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Vancouver Jazz Orchestra: Vancouver Jazz Orchestra Meets Brian Charette
by Pierre Giroux
The Vancouver Jazz Orchestra's debut album arrives with a sense of purpose that feels both timely and reassuringly traditional. Formed to showcase the city's rich pool of jazz musicians while creating a platform for composers and arrangers, the VJO proves itself not through rhetoric but through sound. This release features a confident, well-rehearsed ensemble playing music almost exclusively by Vancouver writers, united here by the invigorating presence of Hammond B3 master Brian Charette. Steve Kaldestad's “Equestrian Interlude" opens ...
Continue ReadingVancouver Jazz Orchestra: Meets Brian Charette
by Jack Bowers
Through the years, Canada has produced an impressive number of world-renowned big bands including Rob McConnell's peerless Boss Brass, the Toronto and Winnipeg Jazz Orchestras, those led by trombonist Dave McMurdo, pianist Jill Townsend and trumpeter Steve McDade, and one of the world's foremost undergraduate bands, Montreal's McGill University Jazz Ensemble. On its debut recording, Meets Brian Charette, the Vancouver Jazz Orchestra proves beyond any doubt that it deserves inclusion in that special fraternity. Simply put, the VJO ...
Continue ReadingCory Weeds: Home Cookin'
by Jack Bowers
On Home Cookin', his second recording with an eleven-piece “little big band," tenor saxophonist Cory Weeds is doing the best he can. Really. As Weeds writes in the liner notes, the plan was to rehearse the band for two nights at Frankie's Jazz Club in Vancouver, Canada, home to Weeds and most of the band's personnel, then to convene at the Warehouse Studio on Sunday to record. Arriving at the club on Friday evening, Weeds found to his dismay that ...
Continue ReadingCory Weeds: Home Cookin'
by Pierre Giroux
Cory Weeds, a prominent figure in the contemporary jazz scene, has made a remarkable statement with his Little Big Band's latest album Home Cookin'. The session showcases a vibrant collection of compositions/arrangements carefully curated to resonate with his personal journey, including those by Horace Silver, Thad Jones and Oliver Nelson, which are essential to him for a variety of reasons. The band comprises ten of his favorite world-class Vancouver, BC-based musicians. These previously mentioned influential tracks ...
Continue ReadingFraser MacPherson: From The Pen Of...
by Jack Bowers
The late tenor saxophonist Fraser MacPherson was well-known in western Canada and elsewhere for his brilliance—but as player, not a writer. In fact, according to MacPherson's son Guy, who wrote the excellent liner notes to From the Pen of..., his father wrote barely a dozen or so original compositions, almost all of which are included on this superlative album with performances by a who's who of well- known jazz artists from Canada and other countries. Considering what ...
Continue ReadingFraser MacPherson: From The Pen Of...
by Pierre Giroux
Tenor saxophonist Fraser MacPherson was an original. Although he was raised in Victoria, British Columbia, he moved to Vancouver early in his career where he remained throughout his working life. He began to build his reputation as a Lester Young-influenced player, and in the mid '70s recorded his first trio album for West End Records with guitarist Oliver Gannon and bassist Wyatt Ruther. This album was picked up by Concord Records in the late '70s and released in the U.S. ...
Continue ReadingSteve Kaldestad: Live at Frankie's Jazz Club
by Jack Bowers
On his fourth album for Cellar Music, western Canada-based tenor saxophonist Steve Kaldestad plays “Con Alma." He also plays con alma--in English, “with soul"—not only on Dizzy Gillespie's paean to human life's animating principle but throughout a more than hour-long concert at Frankie's Jazz Club in Vancouver, wherein he leads an exemplary quartet whose members are among the most accomplished jazz musicians in that lovely British Columbia province and beyond. Kaldestad's partners in the onstage enterprise are ...
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