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Backgrounder: 'Ella Swings Lightly'
One of my favorite Ella Fitzgerald albums is Ella Swings Lightly. Recorded for Verve in November 1958, the album was arranged by Marty Paich and features his Dek-tette backing Ella on a bright batch of songs outside the realm of her tiresome American songbook fare. The all-star Hollywood 10 included Don Fagerquist and Al Porcino (tp), ...
Virgil Gonsalves: Sextet and Big Band
We tend to think of West Coast jazz as a style centered exclusively in Los Angeles. While much of the relaxed, contrapuntal sound did evolve in the suburbs of the city in the 1950s, San Francisco also had a West Coast sound that was slightly more intensive. Artists who emerged from the San Francisco jazz experience ...
Herb Geller: 1962 Paris Sessions
In early 1958, alto saxophonist Herb Geller was having a hard year, a period that would only grow darker with catastrophe that fall. Up until then, he had it all. Starting in 1949, Herb had a meteoric career as a band and bop ensemble player. His orchestral work in the late 1940s and very early 1950s ...
Recreating a Famed Bossa Rehearsal
As a Brazilian teenager and guitarist in the late 1950s, Nara Leão befriended many of the singer-songwriters pioneering the bossa nova in Rio de Janeiro. These musicians included Roberto Menescal, Carlos Lyra, Ronaldo Bôscoli, João Gilberto, Vinicius de Moraes and Antônio Carlos Jobim. Employed at hotels as musicians along the Copacabana beachfront, these musicians were often ...
One of the Best Sassy Videos Ever
Last week, Nelson Porto in Brazil sent along a link to a Sarah Vaughan video that I hadn't seen before. To me, it's by far one of the finest live videos of Sassy on stage in the second half of her career. It's a duet with Wilson Simonal, who is little known outside of Brazil but ...
Horace Silver on 'Soul!'
In the late 1960s and early '70s, PBS aired Soul!, a performance and variety TV program that showcased Black music, dance and literature. In January 1972, Soul! featured Horace Silver with vocalists Andy and Salome Bey, trumpeter Lee Morgan and flutist Bobbi Humphrey. Also included were Harold Mabern, Jymie Merritt, Billy Harper, Bob Cranshaw and Cecil ...
Interview: Dave Stryker, 'As We Are'
If there was an upside to the pre-vaccine pandemic of 2020-2021, it's that creative artists had solitary time to think about the road forward. For guitarist Dave Stryker, that period of confinement resulted in As We Are (Strikezone), a fascinating new album recorded in January 2022, featuring a jazz quartet backed by an inventive string quartet. ...
Gabe Baltazar (1929-2022)
Gabe Baltazar, a Hawaiian-born Asian-American clarinetist, flutist and alto saxophonist with a Charlie Parker sound who was a member of the Stan Kenton Orchestra starting in 1960, died on June 12. He was 92. A clarinetist as a child, Baltazar later switched to alto saxophone as his main instrument. During a visit to New York in ...
Take Five with Clemens Grassmann
by AAJ Staff
Meet Clemens Grassmann Berlin-born, Brooklyn-based drummer, percussionist, composer and educator Clemens Grassmann has collaborated across the U.S. and internationally, releasing multiple recordings as a leader, including Grass Machine (self released, 2022). Recipient of the 2015 Armand Zildjian Percussion Award, Grassmann's genre-defiant aesthetic stretches across generations and unites listeners of every sonic prerogative. Grassmann's compositions ...
Backgrounder: 'Bossa'
Continuing with my Backgrounder series, today I decided to share with you the 1966 Brazilian album entitled Bossa, by the Conjunto Copacabana Bossa, or the Copacabana Bossa Set. Produced and arranged by gutiarist Paulo Tito (above), the group included members of the Banzo Trio—Nelson Racy (p), Ditinho (b) and Howard França (d) as well as an ...
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