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The Scott Silbert Quartet: Dream Dancing
by Jack Bowers
The year 2025 marks the centenary of the birth of John Haley Sims, known around the world by his singular nickname, Zoot, a colossus of the saxophone who left this world far too soon in March 1985. Yet even though Zoot's physical presence is absent, his insuperable spirit lives on via Dream Dancing, a marvelous tribute by saxophonist and Sims enthusiast Scott Silbert and his masterful quartet.While there is no debating that there was only one Zoot Sims, ...
Continue ReadingThe Scott Silbert Big Band: Jump Children
by Jack Bowers
The best music, in jazz or any other genre, is and should be timeless. To prove the point, the Scott Silbert Big Band celebrates the songs of a bygone era on its debut album, Jump Children, refreshing a number of memorable themes from the '30s, '40s and '50s and underscoring their relevance in an ultra-modern twenty-first century environment. His goal, Silbert writes, was “to represent the fantastic musicianship of the artists [who] originally performed these works," venerated masters such as ...
Continue ReadingSmithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra: Bernstein Reimagined
by Jack Bowers
This impressive anthology by the superb Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra is not so much Bernstein Reimagined as Bernstein Unleashed. The jazz component in Leonard Bernstein's memorable compositions for symphony orchestra, Broadway shows, films and even liturgical works always lay simmering just below the surface. As Bernstein is said to have confided to Duke Ellington: “Maybe that's really the difference between us. You write symphonic jazz, and I write jazz symphonies." However credible the remark, there is no doubt that the ...
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