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"Modern Sounds," or: Running a Marathon in Full Body Armor
by Jack Bowers
From October 19-25 Betty and I were at the Los Angeles Marriott Airport Hotel to attend Modern Sounds, the L.A. Jazz Institute's four-day salute to West Coast jazz, followed by a day-long tribute to Stan Kenton on the hundredth anniversary of the legendary bandleader's birth. We arrived a day early to be primed and ready for ...
BuJazzO: That's German for Swinging Big Band Jazz
by Jack Bowers
On August 8, my friend Wes Pfarner and I drove to Santa Fe for a once-in-a lifetime event: a performance by the German Federal Youth Jazz Orchestra, better known to big band enthusiasts by its more condensed and colorful name, BuJazzO. The twenty-piece ensemble, directed by Jiggs Whigham, an American trombonist and educator from Cleveland, Ohio, ...
Big Band Jazz: It's Not Just for Guys Anymore
by Jack Bowers
Back in the early '90s, Stanley Kay, one-time back-up drummer for the incomparable Buddy Rich, later a manager of such artists as Maurice Hines, Michelle Lee and Paul Burke and the entertainment director for the New York Yankees, had a good idea: the time had come, he reasoned, to assemble an all-woman big band that would ...
Jack's Gone! No He Isn't; Yes He Is; No He Isn't...!
by Jack Bowers
As I sat down to write this month's column, word came that trumpeter Jack Sheldon had died. No sooner had I written a few words about that when word came that trumpeter Jack Sheldon had not died. After some back-and-forth on the internet (is he or isn't he?), the last report, it seems, was the true ...
Gold Medalists Abound at Big Band Olympics
by Jack Bowers
As this is being written, Betty and I are just back from a ten-day visit to California, the first six days of which would be of absolutely no interest to readers of this column. The last four, however, were spent at the Los Angeles Airport Marriott Hotel attending the L.A. Jazz Institute's “Big Band Olympics," which ...
Ed Puddick Big Band / Frank Macchia / Rick Wald NY 16
by Jack Bowers
Ed Puddick Big Band Guys & Dolls Diving Duck Records 2010 The late Frank Loesser wrote at least 700 songs, more than a dozen of which are included in the score for the smash musical Guys and Dolls, which, believe it or not, opened on Broadway more than sixty years ...
Shorty Rogers: Portrait of Shorty
As modern as Stan Kenton was in 1950, he wasn't modern enough for Shorty Rogers. Rogers, like many members of Kenton's band at the time, was a big fan of Count Basie and his orchestra's dynamic ability to swing hard. While Kenton was obsessed with modern classical music in 1950, Rogers and others like Bud Shank, ...
Ed Puddick Big Band: Guys and Dolls
by Robert J. Robbins
In the hands of the twenty-something bandleader and arranger Ed Puddick and his equally young, London-based seventeen-piece ensemble, Frank Loesser's classic Broadway score joins the ranks of those which have been adapted for big band (Stan Kenton's West Side Story, Les Brown's South Pacific, and Ted Heath's The Sound of Music all come to mind). Puddick's ...
These Are a Few of My Favorite....Charts
by Jack Bowers
Whenever the topic of desert islands arises among jazz fans, the focus is invariably on which albums (discs) one would choose to cram into a suitcase if one were ever stranded on an otherwise barren island. While the consideration of particular arrangements seldom governs the debate, I really think it should. After all, few albums, however ...
Goin' Up: Space Age Jazz
Playing your bass in outer space? Getting some Martians to groove to a West Coast beat? Landing your orchestra on a distant planet? This week on Night Lights it's “Space Age Jazz"—the story of how some 1950s and 60s jazz adventurers were influenced by the Cold War race for space, with music from Duke Ellington, Sun ...
