Jazz Articles about Zoot Sims

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Jack Kerouac with Al Cohn and Zoot Sims: Blues And Haikus

by Sid Smith
May 5, 2008

I discovered jazz and Jack Kerouac at roughly the same time in my teens back in the early 1970s, when his seminal novel On The Road (Viking, 1957) hooked me into the bohemian world of jazz clubs, intense friendships and the never ending highway under wide open skies described in its pages.

It barely mattered that the quick fluid prose in which this hedonistic manifesto was rolled up in didn't always make sense--it was all about feeling something ...

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Zoot Sims and the Gershwin Brothers

by C. Michael Bailey
July 2, 2005

Zoot Sims Zoot Sims and the Gershwin Brothers Pablo/OJC 1975

The beauty of jazz is there are always older recordings to be discovered and rediscovered. Zoot Sims and the Gershwin Brothers is one of these recordings. Long hailed as one of Sims's finest recordings, it was not until recently that it crossed my path. Everything in print was accurate. The recording is a blissfully successful bit of musical alchemy.

Recorded ...

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Zoot Sims with the Joe Castro Trio: Live at Falcon Lair

by Jack Bowers
May 23, 2004

This loose-limbed rendezvous sounds exactly as it was, an impromptu late-night jam session planned on the fly in someone’s apartment—in this case, however, no ordinary apartment but “The Playhouse,” a spacious second-story room above a garage and adjacent to the main house at Falcon Lair, the imposing Beverly Hills estate then owned by tobacco heiress Doris Duke and previously occupied by legendary silent film star Rudolph Valentino. Pianist Joe Castro, who was married to Duke from 1956-64, liked to invite ...

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Joe Venuti/Zoot Sims: Joe & Zoot & More

by Dave Nathan
October 5, 2002

One of the more satisfying experiences in jazz is when some long forgotten (except by a few) gems have been unearthed, dusted off and reissued (or issued for the first time0. This CD seems to be a mixture of two - first time issued and reissued sessions coming from the 1970's. Sims and Venuti collaborated for the Chiaroscuro label in 1975. But the first nine cuts on this set are from a September 27, 1973 recording which has been cleaned ...

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Stan Getz/Bob Brookmeyer, Al Cohn/Zoot Sims: Recorded Fall 1961, You

by David Adler
April 12, 2002

These two early 60s quintet dates are marvelous, a mother lode of timeless horn artistry. They’re both straight reissues — no alternate takes or unreleased tracks of any sort. The first, originally produced by Creed Taylor, pairs Stan Getz and Bob Brookmeyer, with Steve Kuhn, John Neves, and Roy Haynes in the rhythm section. Three of Brookmeyer’s tunes appear (that’s half the program right there), beginning with “Minuet Circa ’61," a beautiful waltz that immediately establishes the rhythmic and timbral ...

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Zoot Sims & Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis: The Tenor Giants

by Derek Taylor
July 1, 2001

In the traits of tone and phrasing tenor icons Zoot and Jaws were hardly doppelgangers. Jaws of the clipped rasp and pinched carving wail and Zoot with the more effusive, easygoing sound- the two together made for instant and compelling contrast in terms of both philosophy and execution. The common ground the pair shared was in the terrain of no-nonsense hard driving swing and a willingness to vigorously pull out the stops when the chance presented itself. Convening under the ...

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Zoot Sims/Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis: The Tenor Giants with Oscar Peterson

by Dave Nathan
May 1, 2001

If nothing else, this album is reaffirmation that Zoot Sims could play any style of music, with any type of jazz artist and play it like he has been doing it forever. At first blush the teaming of Lester Young derived Sims with the hard driving, tough tenor Coleman Hawkins-influenced Eddie “Lockjaw" Davis seems out of place. But here they are in a whirlwind tour of Europe in 1975 accompanied by the Oscar Peterson Trio on which they took no ...