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Jay Rattman
Jay Rattman, a multi-instrumentalist improvisor and composer in New York City, has performed at Jazz @ Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, and the Coachella Festival, in addition to appearing on NPR's Sound of Young America, WNYC's Soundcheck, The Late Show, and The Tonight Show. A recipient of an ASCAP Young Jazz Composer Award, Rattman holds bachelors and masters degrees from Manhattan School of Music, which presented him with the William H. Borden award for outstanding accomplishment in jazz. In demand in settings as diverse as traditional jazz, klezmer, big bands, free improvisations, creative jazz, and classical chamber music, he has performed or recorded with artists as disparate as Bob Dorough, Feist, Nellie McKay, Stefon Harris, and the José Limón Dance Company. A member of the klezmer band “Zlek” and Phil Woods's Festival Orchestra, he leads a jazz quartet that plays members' original music. As a member of the Manhattan Saxophone Quartet, he has premiered pieces by David Noon, Marc—Antonio Consoli, Jeffrey Nytch, and J. Mark Stambaugh among others.
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Terry Waldo & the Gotham City Band: Treasury, Volume 2

by Jack Bowers
Like any other handiwork you can name, contemporary jazz did not emerge from a vacuum. It sprang forth from a variety of sources, including but not limited to bebop, cool jazz, swing, trad jazz (Dixieland), blues, stride and perhaps the granddaddy of them all, ragtime. Yes, ragtime. Before there was King Oliver or Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington or Woody Herman, Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson or John Coltrane, there was ragtime. And for those who surmise that ragtime ...
Continue ReadingTerry Waldo: Treasury Volume 1

by Nicholas F. Mondello
Simply stated, and without hyperbole, Terry Waldo is an American musical treasure. He's also a treasure purveyor. A protégé of and mentored by Eubie Blake, Waldo is a player, composer, arranger, author, podcaster, theatrical director, and the noted oracle for ragtime and early American popular music. With Treasury Volume 1 (the first of a three-volume set), Waldo and his all-star Gotham City Band cover ten selections from the embryonic days of American jazz.Things kick this lively session off ...
Continue ReadingTerry Waldo & the Gotham City Band: Treasury Volume 1

by Jack Bowers
Pianist Terry Waldo isn't stuck in the past; he revels in it, as do his eager teammates on Treasury, Vol. 1--the first of three such discourses, according to the album's liner notes--recorded not in jazz's primal era but in May and June 2022 (save for After You've Gone," recorded in October 2018 with the splendid guest vocalist Veronica Swift). Waldo, a student of jazz from its origins to present-day genres, treads a well-worn path here, reprising bright and enduring themes ...
Continue ReadingThe New Wonders: Steppin' Out

by Jack Bowers
Although the ten songs performed by cornetist Mike Davis' Brooklyn-based septet, The New Wonders, on the group's second album, Steppin' Out, are well removed from new, most have stood the test of time and remained popular with a small yet devoted number of trad jazz enthusiasts, some for a century or more. The New Wonders carry forward a storied tradition that dates at least as far back as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in the early 1920s and whose best-known ...
Continue ReadingJon De Lucia: The Brubeck Octet Project

by Jack Bowers
Having formed his jazz octet in 2016 for a project at City College of New York, where he was then teaching, Brooklyn-based alto saxophonist Jon De Lucia had to find new music to keep it going--a search that led him to the archives at Mills College, which housed many of Dave Brubeck's original handwritten charts among the papers of the octet's tenor saxophonist and arranger, Dave Van Kriedt. Eight years later, after extensive research, much hard work ...
Continue ReadingNancy Reed & Spencer Reed: Happying

by Katchie Cartwright
The jazz world encompasses a multitude of local communities. Jazz came to Delaware Water Gap and the Pocono Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania via the inns and summer resorts for which the region has been known since the second decade of the 19th century, attracting New Yorkers and Philadelphians seeking summer refuge and fresh woodland air. By the time singer-bassist Nancy Reed and singer-guitarist Spencer Reed arrived there from New York in 1976, a scene had been building for a quarter ...
Continue ReadingJon De Lucia: The Brubeck Octet Project

by Chris May
Synchronicity is a wondrous thing. Item: At around the same time that Albert Ayler was developing his sound in the U.S.A., the Ethiopian tenor saxophonist Getatchew Mekurya was forging a strikingly similar one in Addis Ababa. Neither player had heard the other, and Mekurya had never heard any jazz at all. Feel the Force? Rewind a decade or so and we encounter another space/time portal, this one connecting the U.S.A.'s East Coast and West Coast. In New ...
Continue ReadingPrimary Instrument
Saxophone
Location
New York City
Credentials/Background
As an educator, Rattman maintains an active private studio in addition to having taught group instrumental lessons in New York City public schools, at COTA Camp Jazz, and via distance learning from Manhattan School of Music. He also presented in a teaching artists masterclass with Yo Yo Ma and his Silk Road Ensemble.
Photos
Music
Improvisation No. 2
From: Solo - 13 November 2010By Jay Rattman
Wednesday's Wander
From: In DuoBy Jay Rattman