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Marching to a Jazz Tempo
by Jack Bowers
March came in like a lion in Albuquerque with no less than four blue-chip jazz concerts in the first five days, three of which I attended, passing on the first (the Charlie Christian Project featuring guitarist Michael Anthony and trumpeter Bobby Shew at The Outpost Performance Space) because Betty and I had seen basically the same ...
The AJO: Alive and Swinging at Thirty
by Jack Bowers
The Albuquerque Jazz Orchestra, which had been missing in action for the past several months, returned to combat with a flourish to open its thirtieth year as a unit on February 18, 2012, crowning the annual two-day Albuquerque Jazz Festival with a spellbinding concert performance that featured guest artist Alan Pasqua, an excellent pianist who doubles ...
Bob Brookmeyer: Jack of All Trades, Master of Valves
by Jack Bowers
Bob Brookmeyer, a Renaissance man among jazz musicians who died December 15, 2011, four days before his eighty-second birthday, will be remembered as many things: composer, arranger, musician, educator, outspoken arbiter who brooked no nonsense and wasn't shy about letting others know when he believed they were not giving the music he loved the best they ...
SuperSax Me
by Jack Bowers
Back in the early 1970s bassist Buddy Clark and saxophonist Med Flory conceived a brilliant idea: to form a group (primarily a reed section with rhythm) that would use orchestrated arrangements of saxophonist Charlie Parker's transcendent bop solos as the basis for its music. As for a name, nothing less than SuperSax would suffice. The nine-piece ...
Catching Up
by Jack Bowers
As our most recent column was devoted exclusively to the Ken Poston / LAJI event, “Modern Sounds," held October 20-24 at the Los Angeles Marriott Airport Hotel, and to the day-long tribute to bandleader Stan Kenton on the hundredth anniversary of his birth that followed, a number of substantive items slipped through the cracks. Before they ...
"Modern Sounds," or: Running a Marathon in Full Body Armor
by Jack Bowers
From October 19-25 Betty and I were at the Los Angeles Marriott Airport Hotel to attend Modern Sounds, the L.A. Jazz Institute's four-day salute to West Coast jazz, followed by a day-long tribute to Stan Kenton on the hundredth anniversary of the legendary bandleader's birth. We arrived a day early to be primed and ready for ...
Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho, It's Off To Jazz We Go . . .
by Jack Bowers
Just west of Albuquerque, across the Rio Grande River, lies the picturesque village of Corrales (population around 7,500). Among its residents (and natural resources) is world-renowned jazz trumpeter Bobby Shew. With a musician of his caliber within arm's reach, it would have been imprudent not to call upon him to take part in the village's Music ...
BuJazzO: That's German for Swinging Big Band Jazz
by Jack Bowers
On August 8, my friend Wes Pfarner and I drove to Santa Fe for a once-in-a lifetime event: a performance by the German Federal Youth Jazz Orchestra, better known to big band enthusiasts by its more condensed and colorful name, BuJazzO. The twenty-piece ensemble, directed by Jiggs Whigham, an American trombonist and educator from Cleveland, Ohio, ...
Big Band Jazz: It's Not Just for Guys Anymore
by Jack Bowers
Back in the early '90s, Stanley Kay, one-time back-up drummer for the incomparable Buddy Rich, later a manager of such artists as Maurice Hines, Michelle Lee and Paul Burke and the entertainment director for the New York Yankees, had a good idea: the time had come, he reasoned, to assemble an all-woman big band that would ...
Jack's Gone! No He Isn't; Yes He Is; No He Isn't...!
by Jack Bowers
As I sat down to write this month's column, word came that trumpeter Jack Sheldon had died. No sooner had I written a few words about that when word came that trumpeter Jack Sheldon had not died. After some back-and-forth on the internet (is he or isn't he?), the last report, it seems, was the true ...
