Home » Jazz Articles » Jerry Bergonzi
Jazz Articles about Jerry Bergonzi
Jerry Bergonzi: Extra Extra
by Alberto Bazzurro
L'italo-americano Jerry Bergonzi è notoriamente uno dei sommi sacerdoti del tenorsassofonismo contemporaneo--vogliamo definirlo post-coltraniano? nel suo caso più che mai--che sta a indicare di fatto l'ultimo mezzo secolo di musica afroamericana, in pratica ciò che è arrivato dopo lo svolgersi delle avanguardie storiche (in quanto tali, appunto, non perché dopo si siano esaurite, per buona sorte), alle quali non ha mai guardato con troppa attenzione. Il fatto che sia nato (a Boston) nel 1947 ci dice come questo ...
Continue ReadingDial and DeRosa: Keep Swingin'
by Jack Bowers
Keep Swingin', a splendid new album from pianist Garry Dial and drummer Rich DeRosa, features “the music of Charlie Banacos." Charlie who? you may ask. And the answer is, there are jazz educators, and then there was Charlie Banacos, whose talent and ingenuity in the classroom influenced and inspired countless jazz musicians for more than fifty years. During that time, he designed more than a hundred courses of study and wrote half a dozen books on composition and improvisation.
Continue ReadingRichard Baratta: Off The Charts
by Jack Bowers
Drummer Richard Baratta's third album, Off the Charts, is a play on words, as he and his bandmates have taken lesser- known themes from a number of jazz masters that flew under the radar--in other words, were “off the charts"--and given them a fresh coat of paint, so to speak, to help redeem them from what Baratta considers an undeserved obscurity. The composers in question are Bobby Hutcherson, Joe Farrell, McCoy Tyner, Joe Henderson, Wayne Shorter, Charles ...
Continue ReadingRichard Baratta: Off The Charts
by Pierre Giroux
The premise for Richard Baratta's Off The Charts is to give new life to some of the lesser-known works by boldface composers such as Wayne Shorter, Bobby Hutcherson and Chick Corea, among others. Assisting in this voyage of rediscovery are several top-notch jazz luminaries such as tenor saxophonist Jerry Bergonzi, pianist David Kikoski, bassist John Patitucci and percussionist Paul Rossman. All of the arrangements are by Baratta, save one, and that is the opening Hutcherson number “Herzog," which ...
Continue ReadingRichard Baratta: Off The Charts
by Neil Duggan
After more than three decades as a Hollywood film producer, drummer Richard Baratta seemed ideally placed to bring together the worlds of film and jazz, releasing two albums focusing on songs from the movies. The first of these, Music In Film: The Reel Deal (Savant Records, 2020) gained a Grammy nomination for pianist Bill O'Connell's arrangement of the Euphemia Allen composition, “Chopsticks." Baratta followed this up with Music in Film: The Sequel. His third album, Off The Charts, changes focus ...
Continue ReadingJerry Bergonzi: Nearly Blue
by Jack Bowers
Even though Jerry Bergonzi has nothing left to prove, after almost half a century near the top of almost every list of the jazz world's leading tenor saxophonists, he is hardly ready to sit back and rest on those laurels. On his latest album, Nearly Blue (a sequel to the well-received Spotlight on Standards), Bergonzi is supported, as before, only by organist Renato Chicco and drummer Andrea Michelutti, meaning his supple tenor is in action much of the time, which ...
Continue Reading
