Results for "Johnny Mandel"

Johnny Mandel

The eventful career of Johnny Mandel is grounded by a thorough background in music that has resulted in his being acclaimed in the pantheon of American composers, arrangers, record producers and songwriters. His is a career that has had both duration and substance and continues to flourish. He was born in New York City. At the age of 12, he was playing the trumpet and beginning to write big band arrangements. After graduating from New York Military Academy, where he had received a band scholarship, he immediately went on the road working in the Catskill Mountains at various resort hotels. He then joined the orchestra of the legendary violinist Joe Venuti

2020: The Year in Jazz

By KEN FRANCKLING

The COVID-19 pandemic put the jazz world in a tailspin, just like the world at large, in 2020. And there is plenty of uncertainty going into the new year about what “new normal: might emerge from the darkness. International Jazz Day, like so many other things, became an online virtual event this time around. Pianist Keith ...

Closing Out the Year 2020 With New Releases Plus A Remembrance Of Departed Artists

By MARY FOSTER CONKLIN

Our year end broadcast features new releases from Paola Prestini & Magos Herrera, Lezlie Harrison and Sue Maskaleris with birthday shoutouts to pianists Janice Friedman, Una Mae Carlisle, vocalists Chris McNulty, Katie Bull, Edith Piaf and saxophonist Camille Thurman. Also remembering the many musicians who left us in 2020. Thanks for listening and please support the ...

Scott Whitfield & Friends: A Bi-Coastal Christmas

By JACK BOWERS

If trombonist Scott Whitfield's A Bi-Coastal Christmas cannot quicken your inner holiday spirit, that will not be for lack of trying. Whitfield uses every ribbon in the packet and every tool in the shed to help make the season bright, from big band to quintet, from duo to solo (Whitfield's trombone all by itself). Two of ...

Vanessa Perica: Love is a Temporary Madness

By JACK BOWERS

Even as the year 2020 has slid ignobly into the dustbin of history, music-lovers have been buoyed by a number of encouraging signs that the future of big-band jazz is in capable hands. While splendid recordings by old hands Mike Barone, Steve Spiegl, Mark Masters and Maria Schneider have helped keep the flame burning brightly, their ...

Susie Meissner: I Wish I Knew

By JACK BOWERS

I wish I knew why the talented Philadelphia-based singer Susie Meissner chose to open her salute to the Great American Songbook with the only tune on the album that doesn't really qualify: Curtis Lewis' “The Great City." It's not a bad song but Cole Porter or Johnny Mandel it ain't. On the bright side, Meissner recovers ...

Sex & Drugs & Jazz & Jive: Top Ten Stash Records Albums

By CHRIS MAY

With all the transgressive flair you would expect of bohemian New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, Bernie Brightman's Stash Records made its name with a hugely entertaining series of sex and drugs-themed compilations of swing-era recordings. The first was Reefer Songs in 1976. But Brightman's legacy extends much further. There was a finite amount ...

Cory Weeds Quartet: Day By Day

By JACK BOWERS

At a time when classic jazz seems fractured and flying off in a hundred or more separate directions, it is comforting to encounter sessions like this one, a superlative quartet date led by alto saxophonist and Renaissance man Cory Weeds, and featuring David Hazeltine, one of the more proficient and enterprising pianists on the scene. Day ...