But saxophonist Bob Mintzer, who joined in 1991, is still there and, to a large extent, the idea also lingers on: we hear echoes of it in the work of Snarky Puppy, for example. That idea was/is Californian jazz-funk. But how do you keep it sounding fresh after 45 years and 26 albums (27 if you count the one with Bobby ...
Continue ReadingBob Mintzer: Soundscapes
by Richard J Salvucci
Well, what is your pleasure? Swinging charts? You have them. A tight big band? Yes, that certainly, and more. Terrific soloists? In abundance. A blend of genres that go from straight ahead to Latin to funk? That is all here too. The only thing absent, and all respect to Bob Mintzer, is excitement. To be honest, many contemporary big bands doing studio recordings have a similar issue. The level of musicianship is astronomical, but something is not there. You wonder ...
Continue ReadingRay Obiedo: Latin Jazz Project Vol. 2
by Richard J Salvucci
Sometimes it is difficult to banish the words of Ecclesiastes from your mind when listening to a recording: “There is no new thing under the Sun." While that may be true of music in particular--one builds on the past, just as in other fields--it is no good reason for not listening or for simple indifference. Gerald Wilson's “Viva Tirado" has been around since the 1970s, and Wilson himself has been quoted as being once surprised by hearing the El Chicano ...
Continue ReadingRay Obiedo: Latin Jazz Project Vol. 2
by Pierre Giroux
There is a train of thought which proposes that the beginnings of the modern Latin jazz movement originated with the co-mingling of mambo and bebop. Although there is no empirical evidence to support this proposition, the uptake of the Latin style by boppers such as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Herbie Mann gives some credence to the notion. The music presented by guitarist Ray Obiedo in Latin Jazz Project Vol. 2, while grounded in the Latin jazz construct, is delivered ...
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