Jazz Articles about Bob Sheppard

About Bob Sheppard

Album Review

Charles Chen: Building Characters

Read "Building Characters" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
June 15, 2025

San Francisco-based pianist and educator Charles Chen returns with Building Characters, his second recording in as many years, and as on his debut album, Charles, Play! (Cellar Music, 2024), he is backed by an all-star supporting cast that includes a front line of trumpeter Randy Brecker and saxophonists Bob Sheppard and Lawrence Feldman. They bolster a sharp and powerful rhythm section consisting of bassist Mike Richmond and drummer Adam Nussbaum. Missing are the members of Chen's quartet ...

Album Review

Mark Masters Ensemble: Dance, Eternal Spirits, Dance!

Read "Dance, Eternal Spirits, Dance!" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
May 24, 2025

In 2023-24, the celebrated arranger Mark Masters led his superb southern California-based ensemble into studios to record a pair of tribute albums. The first, Sam Rivers 100, was dedicated to the music of the late saxophonist on the one hundredth anniversary of his birth; the second, Dance, Eternal Spirits, Dance!, to that of another renowned saxophonist, Billy Harper, who is not only very much alive at age eighty-two but serves as guest soloist on both recordings. Unlike ...

Album Review

Jim Doherty: Jim Doherty's Spondance

Read "Jim Doherty's Spondance" reviewed by Ian Patterson

by Ian Patterson
April 10, 2025

Jim Doherty never lacked ambition, but a suite for jazz ballet or even jazz dance was always going to be a difficult sell in '80s Ireland. All was not lost for the pianist and composer, however. A few strings pulled here and there saw Doherty and his long- term collaborator, Louis Stewart decamp to Los Angeles, where they spent two days with top session musicians. One day of rehearsals and another in the recording studio resulted in Spondance, a jazz ...

Album Review

Peter Erskine: Vienna to Hollywood: Impressions of E.W. Korngold & Max Steiner

Read "Vienna to Hollywood: Impressions of E.W. Korngold & Max Steiner" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
February 10, 2025

From Vienna to Hollywood is versatile drummer Peter Erskine's ardent homage to the (mostly) film music of the renowned Academy Award-winning Viennese composers Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner, who wrote some of filmdom's most memorable themes during Hollywood's Golden Age in the decades from 1930 to 1960. To transpose their film scores to the jazz genre, Erskine uses a talented group of performers from Vienna's JAM Music Lab University (where he serves as artist-in-residence), supplanted on two numbers by ...

Album Review

Judy Wexler: No Wonder

Read "No Wonder" reviewed by Pierre Giroux

by Pierre Giroux
January 26, 2025

Judy Wexler's release No Wonder is a portrait in vocal jazz artistry, underscored by thoughtful arrangements from pianist and arranger Jeff Colella and a luminous supporting cast of Los Angeles A-list musicians including multi-instrumentalists Danny Janklow, and Bob Sheppard, trumpeter Jay Jennings guitarist Larry Koonse, bassist Gabe Davis and drummer Steve Hass. The twelve-tune track list is a refreshingly curated program of standards that steer away from the overly familiar, instead embracing the “hipper" corners of the ...

Album Review

Judy Wexler: No Wonder

Read "No Wonder" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
January 19, 2025

Judy Wexler imbues every song she touches with a sense of realism, wonder and depth that's ever so rare. An inimitable artist, this celebrated singer adds volumes to each story she encounters, be it a post-millennial jazz tune, '60s counterculture anthem, glimmering Brazilian jewel or any number of other finds. In the case of No Wonder--Wexler's seventh album, arriving two decades after her debut--she demonstrates her gifts with a marked emphasis on standards. Longtime collaborator/pianist Jeff Colella's ...

Liner Notes

Peter Erskine & The JAM Music Lab All-Stars: Vienna to Hollywood

by Peter Erskine
January 11, 2025

Hollywood called... ...and Max Steiner was the first of this dynamic duo to answer, arriving there in 1929, initially working for the RKO Studios as an orchestrator and then as a composer. This was not his first affiliation with Hollywood, however; he functioned as Fox Studio's musical director, adding live music to silent films presented in New York theaters where he had already established himself on Broadway. The call to come west must have triggered an urge as primal as ...