Jazz Articles about Nat Pierce

About Nat Pierce

Liner Notes

Like any business concerned with making a profit, the record industry has often resorted to questionable concepts, tributes, or other hooks to lure more costumers to their product. Currently we find ourselves in an era where the quality of original music is arguably on the decline, thus it has become even more prevalent to use nostalgia as a selling point. While ghost bands and one-off tributes may be a way to bring a new audience to the music of some ...

Album Review

Basie All Stars: Live At Fabrik Vol. 1

Read "Live At Fabrik Vol. 1" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
March 13, 2023

Such are the glories of his band's recorded legacy from the 1930s through the 1950s, that the mere mention of Count Basie's name will trigger a Pavlovian response from his fan base. Like no other, the Count Basie Orchestra epitomised big-band swing at its most sublime; reefer fuelled, riff based, loose and louche Kansas City jazz that is irresistible even in 2023, a life-affirming antidote to the barbarity of DL-only albums, generative music and social media. Seasoned ...

272

Album Review

Paul Quinichette & His Basie-ites: Like Basie

by Nic Jones
December 5, 2006

Like Basie has already seen the light of day in the CD era as an OJC release, but given its qualities, its reappearance here is welcome anyway. Paul Quinichette's career was perhaps more dogged than aided by the lazy “Vice-Pres" tag that was placed upon him because of his stylistic allegiance to Lester Young. As ever the details of the matter were somewhat different. His work was in fact rhythmically far less oblique, whilst the timbre of his playing was ...

168

Album Review

Nat Pierce, Dick Collins, Ralph Burns and the Herdsmen: Play Paris

by Jack Bowers
April 1, 2001

In early 1954, while Woody Herman’s Third Herd was touring Europe, a number of Woody’s sidemen took the opportunity to pick up some spare change by collaborating on a couple of sessions in Paris for French record executive Charles Delaunay. The results of the Paris dates are documented on tracks 1–8 of this reissue on Fantasy; tracks 9–16 were recorded in January ’54 in San Francisco. The core group of pianists Ralph Burns (1–8) and Nat Pierce (9–16), trumpeter Dick ...