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Frank Wess + Kenny Burrell
Some of the hippest small-group albums recorded in the mid-1950s were those by Frank Wess for Savoy. These include Flutes and Reeds (1955), Opus de Jazz (1955) led by Milt Jackson, North South East Wess (1956), Trombones & Flutes (1956), No Count led by Frank Foster, Jazz for Playboys (1957), Flute Suite and Jazz Is Busting ...
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Frank Wess
Born:
Frank Wess (born January 4, 1922 in Kansas City) is an American jazz musician, who has played saxophone (both alto and tenor) and flute.
He began with classical music and played in Oklahoma. He later switched to jazz on moving to Washington, D. C. and by nineteen was working in the Big Bands. His career would be interrupted during World War II although he did play with a military band in the period. On returning from service he joined Billy Eckstine's orchestra.
He returned to DC a few years after this and received a degree in flute at the city's Modern School Of Music. From 1953 he joined Count Basie's band, playing flute and tenor sax. He reverted to alto sax in the late '50s, and left Basie's band in 1964. From 1959 to 1964 he won Down Beat's critic poll for flute. Since then he has done a variety of TV shows and telethons. He was a member of Clark Terry's big band from 1967 into the '70s and played in the New York Quartet (with Roland Hanna). In the '80s and '90s, he worked with Kenny Barron, Rufus Reid, Buck Clayton, Benny Carter, Billy Taylor, Harry Edison, Mel Tormé, Ernestine Anderson, Louie Bellson, John Pizzarelli, Howard Alden, Dick Hyman, Byron Stripling, Jane Jarvis, Frank Vignola and was a featured member of the Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra.
Michael Weiss: Soul Journey
by Luke Seabright
Bebop is a complex craft, and like all crafts the only way to get any good at it is by learning from those who mastered it before you. Jamming through the night, getting on to that bandstand and firing away your best improvised lines, jousting with your partners (be they friends or strangers) like in the ...
Jay Thomas: We Always Knew
by Paul Rauch
Legacy is a fleeting notion. It is incomprehensible in real time when a career hits high points, when certain doors open to quantitative opportunity. Jay Thomas can tell you a thing or two about that, based on his own personal experience as a jazz artist over half a century. His story includes playing on the Seattle ...
A Family Feeling: Temple University Jazz Faculty Record New Music By Bruce Barth
In June, six members of Temple University’s noted jazz faculty gathered in Bunker Hill Studio in Brooklyn to record eight tracks of new music composed by Bruce Barth. Terell Stafford, director of Jazz Studies at Temple, lead the charge and the result, Family Feeling, is a reflection on the warm camaraderie between Terell Stafford (trumpet); Dick ...
Various Artists: Innerpeace: Rare Spiritual Funk And Jazz Gems
by Chris May
It took a few years for producer Bob Shad's newly formed Mainstream Records to nail its direction in the 1960s. A less than auspicious start was releasing the first singles by the latter-day Trump-boosting halfwit Ted Nugent. A better move, given hindsight, was releasing the debut album by Janis Joplin's Big Brother & The Holding Company. ...
Good Morning Blues
by Richard J Salvucci
Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie as told to Albert Murray William James Basie 399 Pages ISBN: 978-1-5179-0143-1 University of Minnesota Press 2016 (1985) In May 1959 Count Basie and his Orchestra played a “Breakfast Dance and Barbecue," like back in Kansas City, hosted by Roulette ...
A Conversation with Mike Mainieri
by Anthony Smith
The following is an excerpt from the chapter “A Conversation with Mike Mainieri" of Masters of the Vibes by Anthony Smith (Marimba Productions, 2017). So you've been working on a new project this week? Yes, just finishing some overdubs... it's a project I'm involved in with some friends, but I really can't ...
Highlights In Jazz 44th Anniversary Gala with Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks on Thursday, February 9, 2017 at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center
Jack Kleinsinger’s Highlights In Jazz, New York’s longest running jazz concert series, proudly kicks off it 45th season at 8:00 PM on Thursday, February 9, 2017 at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center of Borough of Manhattan Community College, 199 Chambers Street, NYC with The Highlights In Jazz 44th Anniversary Gala featuring the swinging jazz and blues ...
The Stan Kenton Legacy Orchestra: Storming Through the South
by Jack Bowers
First, three hearty cheers and a laurel wreath for trumpeter Mike Vax who has kept the splendid Stan Kenton Legacy Orchestra together (with some inescapable changes in personnel, not to mention name) for twenty-five years, supervised no less than eighteen annual road tours and produced half a dozen in-concert albums, the most recent of which, Storming ...
