Jazz Articles about Steve Fister

About Steve Fister

Album Review

Jim Self: My America 3/My Country

Read "My America 3/My Country" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
July 4, 2025

Tuba maestro Jim Self, who always has a creative trick or two up his ample sleeve, has subtitled the third volume of My America, his recorded tribute to the land of the free and the home of the brave, My Country, to which he could have added the word “music," as this is an album of country and western songs splendidly arranged for a fourteen-member jazz group by Kim Scharnberg. This is by and large bright and ...

Album Review

Jim Self: My America 2: Destinations

Read "My America 2: Destinations" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
January 15, 2023

Tuba maestro Jim Self's My America 2: Destinations is a successor of sorts to the album My America, recorded and released some twenty years before, also on Self's Basset Hound label. While personnel has inevitably changed (only trombonist Bill Booth returns from that earlier album), Self has employed the services of the same arranger, Kim Scharnberg—and thank goodness for that! Although Self and his eleven-member supporting cast acquit themselves well, it is Scharnberg's ingenious charts that make this engine run. ...