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Big Bands: Another Bumper Crop
by Jack Bowers
With the end of the year peeking demurely over the horizon, it's a good time to glance over one's shoulder and concede that 2007 has yielded yet another bumper crop of big-band recordings. Yes, I am as puzzled as you are as to why this should be. After all, big bands, as we are told repeatedly, ...
Ken Poston's Big Band Showcase: You Had to Be There
by Jack Bowers
So what's it really like, inquiring minds often ask, to be present at one of Ken Poston's exhaustive (not to mention exhausting) big-band extravaganzas? Well, there are perhaps as many answers to the question as there are those who attend these semi-annual auditory marathons. Speaking for myself, by the end of Day 1 of the Poston/L.A. ...
Another August, Another Summit
by Jack Bowers
August has flown, and with it the seventh annual Prescott (AZ) Jazz Summit, one of a waning number of such events that isn't remiss in using the name “jazz in its title. There were no aberrations here, no rock, heavy metal, hip-hop, folk or country music masquerading as jazz, only straight-ahead blowing by a number of ...
Jazz Festival At A Distance
by Jack Bowers
The second annual New Mexico Jazz Festival has come and gone, and I blush to admit that I was totally uninvolved. This year's headliner was saxophonist Sonny Rollins, and as I've never been a big fan, I decided not to attend either of his performances, at the Lensic Theatre in Santa Fe and the Kiva Auditorium ...
RIP Buddy Childers
by Jack Bowers
His given name was Marion, but to friends, family and admirers around the world Marion Childers was known simply as Buddy--entirely appropriate, as Buddy Childers was a friend to everyone he met. When Buddy was twelve years old, to keep a trumpet that was given to his father by his mother but lay unused in a ...
Swingin' Into Spring, Poston-Style
by Jack Bowers
There's a line in the old popular song “Casey Would Waltz with the Strawberry Blonde that says “his brain was so loaded it nearly exploded . . . Having run the latest Ken Poston/Los Angeles Jazz Institute-sponsored marathon in Los Angeles, billed as Swing Into Spring, I can understand how Casey must have felt. The morning-noon-evening ...
RIP Tommy Newsom
by Jack Bowers
Big bands lost a true and loyal friend when Tommy Newsom died April 28 of liver and bladder cancer at age seventy-eight. Newsom, who gained a measure of fame as the butt of host Johnny Carson's jokes on The Tonight Show about his presumably drab personality and outfits to match, was a superb saxophonist and arranger ...
Oscar and Song: Here's to the "Losers"
by Jack Bowers
As Betty and I listened last month to a program of George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Duke Ellington, Scott Joplin, Ferde Grofé and others presented by the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra, I thought to myself that American popular music--I'm talkin' Tin Pan Alley, folks, not the dreck that passes for “popular these days--has to be ...
Fedchock Brightens Albuquerque Jazz Festival
by Jack Bowers
Albuquerque held its annual Jazz Festival in February. The format was the same as it has been for the past several years: performances by high school and middle school bands on Thursday and Friday, with a concert Saturday evening (February 17) at the downtown KiMo Theatre featuring the Albuquerque Jazz Orchestra and this year's guest artist, ...
Dave Umemoto: Farewell, Good Friend
by Jack Bowers
Even as the loveliest rose is destined to wither and die, so the stoutest heart must one day fail. Even so, the news that Dave Umemoto's generous heart had suddenly stopped beating sometime during the evening of January 2-3 came as a shock to his many friends, admirers and fellow jazz enthusiasts in California, across the ...
