Jazz Articles about Doug Scharf

About Doug Scharf

Album Review

Frank Lamphere: Frank Songs, My Way: Frank Lamphere Sings Sinatra

Read "Frank Songs, My Way: Frank Lamphere Sings Sinatra" reviewed by David Bondelevitch

by David Bondelevitch
March 10, 2026

"Now that's original... How'd he ever come up with that one?" These words open the press material for Frank Songs, My Way: Frank Lamphere Sings Sinatra, and it is a solid question, with so many albums of Frank Sinatra covers. It would be tough to top Tony Bennett's Perfectly Frank (Columbia Records, 1992). Performers who cover other performers tend to make two mistakes. First, they often pick the obvious songs, which have probably been covered many times, ...

Album Review

Metropolitan Jazz Octet: The Bowie Project

Read "The Bowie Project" reviewed by Paul Reynolds

by Paul Reynolds
May 27, 2023

A tribute to a pop artist by jazz musicians--as with the new David Bowie album by Chicago's Metropolitan Jazz Octet--has to tread a careful line. It obviously won't--can't--be a rote reproduction of the originals, a flaw that sinks many pop-to-pop tributes. Yet it needs to translate the songs into jazz--its harmonic sophistication, especially--in a way that retains the essence of the artist being celebrated. The MJO effort deftly rises to that challenge. This 11-song project should intrigue Bowieists ...

Liner Notes

Metropolitan Jazz Octet featuring Paul Marinaro: The Bowie Project 

by Neil Tesser
February 10, 2023

In the words of David Bowie: “Changes." The Metropolitan Jazz Octet's two previous albums teem with unadulterated jazz. Paul Marinaro is a hard-swinging, expressive baritone steeped in the Great American Songbook and the jazz tradition. So what in the galaxy are they doing with the music of pop legend--and onetime glam rocker, dancehall king, visual visionary, music man of multiple personae, and cultural icon--David Bowie? Historians might note that Bowie started playing jazz saxophone in his ...

Album Review

Joshua Jern Jazz Orchestra: Midnight Stroll

Read "Midnight Stroll" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
April 15, 2020

One can only imagine how difficult it must be, especially in such uncertain times, for any musician to decide that the time has come to assemble a big band and usher it into a recording studio, let alone one whose name and reputation are, more than likely, scarcely known outside his own neighborhood. Thumbing his nose at the odds, Joshua Jern, a Chicago-based trumpeter and educator with impressive talents, has done exactly that, escorting his remarkably well-groomed ensemble on a ...