Jazz Articles about David Berger

David Berger Octet: I Had the Craziest Dream

by Jack Bowers
August 14, 2009

David Berger Octet I Had the Craziest Dream Such Sweet Thunder 2008

Composer / arranger / scholar / historian / educator David Berger, who uses groups of various sizes to adorn his musical framework, has chosen an octet to record I Had the Craziest Dream, subtitled The Music of Harry Warren. If you're thinking “Harry who?," think instead “Chattanooga Choo-Choo," “Lulu's Back in Town," “There Will Never Be Another You," “At Last," ...

David Berger Octet featuring Harry Allen and Joe Temperley: I Had The Craziest Dream: The Music of Harry Warren

by Michael Steinman
August 5, 2008

David Berger's credentials are wide-ranging and impeccable: transcribing 500 Ellington recordings, leading the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, teaching at the Manhattan School of Music and Juilliard. I Had the Craziest Dream is precise, hot and lively, honoring Harry Warren, a deserving 20th-century popular composer less well known than Berlin, Gershwin, or Porter. In addition to the 12 songs on this CD, Warren created “You're Getting To Be A Habit With Me," “There Will Never Be Another You" and over two ...

David Berger & The Sultans of Swing at Birdland

by Budd Kopman
October 5, 2007

David Berger & The Sultans of Swing at BirdlandBirdlandNew York, NYSeptember 25, 2007 David Berger and his Sultans of Swing have a regular Tuesday gig at Birdland and recently have included vocalist Champian Fulton for some tunes in the set. Berger talked a bit about the music, and made the point that this band is not trying to recreate an historic style, but rather that this is the music he and ...

David Berger and the Sultans of Swing: The Harlem Nutcracker

by Budd Kopman
December 18, 2006

It is that time of year again, and David Berger's adaptation and extension of Duke Ellington/Billy Strayhorn's Harlem Nutcracker suite is one swinging way to enjoy music of this season. This release is a reissue of the original. The short story is that Berger, an expert on Ellington and a top notch transcriber, was asked to write ninety more minutes of music for a new show put together by the Donald Byrd Dance Foundation. The show toured ...

David Berger & The Sultans of Swing: Hindustan

by Elliott Simon
July 8, 2006

Recording a band in the studio during the peak of a tour can yield a session that reflects the synergy gained from repeated nights on the road. Hindustan is just such an occasion, capturing the breadth of this large, swinging aggregation on a varied program of standards and new music written especially for these players. The original opener, “Stompin' on a Riff, starts innocently enough as pianist Isaac Ben Ayala, bassist Dennis Irwin and drummer Jimmy Madison ...

David Berger & the Sultans of Swing: Hindustan

by Jack Bowers
May 21, 2006

David Berger not only leads a terrific band, he also has a wicked sense of humor. Hindustan, the fourth album by his intrepid Sultans of Swing, comes complete with a cover photo of camels being led by turbaned Bedouins across blazing desert sands as the sun sinks slowly in the west. So where was it recorded? In sweltering Malmo, Sweden, of course, during a Scandinavian tour last autumn.

Berger and the Sultans are throwbacks to a heady time when thousands ...

David Berger and the Sultans of Swing: Marlowe

by Jack Bowers
November 19, 2004

David Berger, an avowed admirer of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, writes, as Ellington and Strayhorn often did, music with a purpose, evocative themes that paint graphic sound pictures designed to summon a visceral response from his audience. And so it is with Berger's latest album, Marlowe, which consists of two suites--"Windows on the World," solemnizing the World Trade Center disaster of September 11, 2001, and its aftermath; and “Marlowe," consuming more than 38 of the album's nearly 62 minutes ...