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"Fans Get Lucky" [Thompson]- by Ron Hart
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.Here’s another of our promised blog features on Downbeat’s 2017 gifts-of-the-season recommendations.“Tenor saxophonist Lucky Thompson...
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"Jean-Pierre- Leloir's Photos Convey Admiration" - Bill Meyer
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.Here’s the last of our promised blog features on Downbeat’s 2017 gifts-of-the-season recommendations.“Photographer Jean-Pierre Leloir...
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Jo Stafford/ Jo + Jazz
© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.Jo Stafford, died on July 16, 2008, aged 90. She not only had one of the...
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Albert Murray - "Stomping The Blues" - 40th Anniversary Edition
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved."Murray is possessed of the poet's language, the novelist's sensibility, the essayist's clarity, the jazzman's imagination, the gospel singer's...
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Buddy DeFranco and Dave McKenna: Two for the Recording Studio
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.Along with the trumpet, the clarinet was the preeminent instrument of the Swing Era when some of the era's most popular bands were led by the...
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Shelly's Manne Hole [From The Archives]
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.Shelly's Manne Hole opened almost 60 years ago and closed the doors at its original site on Caheunga Blvd. in Hollywood, CA a little less than...
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Mundell Lowe - “Our Waltz”
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved. “Improvisers intimidated by the unhurried ballad’s unavoidable requirement to think often address the problem by doubling the established...
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Joe Pass: “Passalaqua - The Poet of the Guitar”
© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“His approach was characterized by great melodic facility, harmonic sophistication and a natural, easy command of swing, and the music he...
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Lambert Hendricks Ross – Everybody’s LHR
© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.It never ceased to amaze me then - and it continues to amaze me now - how many people, who know very little, if nothing, about Jazz are...
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Theodore "Fats" Navarro: 1923-1950 - A Career Retrospective
© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“Fats was a spectacular musician because, in a time when cats arrived on the scene with nothing, he came on with everything: he could...
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Jimmy Rowles: Sprinkling Jazz
© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“Long acknowledged as the favorite accompanist of every singer for whom he played, Rowles is an artist of consummate harmonic...
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Dave McKenna [1930-2008] - The Ted Panken Interview
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“Dave McKenna was simply one of the legends of the jazz piano. He, of course, would probably have disagreed. "I don't know if I qualify as a...
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Milt Hinton and The "New York Rhythm Section"
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.The following anecdote is drawn from Milt’s collection of stories and photographs as contained in Playing the Changes, which also contains a CD...
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Ella and Henry - Fitzgerald and Pleasants,That Is!
© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved."I never knew how good our songs were," Ira Gershwin once said to George T. Simon, "until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them."“And then...
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Jeru's Journey by Sanford Josephson - Four Appreciations
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.Jazz author Sanford Josephson “stopped by” the editorial offices of JazzProfiles recently and left off four reviews of his recent book Jeru’s...
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Pianist Eddie Higgins From Two Perpsectives
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.It recently came to the attention of the editorial staff at JazzProfiles that a friend of these pages is a huge Eddie Higgins fan. So we though...
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Serge Chaloff - 1923-1957: A Brief Remembrance by Rik van den Bergh and “The...
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“[Blue Serge – Dial LP 1012] …gave a vivid idea of the extent to which … [Chaloff] had absorbed Bird’s [Charlie Parker’s]… modern conception,...
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Carmen McRae – A Grande Dame of Jazz
© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“There's always a tigerish feel to her best vocals - no woman has ever sung in the Jazz idiom with quite such beguiling surliness as...
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Jazz and JFK by Steven Harris - Part 1
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.Steven D. Harris is the author of The Kenton Kronicles: A Biography of Modern America’s Man of Music, Stan Kenton. New and Used Hardcover and...
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Jazz & JFK by Steven Harris - Part 2
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.Steven D. Harris is the author of The Kenton Kronicles: A Biography of Modern America’s Man of Music, Stan Kenton. New and Used Hardcover and...
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