Jazz Articles about Brandon Lee

About Brandon Lee

Album Review

Jon De Lucia: The Brubeck Octet Project Strikes Again!

Read "The Brubeck Octet Project Strikes Again!" reviewed by Pierre Giroux

by Pierre Giroux
October 29, 2026

There is something deeply satisfying about hearing music that has sat quietly in the shadows for decades, finally given a chance to be heard. That is the pleasure offered by alto saxophonist Jon De Lucia's The Brubeck Octet Project Strikes Again!, the second release from his acclaimed octet. More than a nostalgic return to an important period in jazz history, it also explores fresh musical territory. The cool-jazz sensibility and West Coast refinement are certainly present, but they share the ...

Album Review

Jon De Lucia: The Brubeck Octet Project Strikes Again!

Read "The Brubeck Octet Project Strikes Again!" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
October 25, 2026

After his recording of The Brubeck Octet Project earned widespread approval and acclaim in 2024, saxophonist and jazz historian Jon De Lucia did not rest on those laurels; instead, he delved even more deeply into the original octet's archives and unearthed eleven little-known arrangements that form the basis of a second blockbuster album, The Brubeck Octet Project Strikes Again! And what a strike it is--every inch as perceptive and impressive as De Lucia's earlier survey of the Dave Brubeck Octet, ...

Album Review

The Birdland Big Band: Storybook: The Music of Mark Miller

Read "Storybook: The Music of Mark Miller" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
October 7, 2025

Storybook, the third recording by the New York City-based Birdland Big Band, is subtitled “the music of Mark Miller" and is designed to showcase compositions and arrangements by that multi-talented artist who doubles (triples) as the band's lead trombonist. Miller wrote or co-wrote half of the album's 10 colorful and impressive numbers (11 if one counts Joaquin Rodrigo's brief “Concerto de Aranjuez," which serves as an introduction to Chick Corea's “Spain") and arranged all of them. Miller's ...

Album Review

Jon De Lucia: The Brubeck Octet Project

Read "The Brubeck Octet Project" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
November 19, 2024

Having formed his jazz octet in 2016 for a project at City College of New York, where he was then teaching, Brooklyn-based alto saxophonist Jon De Lucia had to find new music to keep it going--a search that led him to the archives at Mills College, which housed many of Dave Brubeck's original handwritten charts among the papers of the octet's tenor saxophonist and arranger, Dave Van Kriedt. Eight years later, after extensive research, much hard work ...

Album Review

Eyal Vilner Big Band: Swingin' Uptown

Read "Swingin' Uptown" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
September 6, 2024

Even though he was born and raised in Tel Aviv, Israel, composer, saxophonist and educator Eyal Vilner is well-versed in the origins and history of American jazz, especially as they pertain to the Swing Era, big bands and the largely black jazz experience in Harlem and elsewhere. Those interests converge on Swingin' Uptown, on which Vilner's excellent big band swings its way through sixteen impressive charts, several of which were inspired by Harlem's remarkble jazz narrative. Besides ...

Album Review

Jon De Lucia: The Brubeck Octet Project

Read "The Brubeck Octet Project" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
June 28, 2024

Synchronicity is a wondrous thing. Item: At around the same time that Albert Ayler was developing his sound in the U.S.A., the Ethiopian tenor saxophonist Getatchew Mekurya was forging a strikingly similar one in Addis Ababa. Neither player had heard the other, and Mekurya had never heard any jazz at all. Feel the Force? Rewind a decade or so and we encounter another space/time portal, this one connecting the U.S.A.'s East Coast and West Coast. In New ...

Album Review

John La Barbera Big Band: Grooveyard

Read "Grooveyard" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
September 27, 2023

Composer/arranger John La Barbera has been at the top of his game for more than half a century, and Grooveyard is simply another example of his undiminished artistry. Besides arranging everything--superbly, as always--La Barbera wrote six of the session's ten charming songs, escorting other treasures by Carl Perkins, Dave Brubeck, Curtis Fuller and Elvin Jones. As he writes his handsome and colorful big-band charts, La Barbera is always careful to observe Rule No. 1: they have to ...