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About Benjamin Boone
Instrument: Saxophone
Related Articles | Concerts | Albums | Photos | Similar ToBenjamin Boone: Caught in the Rhythm
by Paul Rauch
The connection between poetry and jazz music is a delicate one. It has been documented so infrequently, in performance and recordings, that one still conjures the flicker of an image of Jack Kerouac reading in some dark Greenwich Village cafe with Steve Allen or Zoot Sims, surrounded by beret-wearing, cappuccino-sipping beatniks. The work of Fresno-based saxophonist Benjamin Boone has assisted in widening that view through four albums recorded for the Origin Records label, including the fourth, Caught in the Rhythm ...
read moreBenjamin Boone: The Poets Are Gathering
by Paul Rauch
Saxophonist Benjamin Boone continues his ambitious foray into jazz and poetry, this time recruiting an impressive cadre of poets for his aptly entitled release, The Poets are Gathering (Origin, 2020). The union of poetry and jazz has never been so powerfly presented, reflecting the past year of the worldwide Black Lives Matter movement, the universal role of the poet, and the power of art and voice to raise awareness and inspire change. The album employs the likes of US Poet ...
read moreBenjamin Boone: The Poetry of Jazz and the Ghanaian Connection
by Duncan Heining
So, Down Beat picks your record, The Poetry of Jazz, as one of its year-end top three. You put out a second volume, which is similarly well-received. Now here's the conundrum. Do you lock into the niche and follow up with more of the same? Or do you go for broke with that program masterpiece you always dreamed of? If you're saxophonist-composer Benjamin Boone, the answer's neither of the above. Instead, Boone has opted for a set with ...
read moreBenjamin Boone: Joy
by Chris M. Slawecki
Benjamin Boone's set with this band born and grown in Ghana is a genuine cross-cultural jazz Joy. The seeds of Joy were planted when composer-saxophonist Boone spent a year as a US Fulbright Scholar in Ghana in sabbatical from his professorship at California State University (Fresno), to study the country's music and musical traditions. The music Boone found made him feel at home: “These guys know American jazz inside and out--but with a definite Ghanaian twist," he explains. ...
read moreBenjamin Boone with the Ghana Jazz Collective: Joy
by Dan Bilawsky
When saxophonist Benjamin Boone took a sabbatical from his teaching position at California State University Fresno to travel to Ghana as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar, he envisioned a yearlong educational immersion in the music, arts and broader culture of the region. What he couldn't have imagined, which became reality, was connecting with a set of Accra-based musicians who would welcome him into the fold as a band mate. Eager to document this newfound partnership before he returned to America, Boone ...
read moreBenjamin Boone: The Poetry of Jazz
by Duncan Heining
Lenny Bruce might have skewered it with his skit, “Psychopathia Sexualis." Mike Myers' mildly misogynist poet might have parodied it in the movie I Married an Axe Murderer (1993). It has been dismissed as a late-fifties fad associated with the Beats. And, yet, the desire of poets and jazz musicians to combine their art forms has proven surprisingly durable. Sometimes, the practice is just plain embarrassing and made worse by the reality that those involved, like the man ...
read moreBenjamin Boone: The Poetry of Jazz
by Mark Corroto
Benjamin Boone's The Poetry Of Jazz could easily have been titled The Jazz of Poetry because of the almost interchangeable nature of the terms. The composer/saxophonist's vision to put music to the U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine's prose is a reminder to listeners that jazz was birthed by the common man, and is not to be kept in an ivory tower.Both professors at Cal State Fresno, Levine and Boone had performed together before, and the saxophonist had used ...
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