Home » Jazz Articles » Mort Weiss
Jazz Articles about Mort Weiss
Mort Weiss: The B3 and Me
by Robert R. Calder
Mort Weiss turned 71 last year. Records from sixty, fifty, forty years back, of anybody playing clarinet as he does now, would have been equally noteworthy with this second CD, even without the novelty of also featuring a Hammond B3 player (far less the man Weiss isn't alone in calling the Hammond B3 player). This may be the only clarinet/organ/guitar quartet on disc, but there were never that many more major bebop clarinetists. Discord is mentioned in ...
Continue ReadingOne By One: The Musical Arithmetic Of Mort Weiss
by Samuel Chell
If it isn't a first, it's certainly not a common occurrence for a musician to take his axe out of storage after a forty-year lay-off without a missing a beat. And if Hammond B3 trios featuring tenor saxophonists with Selmer Mark 6s are a well-established instrumentation, the same can hardly be said about the combination of a B3 and a Buffet clarinet. So clarinetist Mort Weiss has pulled off a couple of milestones that would practically assure instant attention for ...
Continue ReadingMort Weiss: Sets Sail With Clarinet
by R.J. DeLuke
The world of jazz seems to be ever changing. It accepts change, with new modes of expression, new influences, new players spawned from the long lineage of musicians who created and followed an fused the great American art form over the last century But some things don't change, and one of those is that a player who's proven himself is a player. Period. Circumstances and situations may get in the way; they may delay. Sometimes situations, bad ones, ...
Continue ReadingMort Weiss: The B3 and Me and Organic Vibes
by Andrew Velez
Mort Weiss The B3 and Me SMS Jazz 2006 Joey DeFrancesco Organic Vibes Concord 2006
For those listeners who regret the scarcity of the clarinet as a jazz presence these days, this session, The B3 and Me, is especially welcome. Weiss demonstrates just how syntonically the clarinet and Hammond B3 can ...
Continue ReadingThe Mort Weiss Quartet: Mort Weiss Meets Joey DeFrancesco
by Samuel Chell
"OK, let's just do it." The B3 player riffs on a dominant 7th sus chord; the soloist, eager to get it on, makes an entrance four measures into the organist's eight-bar intro, then waits four more bars before beginning the resilient “There Will Never Be Another You." The organ drops out a measure ahead of the first “ride" chorus, re-entering with a bass-note bomb anticipating the second beat of the chorus with enough force to propel soloist and listener alike ...
Continue ReadingMort Weiss: The B3 And Me
by Samuel Chell
Mort Weiss The B3 And Me SMS Jazz 2006
Although the temptation to retitle this session Bambi Meets Godzilla is a powerful one, the encounter is neither a laughing matter nor a foregone conclusion. Mort Weiss is the Rip Van Winkle of jazz, a musician who dropped out of the scene and ignored his clarinet for forty years before making an incredible, possibly unprecedented, recent comeback.
Small wonder then that Weiss's tone and melodic ...
Continue ReadingThe Mort Weiss Trio: The Three of Us
by Stephen Latessa
They could make a movie about the twists in Mort Weiss's life. The story certainly seems like something Hollywood might come up with: young man has love of music and embarks on professional career, grows tired of life on the road and retires, resumes his career after a thirty year sabbatical. Everyone loves happy endings and The Three of Us, the latest offering from Weiss, is certainly a reason for gladness.
The Three of Us is an intimate ...
Continue Reading
