Jazz Articles about Buddy Childers

About Buddy Childers

Album Review

Stan Kenton and His Orchestra: Roots

by Jack Bowers
March 15, 2024

Roots is a most appropriate title for this series of concerts by the Stan Kenton Orchestra recorded in 1944-45 on behalf of the Armed Forces Radio Service. While the sessions do include a handful of staples from the Kenton book ("Eager Beaver," “Reed Rapture," “Tampico," the well-known “Artistry in Rhythm" theme), it's clear that Kenton and the orchestra hadn't yet developed the singular persona that enabled it to safeguard its place among the front ranks of contemporary big bands until ...

Album Review

Stan Kenton and His Orchestra: In a Lighter Vein

Read "In a Lighter Vein" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
December 13, 2020

Stan Kenton was a man of many moods, as was his intrepid and popular orchestra, which endured until his passing in August 1979 and whose renown is kept alive even today by the Stan Kenton Legacy Orchestra. Kenton dons his carefree hat on In a Lighter Vein, an assortment of straight-ahead themes from the orchestra's jazz library, preserved in five concert performances from 1953-55 beneath the umbrella of NBC radio's All Star Parade of Bands. Original compositions ...

Album Review

Stan Kenton and His Orchestra: Concert Kenton

Read "Concert Kenton" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
November 15, 2020

There's no question that Stan Kenton led one of the more successful and popular orchestras of the storied Big Band Era, winning various yearly polls while drawing large crowds to his jazz concerts and dance performances from coast to coast. But Kenton always wanted something more: to enlighten as well as entertain. Music, he felt, should be cerebral as well as visceral. And so he formed the Neophonic Orchestra to play the sort of forward-looking jazz he felt many listeners ...

Profile

Buddy Childers

by Robert Spencer
May 11, 2001

The Big Band sound of legend, the Big Band sound of Duke and Basie and the Thundering Herd, the Big Wide Enormous Fat Sound, is alive and well. The Big Band sound is alive and well and living in the horn of Buddy Childers. Mr. Marion Childers turned 75 on February 12, and from the sound of his recent releases, he's playing as strong a trumpet now as he was in 1942, when Stan Kenton hired him at ...