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Jazz Articles about Walter Blanding
Walter Blanding, Jr. with the John Toomey Trio at the Attucks Jazz Club
by Mark Robbins
Educator, composer, musician, Walter Blanding, Jr is a man for all seasons. Born into a musical family in Cleveland, OH, his parents moved the family to New York in the early '80s where his parents became part of the house band at the Village Gate jazz club. Blanding began playing the saxophone at the age of six and performed with his parents as a teenager He studied at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School, where he met Wynton Marsalis, ...
Continue ReadingRandy Napoleon: The Door is Open: The Music of Gregg Hill
by Paul Rauch
In and around the formidable jazz studies program at Michigan State University is a plethora of jazz talent devoted to instrumental and compositional excellence. Most of this talent is young, benefiting from a wide array of world-class instructors that includes program director Rodney Whitaker and veteran guitarist Randy Napoleon, among other notables. Within this labyrinth of jazz wisdom in the Detroit / Lansing metroplex is composer Gregg Hill, a former truck driver and tech entrepreneur whose performing ambitions were superseded ...
Continue ReadingJazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra Septet with Wynton Marsalis: The Democracy! Suite
by Paul Rauch
There is an interesting generational divide in perception when it comes to the music of Wynton Marsalis. While many hail his work at Lincoln Center as elevating jazz to its rightful place among the fine arts, others lament the separation from his iconic quartet and quintet work in the 1980's as some sort of jazz treason. What is unquestionable is his virtuosity and eloquence, expressing each note with beauty as the clear priority in his playing as a ...
Continue ReadingWalter Blanding: The Olive Tree
by C. Andrew Hovan
A new addition to an already heady bunch of tenor stars on Criss Cross, including Walt Weiskopf, Tim Warfield, Seamus Blake, and Ralph Lalama, 28-year-old saxophonist Walter Blanding is making good on the promise he showed back in 1991 on the collective project Tough Young Tenors. His debut as a leader, The Olive Tree, finds Blanding in familiar company, with trumpeter Kisor a buddy from high school and both pianist Farid Barron and bassist Rodney Whitaker chums from the Lincoln ...
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