Jazz Articles about Bob Mintzer

About Bob Mintzer

Album Review

The Dave Stryker Trio with Bob Mintzer: Groove Street

Read "Groove Street" reviewed by Pierre Giroux

by Pierre Giroux
January 12, 2024

The Dave Stryker Trio with tenor saxophonist Bob Mintzer is a captivating musical escapade. This collaboration not only showcases the talents of the two principals but also the two accompanying players, organist Jared Gold and drummer McClenty Hunter. Right from the initial notes of the opening track “Groove Street," a Dave Stryker original, the band sets itself up for success with Gold's classic organ shuffle as the launching pad. Stryker's guitar sizzles and Mintzer weaves a ...

Album Review

The Dave Stryker Trio: Groove Street

Read "Groove Street" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
December 25, 2023

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. ...

Liner Notes

Dewa Budjana: Joged Kahyangan

by John Kelman
May 12, 2023

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 ...

Liner Notes

Steve Khan: Patchwork

by Rafael Vega Curry
January 23, 2023

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, ...

Album Review

The Yellowjackets: Parallel Motion

Read "Parallel Motion" reviewed by Peter Jones

by Peter Jones
November 6, 2022

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 ...

Album Review

Bob Mintzer: Soundscapes

Read "Soundscapes" reviewed by Richard J Salvucci

by Richard J Salvucci
October 10, 2021

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 ...

Album Review

Ray Obiedo: Latin Jazz Project Vol. 2

Read "Latin Jazz Project Vol. 2" reviewed by Richard J Salvucci

by Richard J Salvucci
September 30, 2021

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 ...