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

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 ...

Chuck Granata: On Sinatra, The Beach Boys, and Johnny Mandel

By NICHOLAS F. MONDELLO

Chuck Granata is a record and radio producer, author, music historian and archivist. He has written four books on music and sound recording: Sessions with Sinatra: Frank Sinatra and the Art of Recording (Chicago Review Press, A Capella Books, 1999), Wouldn't it be Nice: Brian Wilson and the Making of the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds (Chicago ...

Vince Mendoza: Streams of Influence Flowing into a River of Sound

By VICTOR L. SCHERMER

Vince Mendoza is a jazz composer, arranger, and conductor of consummate originality, skill, and adaptability, so much so that he has for several decades received frequent invitations and commissions from the whole gamut of ensembles and performers like the WDR Big Band, the Metropole Orkest in the Netherlands, the Los Angeles and Berlin Philharmonic, and the ...

Harry Allen With Rossano Sportiello At The Jazz Corner

By MARTIN MCFIE

Harry Allen with Rossano Sportiello The Jazz Corner Hilton Head Island, SCJanuary 10-11, 2019 At a certain point in a musician's career the shorthand of describing them as influenced by, or sounding like, this or that great player from the past becomes redundant--Harry Allen sounds like Harry Allen. His ...

Michael Zilber: East West / Music for Big Bands

By JACK BOWERS

On East West, his first-ever big-band enterprise, Canadian-born saxophonist Michael Zilber leads world-class ensembles in New York City and San Francisco, which speaks volumes about his artistry and gravitas. Zilber not only plays saxophone on both bands, he composed eight of the fourteen numbers on this handsome two-CD set and arranged all of them.

Never Forget to Say Thank You

By MARY FOSTER CONKLIN

This week we feature Grammy nominees and finalists from the Hot House/Jazzmobile NYC Readers Jazz Awards, a new release from Alice Ricciardi and Pietro Lussu, plus birthday shout outs to June Christy, Hoagy Carmichael, Johnny Mandel, Etta Jones, pianist Geoffrey Keezer and Michelle Ann May of Musique Noire, among others. Playlist Musique Noire “Pretty ...