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The Mats Holmquist Big Bad Band: A Tribute to Chick Corea
by Jack Bowers
Chick Corea has been one of the jazz world’s most prolific and influential composers for more than three decades, and the best one can say about this impressive salute by Mats Holmquist’s Stockholm-based Big Bad Band is that his music has seldom sounded more enchanting. I don’t know if Corea has heard this, but if he ...
The DVC Night Jazz Band: Featuring Toshiko Akiyoshi
by Jack Bowers
The DVC above stands for Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hills, CA. DVC is quite proud of its Jazz Studies program, as well it should be with more than five hundred students helping to support four big bands, four smaller combos, three vocal groups, a summer clinic supervised by master educator Jamey Aebersold, and classes and ...
The Rob McConnell Tentet: Music of the Twenties
by Jack Bowers
To anyone who may be wondering why Rob McConnell would devote an entire album to music that is almost eight decades old, all I can say is, “listen.” Not only don’t they write ‘em like that anymore, they almost never play ‘em this way either. Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Victor Herbert, ...
Nils Lindberg: A Christmas Cantata
by Jack Bowers
Another year, another Christmas album that arrives on the doorstep in January. Too bad, really, as composer/arranger/pianist Nils Lindberg's Christmas Cantata is an immaculately conceived treatise that blends music based on biblical passages with traditional English, French, Welsh and Swedish carols and songs into an iridescent medley that invigorates, inspires and swings in equal measure. Lindberg's ...
The Riverside Community College Jazz Ensemble: Upside Out
by Jack Bowers
This album covers several years (exactly how many is unclear) in the life of the Riverside Community College Jazz Ensemble (and a trio, heard on three of the nine tracks). Charlie Richard, who directs the band and combo, has done a splendid job in bringing them along, as witness the ensemble’s first-place honors in every competitive ...
Phil Nimmons: Vintage Nimmons 'n Nine: CDB Air Checks 1959-64
by Jack Bowers
By the time the programs from which these air checks are taken were heard via the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, composer / arranger / bandleader / clarinetist Phil Nimmons was well–known in that country, having started his career with the CBC in the early 1940s and begun a twenty–year run of regular Jazz broadcasts in 1957. Even ...
The Dave Stevens Big Band: Sound Storm
by Jack Bowers
This is the first album by Dave Stevens’ surprisingly proficient Pennsylvania-based big band; the hope here is that it won’t be the last. The intention, when the band got together in September ’02 at Mercyhurst College in Erie, PA, was to piece together a concise demo for supporters and prospective sponsors within arm’s length of its ...
Don Scaletta and the Jazz Project: Stan Kenton Salute
by Jack Bowers
Although at 34:12 the Jazz Project’s salute to the incomparable Stan Kenton is one of the briefest I’ve heard, it is otherwise first-class all the way. Pianist Don Scaletta’s Florida-based band is quite good, and there are times when I was almost convinced that this was no re-creation but the powerful Kenton orchestra come alive again. ...
The Jim Widner Big Band: Flying High...
by Jack Bowers
Something was bothering me as I listened to “Juba,” the adrenalizing opening track on the fourth and most recent album by bassist Jim Widner’s world-class big band. It was Phil DeGreg’s piano. Not the comping—Phil’s too capable for that—but the piano itself, unusually clanky and far too prominent in the mix. Rather than chaperoning quietly in ...
The Jill Townsend Big Band: Tales from the Sea
by Jack Bowers
This is what makes reviewing such an adventure. Just when one thinks he may have heard it all, a new big band comes out of nowhere—well, out of Vancouver, British Columbia, actually—to prove that he hasn’t, that there’s always something new under the sun, and that there’s almost nothing more rewarding than the thrill of discovering ...
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