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The Glenn Miller Years - Part 2
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“Miller led one of the most popular and best-remembered dance bands of the swing era. In his lifetime he was seen as an intense, ambitious...
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The Glenn Miller Years - Part 3
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“Popular music can evoke a sense of time and place as powerfully as a home movie or an old newspaper. It is the soundtrack to our lives and...
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The Glenn Miller Years - Part 4
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“OF ALL the outstanding popular dance bands, the one that evokes the most memories of how wonderfully romantic it all was, the one whose music...
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The Glenn Miller Years - Part 5
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“The phenomenal popular success of Glenn Miller and his orchestra, beginning in 1939, became one of the great legends of American popular...
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The Glenn Miller Years - Part 6
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“The kind of mass success Miller had can only be achieved with a music which is both simple and single-mindedly distinctive, reduced to an...
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The Glenn Miller Years - Part 7
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“Miller continued to expand the string section until it stabilized at twenty. It was superb. He could never have had such a section or such an...
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DICK OATTS/MATS HOLMQUIST NEW YORK JAZZ ORCHESTRA "A TRIBUTE TO HERBIE+1"
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.On A TRIBUTE TO HERBIE+1 which was released on February 5, 2016 on Summit/MAMA Records - [MAA-1049] - one of the most distinguished...
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A Jazz Teacher for the Ages
A Jazz Teacher for the AgesDavid Baker helped lead the way for the acceptance of jazz in American higher education.By JOHN EDWARD HASSEApril 11, 2016 Edition of the Wall Street JournalDavid Baker, who...
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New From Resonance Records
A Non-Profit Jazz Label With a Mission.Devoted to Preserving Jazz and Discovering the Rising Stars of Tomorrow. Resonance Records Proudly Presents: BILL EVANS Some Other Time:The Lost Session...
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Tubby Hayes - "England's Late Jazz Great" [From the Archives]
© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved."I'm basically an evangelist," Vic Hall told The Tampa Tribune in 1993. "I'm trying to spread the word about jazz, but it's in a gentle...
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Freddie Redd - The Thespian [From The Archives]
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“Freddie Redd has an endless imagination for melody.”- Mabel Fraser, Jazz author“Freddie Redd is a real master of melody. He has a lot more to...
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Bill Evans - The Secret Sessions [From the Archives]
© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.As I have often remarked, this blog is as much about shining what Howard Rumsey, the late bassist and bandleader, referred to as “the solo...
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Brilliant Bill... Kirchner, That Is! [From the Archives]
© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.Bill Kirchner’s distinctive approach to Jazz became even more unique on October 7, 2014 when he was joined by pianist Carlton Holmes,...
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JAZZ VIBES: Three Eras By DON DeMICHEAL
© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“The vibraphone invites overplaying almost by its very nature. … Unlike a horn player, the vibraphonist is unable to sustain notes for...
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New Jazz Conceptions - When George Russell Met Bill Evans
© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.Clarinetist Tony Scott provided Bill Evans with much late-fifties club work in New York. Scott had also landed a recording contract with...
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George Russell - The 1986 Jazz Journal International Interview
© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.As regular readers of the blog may have noticed, mine is not an interactive blog. Or, to put it another way, I don’t place a lot of...
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Jazz Composition: What is It? - Martin Williams
© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved."I want to be a composer-arranger, because when you play, you can only express one idea at a time. When you write, you can say it all."-...
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Jane Ira Bloom - Early Americans
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.Crystalline beauty - I never thought I would use this phrase in describing the sound that comes from a soprano sax - but that’s exactly what...
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LALO = BRILLIANCE By GENE LEES
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.Thanks to his work as a Jazz composer, movie score writer for many of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry films and writer of a series of TV themes...
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The Forgotten Ones - Leo Parker by Gordon Jack
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.The following feature first appeared in the November 2015 edition of JazzJournal. You can locate more information about the magazine by going...
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