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Peter Erskine: Vienna to Hollywood: Impressions of E.W. Korngold & Max Steiner

by Jack Bowers
From Vienna to Hollywood is versatile drummer Peter Erskine's ardent homage to the (mostly) film music of the renowned Academy Award-winning Viennese composers Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner, who wrote some of filmdom's most memorable themes during Hollywood's Golden Age in the decades from 1930 to 1960. To transpose their film scores to the jazz genre, Erskine uses a talented group of performers from Vienna's JAM Music Lab University (where he serves as artist-in-residence), supplanted on two numbers by ...
Continue ReadingPeter Erskine & The JAM Music Lab All-Stars: Vienna to Hollywood

by Peter Erskine
Hollywood called... ...and Max Steiner was the first of this dynamic duo to answer, arriving there in 1929, initially working for the RKO Studios as an orchestrator and then as a composer. This was not his first affiliation with Hollywood, however; he functioned as Fox Studio's musical director, adding live music to silent films presented in New York theaters where he had already established himself on Broadway. The call to come west must have triggered an urge as primal as ...
Continue ReadingBob Brookmeyer with the Ed Partyka Jazz Orchestra: Madly Loving You

by Jack Bowers
Kansas City–bred valve trombone master Bob Brookmeyer is top–billed on this handsomely conceived and superbly performed album because it was a gift from Ed Partyka’s Jazz Orchestra and a number of prominent composer / arrangers to Brookmeyer on his seventieth birthday in December 1999. Partyka, a Chicagoan who has lived since 1990 in Cologne, Germany, had taken part in Brookmeyer’s Jazz Composers’ Workshops in Cologne, was deeply influenced by them and sought to repay the debt by producing a big–band ...
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