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Lester Young
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Lester "Prez" Young was one of the giants of the tenor saxophone. He was the greatest improviser between Coleman Hawkins and Louis Armstrong of the 1920s and Charlie Parker in the 1940s. From the beginning, he set out to be different: He had his own lingo; In the Forties, he grew his hair out. The other tenor players held their saxophones upright in front of them, so Young held his out to the side, kind of like a flute (see picture above). Then, there was the way he played: Hawkins played around harmonic runs. He played flurries of notes and had a HUGE tone that the other tenor players of the day emulated. Young used a softer tone that resulted In a soft, light sound (if you didn't know better, you would think the two were playing different instruments). Young used less notes and slurred notes together, creating more melodic solos. He played the ordinary in an extraordinary way, using a lot of subtleties to produce music that Billie Holiday said flips you out of your seat with surprise.
Ronnie Cuber: Baritone Boss
by Mark McKergow
Ronnie Cuber (1941-2022) made his mark on the jazz world as a versatile and muscular baritone saxophonist. Born in New York on Christmas Day 1941, he started on tenor saxophone but switched to baritone at 17, attracted by the vacant chair in Marshall Brown's Newport Jazz Youth Band (which also featured lifelong colleagues Eddie Gomez and Michael ...
Percy France: Live from the West End
by Daniel Gould
If you know Percy France, most likely you are a fan of “greasy" organ jazz, particularly on Blue Note Records during their classic era. He was an integral part of Jimmy Smith's Home Cookin' (1959) and Freddie Roach's Down to Earth (1962). Or perhaps you came to jazz through r&b acts like the Bill Doggett combo. The ...
Alan Greenspan, 1926–2026: The Reedman Who Conducted the Economy
by Kofi Adjepong-Boateng
He kept the clarinet. Sixty years after he last played for money, the central banker still had the instrument from his dance-band days; when a television crew trooped in, he turned it over in his hands but would not play it, remembering too well how it was supposed to sound. Alan Greenspan, who died ...
Take Five with Clarinetist Davide Sgarra
by AAJ Staff
Meet Davide SgarraDavide Sgarra is an Italian jazz clarinetist and saxophonist based in Brooklyn, New York. Born and raised near Varese in northern Italy, he went on to earn his Bachelor of Music from the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague in the Netherlands and his Master of Music from Manhattan School of Music in New York ...
In Circuses and Carnivals, Sideshows Brought Black Music To The Heartland
by Arthur R George
Black musicians in circus and carnival sideshow bands from the late 1800s well into the Twentieth Century brought ragtime and what would become jazz and rhythm and blues to white audiences deep into Midwest agricultural regions. Trumpeter Lester Bowie, later known for the avant-garde Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), ...
Miles Davis: Ascenseur pour l'Échafaud
by Jack Kenny
A legend has grown up around the music Miles Davis created for Louis Malle's debut film Lift to the Scaffold (Ascenseur pour l'échafaud). The story goes that Davis arrived at the Paris studio having never seen the film. He watched the rushes once, then improvised as the footage rolled with his European quintet--René Urtreger on piano, ...
Davidsson: A Lifeline from the Land of Fire and Ice
by Dean Nardi
Icelandic artist Thorleifur Gaukur Davidsson grew up on a volcanic island called Heimaey, four miles off the coast of Iceland. He records by his Swedish patronymic surname, meaning “son of David." His debut album Lifelines (OPIA, 2024) is filled with memories and emotions culled from family and the natural beauty of his home island. Davidsson took ...
Carlos Nathaniel Ward: libertà, spiritualità e rigore
by Gaetano Fiore
“Arte e Jazz? Non facile e acritica gestualità ma concentrato di analitica ponderatezza". In occasione di un mio omaggio pittorico espositivo a Bill Dixon a San Vincenzo (LI) nel 2010, Libero Farnè scrive la suddetta frase che ben fa riflettere su quanto sia importante procedere con “lentezza" per tradurre i concetti di libertà, spiritualità ...
Fred Hersch: The Touch of Genius
by Ken Dryden
The sound of Fred Hersch at the piano is so distinctive, a couple of bars is usually enough to identify him. The mainly self-taught Cincinnati native excelled early, playing jazz in his home town before leaving to study with pianist Jaki Byard at the New England Conservatory of Music. From there, Fred moved to New York ...
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