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Jazz Articles about Ray Brown

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Book Review

Ray Brown: His Life and Music

Read "Ray Brown: His Life and Music" reviewed by Andrew Hunter


Ray Brown: His Life and Music Jay Sweet 310 Pages ISBN: # 9781800505353 Equinox Publishing2025 It is such a common occurrence in life that bad things happen to good people, and conversely that good things happen to bad people, that there is a branch of theology given to the question of how and why God allows such injustice to occur. It is called theodicy. Given the frequency with which people ...

17
Album Review

Teddy Edwards / Howard McGhee: Together Again!!!!

Read "Together Again!!!!" reviewed by Richard J Salvucci


Howard McGhee was one of the cats present at the creation, when bop became a thing. His life embodied a classic redemption story, complete with death (metaphorically) by drugs, years in exile and finally, by dint of his own struggles and a timely gig with Woody Herman, resurrection. While he had been widely admired and respected in the late 1940s as a pioneering trumpeter, the unspoken judgment was that it was his misfortune to come to prominence when Dizzy Gillespie ...

5
Album Review

Oscar Peterson: Con Alma

Read "Con Alma" reviewed by Chris May


To borrow Duke Ellington's description of Louis Armstrong, Oscar Peterson was born poor, died rich and never hurt anyone along the way. He also brought joy to untold numbers of people. But, truth to tell, his style was the twentieth-century equivalent of modern day AI-produced generative music. Sit Peterson down at a piano, progamme him (as in give him a tune to play), and press Go: a torrent of technique poured out. Trouble is, Peterson's pianism was ...

11
Album Review

The Oscar Peterson Trio: Con Alma: The Oscar Peterson Trio Live in Lugano, 1964

Read "Con Alma: The Oscar Peterson Trio Live in Lugano, 1964" reviewed by Mike Jurkovic


Was there ever a more generous player than Oscar Peterson? A man who, by simply doing the thing he most loved and thrilled to do, which was make people feel better way down deep in their bones, sat at his piano and made the world grateful? Rekindled that spark--of imagination, of potential, of better--just by running his hands along the eighty-eights and instigating his soul mates, bassist Ray Brown and drummer Ed Thigpen to do the same. That ...

18
Album Review

Sonny Rollins: Go West! The Contemporary Records Albums

Read "Go West! The Contemporary Records Albums" reviewed by Richard J Salvucci


Apparently, the median age of a jazz listener is in his or her mid to late 40s. So, perhaps, the representative listener was born in the mid-1970s. Sonny Rollins first recorded in 1949. The recordings reviewed here were made in the late 1950s, well before many contemporary listeners were born. While there have been ample reissues of Rollins' work, most coincided with the still-active phase of his career. Much of his work has appeared since “Skylark" on The Next Album ...

3
Album Review

Oscar Peterson Trio with Herb Ellis and Ray Brown: Vancouver 1958

Read "Vancouver 1958" reviewed by Pierre Giroux


This iteration of the Oscar Peterson Trio, with guitarist Herb Ellis and bassist Ray Brown, had been together for five years at the time of this recording, but it was reaching its expiration date. Following appearances at The Vancouver Jazz Festival on August 4 and 8, 1958, there was only one further instance of the trio recording together that year, and that was for KABC-TV Stars of Jazz on August 18,1958 after which Herb Ellis left the band. The principals ...

13
Reassessing

The Easy Way

Read "The Easy Way" reviewed by Richard J Salvucci


It is fair to wonder how Jimmy Giuffre would be remembered had he not gone off on to the wilder shores of atonality, collective improvisation, and free jazz with Paul Bley and Steve Swallow in the early 1960s. It is easy to forget that Giuffre was regarded as a rising star, both as a multi-instrumentalist (he played tenor and baritone sax; clarinet was apparently a double for him) and a composer, in the 1950s. Yes, mentioned in the same breath ...


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