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Ron Caswell

Ron Caswell (tuba) Born a pauper in the municipality of Trenton, NJ, Ron Caswell escaped his cultural abyss to attend the Mannes College of Music. He's performed on tuba with The New York City Opera, New Jersey Symphony, Little Orchestra Society, Our State Fair (Broadway), Flying Karamazov Brothers (Broadway), Orchestra of St. Lukes, Slavic Soul party!, Frank London's Klezmer Brass All-Stars and too many more to mention. Ron has also co-produced salsa records with Martin Arroyo and has performed with numerous Latin bands playing trumpet and tuba. He plays bass in numerous rock projects including the underground East Village rock sensation the KNOBS!

Frank London: Touzle Your Kurchy

Read "Touzle Your Kurchy" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
September 21, 2026

Trumpeter Frank London has never been one to color neatly inside the historical lines. Known for his groundbreaking work with the Klezmer Conservatory Band and The Klezmatics, the restless downtown maestro has spent decades detonating cultural boundaries. With the Loisaida Fife and Drum Corps, he turns his sights toward eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Americana, dragging dusty martial traditions into a sweaty, musical block party. The album borrows its title from an antique Scots-English fife-and-drum tune--a flirtatious dare to rumple someone's kerchief--and that ...

Album Review

Slavic Soul Party: Live at Barbes: Slavic Soul Party Plays Duke Ellington's Far East Suite

Read "Live at Barbes: Slavic Soul Party Plays Duke Ellington's Far East Suite" reviewed by Chris M. Slawecki

by Chris M. Slawecki
March 21, 2017

In the late 1990s, visionary percussionist Matt Moran founded Slavic Soul Party, a brass band designed to stretch the boundaries between Eastern and Western European traditional music until those boundaries snap. More than two decades and twenty members later, “New York's Official #1 Brass Band for BalkanSoulGypsyFunk" fully realizes this vision by performing one of Duke Ellington's most famous Billy Strayhorn collaborations: 1963's The Far East Suite, around which Ellington organized a global tour schedule through the Middle East, South ...

Album Review

Slavic Soul Party: Plays Duke Ellington's Far East Suite

Read "Plays Duke Ellington's Far East Suite" reviewed by Angelo Leonardi

by Angelo Leonardi
November 23, 2016

Nel jazz contemporaneo la reinterpretazione delle opere passate avviene in due modi diversi. Da un lato c'è chi privilegia la riproposizione fedele dell'originale, partendo da una prospettiva a grandi linee accademica (Wynton Marsalis) fino alla riproduzione letterale di ogni aspetto melodico, timbrico e ritmico (come ha fatto il gruppo Mostly Other People Do The Killing con Kind of Blue). Dall'altro abbiamo la reinterpretazione personale, che può conservare in tutto o in parte l'identità dell'originale oppure creare qualcosa di diverso.