Mark Gross

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Mark Gross: Jazz for Teens

by B.D. Lenz
September 8, 2026

For many young musicians, learning jazz is about much more than learning how to play an instrument. It's about developing confidence, learning to listen, finding your own voice, and discovering how to work with others.Few people understand that better than Mark Gross. As Director of Jazz Instruction at NJPAC, Gross has spent years helping shape the next generation of jazz musicians through programs like TD Jazz for Teens, while also drawing on his own experience as a performer ...

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Roseanna Vitro: Sing a Song of Bird

by Pierre Giroux
November 2, 2021

Roseanne Vitro is one of those jazz singers who falls into the category of “I recognize the voice, but I just can't seem to place her." She has more than a respectable discography which stretches back to 1982, when she released her debut album Listen Here for the Texas Rose label. Her fall 2021 album, Sing A Song Of Bird, is a combination of abundance of attitude and perseverance, since it is composed of two separate sessions (one recorded in ...

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Andy Farber and His Orchestra: Early Blue Evening

by Jack Bowers
October 5, 2021

Saxophonist Andy Farber's New York-based orchestra came together and cut its teeth as the onstage band for three hundred performances of After Midnight, a Broadway revue that paid tribute to Jazz Age nightclub luminaries from Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford and Count Basie to Harold Arlen, Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh. As one might presume from the orchestra's provenance, echoes of Ellington and Basie can readily be discerned on its first recording since After Midnight closed in 2014--but Farber, who wrote ...

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Derrick Gardner & The Big dig! Band: Still I Rise

by Jack Bowers
July 23, 2020

Trumpeter Derrick Gardner, a Chicagoan who has performed around the world with a who's who of jazz luminaries from Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie and Frank Foster to Nancy Wilson, Tony Bennett and Harry Connick Jr., to name only a few, traveled to Winnipeg, Canada, to assemble and record his Big Dig! Band, several sizes removed from Gardner's sextet, The Jazz Prophets, a working group since it was formed in New York City in 1991. Gardner not only shines as trumpet ...

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The Dave Holland Big Band: What Goes Around

by Jack Bowers
November 1, 2002

I've never been overly impressed by popularity contests, and as British-bred bassist Dave Holland swept the field in this year's Down Beat magazine critics' poll, I was thoroughly prepared not to like What Goes Around by Holland's thirteen-piece big band.

Surprise! The album is far better than expected; in fact, I'd go so far as to concede that it is thoroughly absorbing, enlivened every step of the way by notably innovative charts and earnestly inspired blowing from Holland's company of ...

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Dave Holland Big Band: What Goes Around

by AAJ Staff
September 9, 2002

With a musical force like bassist Dave Holland at the helm, it's hard to imagine a group going wrong. But his new big band has a singular problem: too many players. Thirteen musicians, each more than capable, join forces on What Goes Around, which features seven tunes composed and arranged arranged by the man himself. Unfortunately this increase in scale just doesn't translate into much except redundancy. The core quintet (Potter, Eubanks, Nelson, Holland, and Kilson) has repeatedly proven its ...

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Mark Gross: Riddle of the Sphinx

by Dave Nathan
July 1, 2001

Alto/soprano saxophonist Mark Gross and his cohorts carry on in music man's fascination with trying to solve the riddles associated with Egypt's greatest monument the Sphinx. The first track, the mysterious sounding “Valley of the Dry Bones" establishes the overall setting for what's to follow over the next 50 or so minutes, viz., Middle Eastern musical themes built on Gross' probing sometimes querulous soprano. But on the next track, “Moses In Egypt", there's a discernable feeling of hope created, again ...