Home » Search Center » Results: Jack Bowers
Results for "Jack Bowers"
Chad Lefkowitz-Brown and the Global Big Band: Open World
by Jack Bowers
There are times, thanks to the indestructible human spirit, when even the most horrendous scourge--say, a global pandemic that has claimed millions of lives in countries around the world--can lead to the occasional silver lining, a small yet persistent light at the end of a very dark tunnel. Case in point: Open World, a superlative new ...
Simply This Quintet: Stepping Up
by Jack Bowers
On its first full-length album, the modestly named Simply This Quintet boasts a sturdy two-tenor front line (Reginald Lewis, Matthew Storie) and an able rhythm section (Jesus Fuentes, piano; Emma Taylor, bass; Frank Kurtz, drums) performing eight original compositions by members of the group. The quintet was formed in 2018 by friends at the University of ...
Gemma Sherry: Music To Dream To
by Jack Bowers
Vocalist Gemma Sherry's fourth album, Music to Dream To, recorded in July 2020, closely follows her third, Let's Get Serious, released less than a year earlier. This latest album expresses Sherry's love for the music of South America in general and Brazilian bossa nova in particular, with half a dozen engaging songs that sway to an ...
Alon Farber Hagiga: Reflecting on Freedom
by Jack Bowers
Israeli saxophonist Alon Farber's Hagiga (in Yiddish, “celebration") is exactly that--a warm tribute to contemporary jazz from the Middle East to South America and beyond, ably performed on the group's fourth album, Reflecting on Freedom, by half a dozen well-schooled Israeli musicians and--on several of the album's nine tracks--special guest percussionist Rony Iwyrn and vocalist Sarai ...
Graham Dechter: Major Influence
by Jack Bowers
If you're a jazz guitarist who plans to record a quartet CD, you obviously want the most able and supportive rhythm section you can possibly find to lend its weight. For Los Angeles-based Graham Dechter, assembling such a peerless trio to enhance Major Influence, his third album as leader and first in nearly a decade, posed ...
Andy Farber and His Orchestra: Early Blue Evening
by Jack Bowers
Saxophonist Andy Farber's New York-based orchestra came together and cut its teeth as the onstage band for three hundred performances of After Midnight, a Broadway revue that paid tribute to Jazz Age nightclub luminaries from Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford and Count Basie to Harold Arlen, Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh. As one might presume from the ...
Dave Zinno Unisphere: Fetish
by Jack Bowers
Dave Zinno's New York-based Unisphere is a quintet/sometime sextet that is rhythmically sound, melodically smooth and anchored by his assertive bass lines. The group employs a splendid two-horn front line (tenor saxophonist Mike Tucker, trumpeter Eric Benny Bloom) and adds a third, trombonist/arranger Rafael Rocha, on the freewheeling closer, “Meu Fraco e Cafe Forte" (in English, ...
Gerry Eastman Trio: Trust Me
by Jack Bowers
Trust Me embodies more than an hour of tasteful contemporary jazz by a decisively hip guitar/organ/drums trio led by New York-bred Gerry Eastman on guitar with Greg Lewis at the Hammond B3 and Taru Alexander manning the drum set. The program consists of eight of Eastman's original compositions, each of which is polished and credible but ...
Jon Gordon: Stranger Than Fiction
by Jack Bowers
New York-bred alto saxophonist Jon Gordon has come a long way since he was hailed as something of a prodigy in the mid-1980s and earned first place in the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Saxophone Competition in 1996. The music performed by Gordon's nonet on Stranger Than Fiction, we are told, “reflects [his] realization that reality takes ...
Q'd Up: Going Places
by Jack Bowers
Q'd Up is a quintet comprising faculty members at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. The group's latest album, Going Places, marks the end of an era, as two of its longest-serving members—multi-instrumentalist Ray Smith and pianist Steve Lindeman--are indeed “going places." In other words, they are retiring and making their final recorded appearance with the ...
