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Clifford Brown and Max Roach: "Alone Together - The Best of The Mercury Years"
© -Steven Cerra. Copyright protected; all rights reserved.“Alone Together, it should be made clear, consists of one CD of Brownie material (much of it with Roach) and one CD of somewhat later Roach...
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Stan Kenton by Bill Gottlieb
© - Steven A. Cerra - copyright protected; all rights reserved.Stan Kenton and Marion "Buddy" Childers photographed through a fractured mirror to suggest the shattering effect of the Kenton hand's...
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Chet Baker Big Band
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.Given the myriad recordings that Chet Baker appeared on during his forty year career, it not surprising that Chet Baker Big Band [Pacific Jazz...
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Charlie Mariano - A Rememberance
© -Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“I don’t know any Jazzman who has as good a sense of melodic development in his solos as Charlie. The lines he finds! And he’s so warm.”-...
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Shelly Manne and His Men Play Peter Gunn
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.The following posting is brimming with nostalgia.It begins with my fondness for anything and everything to do with Henry “Hank” Mancini’s music...
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Commodore Records: A Tribute to Milt Gabler and a Look at Wild Bill Davison
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“Commodore was founded in 1938 as an offshoot at a legendary min-Manhattan Jazz record store. It was one of the first and best examples of a...
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Dizzy Gillespie - The Immortal Joker Parts 1-3, Complete
© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved."Jazz is a music full of thrilling sounds," he writes. "It can also span the full breadth of human emotion from exhilaration to profound...
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Chet Baker - "The Musician Magazine Interview" by Jerome Reece
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.Musician Magazine was in circulation from about 1976 to 1999 and, given the time frame, it published fewer features on Jazz relative to the...
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Clark Terry - An Appreciation
© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“Virtuosity means different things to different people. Musicians worship it when they encounter it because they understand its elusive...
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Max Roach - Masterful, Magisterial and Momentous
© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“Where Kenny Clarke's bombs occurred every few measures, Roach's fall every two to four beats ... Where Clarke played just an occasional...
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Elmo Hope: A Jazz Composer Of Significance
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“… Hope had a strong gift for melody, enunciating themes very clearly, and was comfortable enough with classical music to introduce elements of...
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Hoagy Sings Carmichael With The Pacific Jazzmen
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.Hoagy Sings Carmichael With The Pacific Jazzmen [Pacific Jazz CD 0777 7 46862 2 8] has sat in my collection for a long time, but I never knew...
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The Swinging Guitar of Howard Roberts The Swinging Guitar of Howard Roberts
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“In his prime, Howard Roberts played on more than 900 studio dates annually and recorded the hippest guitar records of the era. His legion of...
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"How Lester Young Altered the Course of Music" by John Edward Hasse
© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.Bob Cooper, Richie Kamuca, Bill Holman, Bill Perkins, Jimmy Giuffre, Bob Hardaway, Gary LeFebvre, Med Flory, Pete Christlieb, Warne Marsh,...
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"Big Band Jazz - Look to the Colleges" by Stan Kenton
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“My satisfaction comes from this. When I was a kid, there were so many things you wondered about that you couldn't possibly get from your music...
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Mel Lewis - A "Signature Drummer" - An Interview with Loren Schoenberg
© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.Over the years, I’ve seen and heard Mel Lewis play in a variety of settings.Night after night, I’d run around town to listen to him play...
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Jive for Five: The Bill Holman - Mel Lewis Quintet
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.Andex Records was one of those boutique labels that popped up now and then to produce a few Jazz recordings by up and coming Jazz artists. In...
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"Mel Lewis: The View from the Back of the Band" - The Chris Smith Biography
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“Mel showed me at that time, what a drummer is capable of doing as far as being integrated as an inescapable component of the arrangement as a...
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The Origins of The Jazz Institute
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.I remember Richard Gehman as one of the busiest writers on the literary magazine scene in the 1950s with his articles appearing in The Atlantic...
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The Case for Hoagy Carmichael by Richard Sudhalter
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved."Play me a Hoagy Carmichael song and I hear the banging of a screen door and the whine of an outboard motor on a lake — sounds of summer in a...
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