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"The Great Gillespie" - Whitney Balliett
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.This blog has always been as much about Jazz writings as it has been about the music and its makers.For if it is true that Jazz can’t be taught...
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Riverside Records – Orrin Keepnews
“When Orrin Keepnews, the Grammy Award-winning jazz-record producer, writer and reissue master, was growing up in New York in the "30s and "40s, a teenager -- for the cost of a beer or two, when the...
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The L.A. Network Plays Dave Brubeck
© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.What follows is a writing that was commissioned to serve as an annotation for the Dave Brubeck Redux Project by Fidelio...
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Michael Brecker - The Koninklijk Conservatorium [Den Haag] Interview 3.21.2004
© -Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“His work as a session-man has polished his style into something superbly confident and muscular, a Coltrane without the questing inner...
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Stan Kenton at Newport
© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.The first time I met Stan Kenton was in 1959 when I was in a big band that played the Hollywood Palladium as part of an annual...
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Rahsaan Roland Kirk – The Ineffable
© -Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“… Rahsaan Roland Kirk … [used] circus like multi-instrument playing to foment his own version of an improvisational revolution.”- Don...
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Ray Bryant
© -Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“Bryant is a major and often unsung player of bebop piano with blues and gospel never far away. … Noted for an imaginative and influential...
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Nick Brignola: Roaring and Soaring on Baritone Saxophone
© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“He favored the big side of the horn, playing a hard-bop vocabulary with great power and command.… his virtues are a great sound, great...
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Benny Goodman Combos
© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“Benny Goodman recorded prolifically throughout the great part of his more than six-decade career. The list of musicians with whom Goodman...
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Jazz Impressions of Dave Brubeck
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.Dave Brubeck had an immensely successful career as a Jazz musician, but it was never a certain thing. He was based in San Francisco so he...
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Roach, Blakey and P.J. Jones, Inc - Whitney Balliett
© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.In the 18th and 19th centuries and even into the early 20th century, British civil servants [to think of them as bureaucrats would be a...
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Bobby Troup – Stars of Jazz
© - Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“About Bobby Troup...He sang as though he had just half a voice. No volume, it was all about confiding. Sometimes he croaked out a line,...
View ArticleBilly and Pete - "Raincheck"
Tenor saxophonist Pete Christlieb performing Billy Strayhorn's "Raincheck" as arranged by Rob Pronk for The Metropole Orchestra as conducted by John Clayton.
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Jimmy Smith – Breaking New Ground
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.The late Frank Wolff, Alfred Lion's partner in Blue Note, wrote, "I first heard Jimmy at Small's Paradisein January of 1956. It was his first...
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Dave Brubeck A Life in Time - Philip Clark
© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.“I was interested in investigating how one aspect of his life illuminated another against the panorama of American history; and if...
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