Results for "Tom Matta"

Tom Matta

Metropolitan Jazz Octet

Active since: 2014

The Metropolitan Jazz Octet (MJO) is the reawakening of a group that started in the 1950’s by Chicago saxophonist and arranger Tom Hilliard. 

From 1950 through mid-'80s Hilliard wrote many of the octets compositions. He worked with Chicago’s top arrangers and studio musicians expanding the library to 150-plus charts. In 1959 MJO recorded an album on the Argo label called “The Legend of Bix,” a tribute to 1920's great cornetist and composer Bix Beiderbecke. 

As a professor at De Paul University School of Music, Hilliard taught three current members of MJO to whom he bequeathed his complete library, passing the torch to the next generation. 

New Standard Jazz Orchestra: Waltz About Nothing

by Jack Bowers
May 3, 2022

Since trumpeter Rob Parton's superlative JazzTech Big Band left the scene more than a decade ago, Chicagoans have been left to wonder when, or even if, another ensemble of that caliber would arrive to fill the void left by its departure. In 2020, their hopes were realized with the formation of the New Standard Jazz Orchestra, ...

New Standard Jazz Orchestra: Waltz About Nothing

by Jack Bowers
July 3, 2016

Any orchestra that professes to establish a new standard had better be able to back that up. Happily for the listener, on its debut recording, Waltz About Nothing, Chicago's New Standard Jazz Orchestra can--and does. In a little more than two years, the NSJO has arisen as a worthy successor to one of the more exemplary ...

Standards

By Tom Matta

Label: Self Produced
Released: 2015
Track listing: A Fine Romance; A Night in Tunisia; Tuffy; Short Story; Somewhere; Movin’ Wes, Part 1; It Never Entered My Mind; I Get a Kick Out of You.

Tom Matta Big Band: Standards

by Jack Bowers
December 26, 2015

What's in a name? After all, a big-band jazz album by any other name would sound the same. On the other hand, it should be pointed out that as the versatile Tom Matta has chosen the name Standards to define his second album as leader of the Chicago-based Tom Matta Big Band, only three of the ...