Jazz Articles about Chuck Owen

Chuck Owen and the Jazz Surge: Within Us

by Jack Bowers
September 9, 2021

Any big band celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary has earned a triumph surpassing most others. To mark the occasion with an album as admirable as this one is icing on the celebratory cake. The fact is, composer/arranger Chuck Owen's Florida-based Jazz Surge, formed in 1995, shows no signs of aging or becoming obsolete. Thanks to Owen's broad-beamed and colorful charts, the Jazz Surge is as mesmerizing as a memoir and stylish as tomorrow. Half a dozen of Owen's ...

Chuck Owen and the Jazz Surge: Whispers on the Wind

by Jack Bowers
October 23, 2017

Chuck Owen's Florida-based and Grammy-nominated Jazz Surge is back in the saddle with another series of impressive musical portraits, Whispers on the Wind, whose genesis harkens back to Owen's childhood in windy Omaha, NE, and whose inspiration derives in part from the works of three contemporary authors: Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy and Stephen King (the last, as Owen writes, from King's Dark Tower series). To help cast the spell, Owen uses a number of instruments not generally associated with big-band ...

Chuck Owen and the Jazz Surge: River Runs

by Jack Bowers
August 5, 2013

On this powerful and ambitious “concerto for jazz guitar, saxophone and orchestra," composer Chuck Owen's Jazz Surge is bolstered by a thirty-four member reed, brass and string section that helps guide the listener on a picturesque journey along a number of rivers of various shapes, sizes and currents whose aim is to rekindle through musical portraiture the indwelling love of water in each of us as it heightens our awareness of and appreciation for one of nature's awe-inspiring and essential ...

Chuck Owen & The Jazz Surge: The Comet's Tail: Performing the Compositions of Michael Brecker

by Larry Taylor
October 29, 2009

What better way to commemorate Michael Brecker than with a CD by a hard-driving big band playing his compositions. Brecker, the great tenor saxophonist died in 2007. His music and talent will be long remembered, and Chuck Owen & the Jazz Surge have put together a wonderful selection of arrangements, starring some of today's best of players.

Owen, University of South Florida jazz composition professor, conceived this project in conjunction with USF. Owen says that the goal was re-envisioning Brecker's ...

Chuck Owen and the Jazz Surge: Madcap

by Jack Bowers
July 1, 2001

Chuck Owen’s Florida–based Jazz Surge charts an adventurous course on its second album for Sea Breeze Records, and while it doesn’t always strike the target it does so often enough to keep one’s mind from wandering too far from the action. The Surge, some of whose members are students or faculty members at the University of South Florida in Tampa, where Owen teaches, is helped along the way by four prominent guest artists — guitarist John Abercrombie, trumpeter Tim Hagans, ...

Chuck Owen and the Jazs Surge: Madcap

by Dave Nathan
July 1, 2001

Chuck Owen has gathered his Florida based Jazz Surge big band together for their first release in more than five years. What comes out is a progressive big band playing at its finest. Although the charts have a modern sound to them, they still are within the realm of mainstream jazz. This group is not George Gruntz's Jazz Band or the Either/Orchestra. With his four originals and two standards, Owen demonstrates that you can write charts that don't have to ...