Miki Howard asked:


Introduction: After some 25 years, singer and actress Miki Howard continues to resonate passion and soul into music. With many years in the entertainment business, Miki’s latest CD, Private Collection makes the listener think of her and the CD content as similar to a collection of fine, developing wine. Aside from a string of Billboard R&B top rated singles, and success with nominations from Grammies, American Music Awards, Soul Train Music Awards and others, how many singers and actresses could pull off portraying the legendary Billy Holliday? Outside of Diana Ross, Miki Howard did to rave reviews in Spikes Lee’s highly acclaimed, Academy Award nominated 1990 masterpiece, Malcolm X.

Unlike the current ‘Soul Revival’ coming to the forefront from such new artists like, Amy Warehouse, Donnie, Rahassan Paterson, The Brand New Heavies, Gordon Chambers, Anthony Hamilton and others, Miki Howard not only brings a soul element to her vocal depth, but she also embodies jazz, blues and the best of today’s R&B, including the music coming singers likes of Alicia Keys and Fantasia, to name a few. This all stems from Miki’s early roots.

1960s: Born Alicia Michelle Howard in Chicago, Illinois, she is the daughter of gospel singer Josephine Howard of the legendary, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame group, The Caravans, and Clay Graham of the Pilgrim Jubilees. During her childhood in Chicago and Detroit, Howard met some of the best singers of the day when they visited her family. “It was nothing for me to see James Cleveland, Billy Preston, and Fats Domino in my house,” she said. “I was surrounded by music every day, so I knew I wanted to sing professionally someday.” Among Howard’s earliest influences were family friends Dinah Washington–to whom she would later be compared–and Aretha Franklin. Howard also counted Nina Simone, Shirley Basely, Lena Horne, and Judy Garland among her favorite vocalists.

1970s: Miki’s family moved to Los Angeles while she was in her early teens. Already aiming at a career in music, the 15-year-old Howard received her first break when she participated in a teen beauty contest. Augie Johnson, leader of the group Side Effect, happened to be in the audience; impressed with Howard’s singing talent, he introduced her to Wayne Henderson, who signed the teenager to a contract with his At Home Productions. Howard also joined the lineup of Side Effect in 1978. For the next couple of years, Howard continued to sing with the group and performed backup vocals as a studio singer for jazz great Stanley Turpentine, Wayne Henderson, Roy Ayers, Grover Washington, Jr., and Philip Bailey. Howard and Johnson also began a personal relationship that produced two children

1980s: Already in demand as a session vocalist, Howard also performed with Side Effect on comic deejay Rick Dees’ singles in the early 1980s, which she credits as the catalyst for her solo career. “It was my experience with Rick that made me want to go solo,” she recounted on the Peak Records website. “We performed at the L.A. Amphitheater and I saw the dressing room marked ‘Star’ and I was jealous and wanted my own room.”

As with so many other solo artist confined to the limitations of being in a group environment, Howard sought a solo recording contract, and around 1985, famed label Atlantic Records gave Miki Howard a life changing opportunity. She recorded her first solo album with Atlantic in 1986, Come Share My Love. Her first hit for Atlantic was the album title track, Billboard R&B top ten single “Come Share My Love, ” which peaked at number five. Miki followed that with her second hit, a remake of Glenn Miller’s 1940 tune “Imagination,” which she had to fight to include in her first album.

Howard’s second solo album, 1988’s Love Confessions, offered two R&B chart hits, the top-five hit “Baby Be Mine,” and the top-ten hit, “That’s What Love Is.” The latter was a duet with Gerald Leveret that reflected a real-life romance between the two singers that lasted until 1990.

Howard’s third solo album, Miki Howard, was released in 1989 and proved her most commercially successful to date. The single “Aren’t Nothing in the World” became Howard’s first number-one hit on the R&B charts, and another song, “Love under New Management,” followed it to number two. Although it was not her biggest hit, “Management” became one of Howard’s signature tunes.

1990s: Howard continued her successful solo career after switching to Giant Records in 1991. Her first single under her new contract, “Aren’t Nobody like You,” became Howard’s second number-one R&B hit. The subsequent album, 1992’s Femme Fatale, featured Howard’s renditions of classic tracks originally performed by Dinah Washington (“This Bitter Earth”) and Billie Holiday (“Good Morning Heartache”).

A casting director saw Miki perform some Billie Holiday tunes at a New York City concert at Radio City Music Hall, and offered her the above referenced role of Holiday in the nightclub scene of director Spike Lee’s 1992 epic film Malcolm X. The following year, Howard recorded an entire album of Holiday songs, titled Miki Sings Billie, including her favorite Billie tune, “Don’t Explain.” Outside of her acclaimed portrayal of Billie Holiday, other film credits have included working with such directors as John Singleton in his 1993 movie Poetic Justice with pop icon Janet Jackson.

After Miki’s relationship with Leveret ended, Miki had a brief marriage that produced another child. By 1993, the singer had finally extricated herself from that marriage, a disastrous marriage that had a damaging effect on her career. As she explained “I don’t want to go into details, but let’s just say events that occurred during that relationship left me with challenges in the industry. For instance, I remember I was about to sign with RCA Records and the deal fell through. That was a crushing blow. With all that was going on in my life at the time, I decided to ‘retire’ for a while to get myself together.”

During this period, Howard moved to Atlanta with her three children, where friends Chaka Khan, Cherelle, and Patti LaBelle comforted her in the aftermath of the divorce. Miki released Live Plus in 1996, and a comeback album of original material, Can’t Count Me Out, in 1997. She also toured in the road company of the Broadway musical Dream girls, playing the role of lead Dream, Deena.

By 1999, Howard was ready to revive her recording career in earnest. Miki says she simply contacted her managers and said, “I need to make a record.” “One of my co-managers at the time had started Peak Records so it was uncanny.” Howard continued, “I got a deal pretty quickly with the new label! Lots of my friends started coming out of the woodwork to give me songs and before we knew it, we had ten ready to go.”

2000s: Howard’s first album of original material in four years, Three Wishes, was released in 2001 to excellent reviews. The album earned a Grammy Award nomination for Best Traditional R&B Recording; although she lost out to Gladys Knight in that category, the nomination itself represented an artistic comeback for Howard. After 25 years in the music business, the singer was comfortable with her place in the industry and resigned to the compromises it demanded. In 2001 The Very Best of Miki Howard, including her top R&B hits from the late 1980s and early 1990s, was released on Rhino Records. An album on the Shanachie label, Pillow Talk: Miki Sings the Classics was released in 2006.

Discography: Miki Howard, a kid from the 1960’s, is a woman that has survived the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s. She is an artist with a persistent fan base, consistently awaiting new releases. The Discography that created her following includes a long list of hits: Come Share My Love 1986, Love Confessions 1987, Miki Howard 1989, Femme Fatale 1992, Miki Sings Billie 1994, Live Plus 1996, Can’t Count Me Out 1997, Three Wishes 2001, The Very Best Of Miki Howard 2001, Pillow Talk: Miki Sings The Classics 2006, and now Private Collection 2008.

Private Collection: Miki’s latest album, which was released in March 2008 on Branicka Records, is already causing a positive buzz. “Private Collection is the kind of record that you .live. to,” says Miki. “You play it in the car, play it while you clean your house, play it at cocktail parties that are the kind of record this is. The five standards that I did on this CD are five of my favorites. The five original co-written songs have a piece of me in them. That’s why I called this work Private Collection.”

Today: Times have changed and so have the opportunities. Recently, Howard signed a contract for a Reality TV show. On April 13th, Miki started a five-month world tour, stretching beyond the US to include Japan and South Africa. These and other changes in her life reflect the evolution of Ms Howard, again, similar to a fine wine, improving with time. Private Collection will not disappoint Miki’s fans, old and new, and will continue to build on the unbelievably solid legacy that is Miki Howard. It becomes obviously clear once one hears her .Private Collection that the best of Miki Howard is still to come.

Miki Howard,R & B,R & B Musician,Soul music,a famous jazz musician



Wilson

Jazz Goa asked:


HP- Tell us something about yourself.

CD- I’m a Mumbai goan looking forward to being a Goa goan very soon. I’ve reached two important milestones in my career. One is, after decades of playing everyone elses music i’ve development a style of my own and the biggest compliment I get these days is when someone recognizes my bassplaying on some tune they heard somewhere, they call up to confirm and..voila! The other milestone is probably every musicians dream, to produce music out of my own studio. A dream that will come true for me within this year when I setup my own state of the art studio in Sangolda. I’ve also setup an organisation called Jazz Goa with the help of fellow musicians and jazz enthusiasts in Goa.

HP- What drew you towards jazz?

CD- Jazz is a huge word, it should be spelt jjjaaaazzzzz! Seriously though, I think jazz is the most open, alive and evolving form of music that allows a musician to be him/herself. Most other forms of music demands a musician to follow trends and tradition or create stuff that’s currently hip. Whereas a jazz musician goes about his business listening, assimilating and finally innovating with yet another genre of jazz! We now have dixiland-jazz, swing-jazz, bebop-jazz, funk-jazz, rock-jazz, pop-jazz, fusion-jazz, latin-jazz, indo-jazz, mando-jazz… to cut a long story short, there’s a -jazz attached to every genre of music. And there will be a -jazz attached to every genre that comes along. I’m a musician who’s atracted to anything that looks, feels, smells, tastes and even sounds like music, so naturally I choose jazz as I get to play it ALL.

HP- What sets apart jazz music from other genres?

CD- Jazz is the only form of music that embraces all other forms and it is no longer American music. Today jazz can safely be called world music.

HP- What led you to become a jazz artiste?

CD- From amoung all the different genre’s of music I grew up listening to, for some reason it was always jazz that struck those extended chords within me. I could always hear the human and very often super human element in a jazz rendition.

HP- Your favourite jazz aristes/tracks.

CD- You’ll need to extend this interview by a few thousand pages to answer that. My all time favourite however was a bassplayer called Jaco Pastorius who revolutionised bassplaying taking bass right upfront, over, under and right through a song.

HP- To whom would you attribute your credentials as a jazz musician?

CD- To everyone i’ve worked with and everyone I would like to work with someday.

HP- Where and how did you train to be a jazz artiste?

CD- I have no formal training in music, I learnt music listening to other musicians, assimilating what I liked and using it consiously or subconsiously in performance until i developed a style of my own. Once I decided to play professionally though, I did study the technicalities through some great music books that are easily available these days.

HP- How do you prepare for a gig?

CD- I make sure there’s enough soda to go with the whisky…just kidding! It depends, if it is a concert where I would be performing my own compositions, I get the tunes composed, then get the band to rehearse and sound the way I heard it in my head. As it often turnsout, input from the rest of the band takes the tune to a dimension I would never have imagined. So you see, music is all about connecting and collaborating, don’t believe any of those fantastic one man bands. They’re faking it for monetary reasons, not that I have anything against it. All is fair in love, war and music.

HP- Talking about gigs, where and when did you first perform/how long have you been into jazz?

CD- Like most musicians I first got into music with school/college bands. I then graduated into fivestar hotel resident bands whose repertoire was made up mainly of jazz standards. I did that for ten years, playing music every night made me a musician.

HP- What is the jazz scene like in India, and Goa in particular?

CD- The jazz scene in India, Goa or anywhere in the world is the same. There’s a niche group of performers and listeners that grows all the time. Hopefully with jazz’s open armed evolution, it will grow into the global sound of music.

HP- What have been your highs and lows in your career thus far?

CD- The highs have always been the applause at the end of a track performed, the lows would be finding out that the applause was actually for the sixer Sachin hit on the big screen just besides the stage at Jazz by the Bay in Mumbai.

HP- How would you explain your role as a jazz musician in society?

CD- A jazz musician gives people a nicer high than some other interesting social highs.

HP- Define jazz.

CD- Jazz is improvised music. Sometimes structured, sometimes orchestrated, sometimes free of form and almost always, spontaneously created.

HP- Notable gigs/performances.

CD- The world reknowned Hennessey XO jazz tour has always been featuring jazz artistes signed by the American Blue Note label. Last year for the first time a jazz band outside the label, from far away India, was selected for this prestigious international tour. I was the bassplayer for that band. An unforgettable experience for sure. More recently my indo-jazz fusion band ‘The Brown Indian Band’ has been approached to open for Sting’s European tour this year. Fingers are crossed about that one.

HP- Collaborations with other musicians.

CD- I am contineously collaborating with musicians from all over the world thanks to the internet and my website http://www.hullocheck.com

HP- I understand you have been into different genres of music and worked with various ensembles. Tell us more.

CD- As I mentioned it before, when it comes to music I want it ALL. Name the genre and chances are, i’ve been there. You’ll find traces of just about every genre in my own music. There are very few musicians in the world today, who would match the number of bands and musicians I have worked with.

HP- Currently performing at…

CD- I currently perform on two resident contracts in Mumbai at the JW Marriott hotel in the afternoons and the Taj Lands End hotel in the nights. I also take timeoff from these two gigs to perform at concerts and corporate events in India and abroad. So that averages some sixty gigs a month!

HP- Your hobbies/interests…

CD- My main hobby and interest is my profession today. Everyone else works for a living, I play for mine. Someone once told me ‘All play and no work makes…makes me tick!’ Seriously though, I am very keen on improving the plight of most goan musicians in Goa. I was one sometime ago so I should know the raw deal most of them get. My plan is to set up Jazz Goa as an umbrella organisation for not just jazz but all the other immense artistic talent in Goa. To start with my studio in Sangolda will record and produce deserving artistes. Jazz Goa will then launch the best from there at a global level. Jazz Goa has already produced four audio CD’s and a DVD that is available in Goa exclusively at Vibes Music in Margao and online at http://www.jazzgoa.com



Zachary

Duane Shinn asked:


Jazz pianist Dave Brubeck is one of the stalwarts of jazz piano. His music is characterized by unusual time signatures and can be either extreme – totally dynamic or or completely relaxed. His most famous piece – Take Five – is so popular it has taken on almost cult status, and rightfully so.

David Warren Brubeck (aka Dave Brubeck)was born on the 6th of December, 1920. His thing for music came from his mother – an aspiring concert pianist who was formally taught. She used to take piano classes to supplement her income. Despite having such organized music at home, Dave Brubeck took to his own way of learning and playing the piano opting to create his own melodies. He purposely avoided a situation where he had to read music and play using his bad eyesight as an excuse.

When in college, it was discovered that he could not read written music. This caused for the professor in charge to take action and expel him but his other professors stood by the fact that despite his inability to read music, he had a good abilities when it came to counterpointing and harmony. Taking his case as an exception, it was decided that he be allowed to graduate from the institute promising to never teach piano.

Armed with a degree from the University Of The Pacific, he was drafted to join the army in 1942. During his service in the army, he met his future partner in music, saxaphonist Paul Desmond. While serving in the US Defence Forces, he played in a band which brought both fame and dislike to his musical stylings.

After almost four years serving in the Army, he went back to college and got himself enrolled in Mills College in Oakland, California. There he studied with the French composer Darius Milhaud who recognized his unusual talent for improvisation and uncommon rhythms.

Immediately after finishing his course in Mills College, he was signed to Fantasy Records in Berkeley California. He started singing with an octet and a trio which eventually became a quartet when Army pal Paul Desmond joined the group which originally included Cal Tjader and Ron Crotty.

Taking after his inclination to play music that was more unusual than not at the time, they recorded some music which didn’t have enough mass appeal to be a success which hence gave them very few gigs. After failing to draw in crowds, Dave Brubeck spent many years playing nothing but the opposite of what he had intended to when he started out playing jazz standards with the other members of the trio except Paul Desmond.

In 1951 after an almost fatal swimming accident, Dave formed his next group The Dave Brubeck Quartet – this time with Desmond in it. They were the house band for awhile at the Black hawk nightclub in San Francisco. The new quartet was very successful. They started touring college campuses and made a series of recordings including Jazz At Oberlin, Jazz Goes To College and Jazz Goes To Junior College.

The fame and success got Dave Brubeck space on the cover of Time Magazine – the only jazz musician to have the honor since Louis Armstrong. Sometime around the mid 1950’s one half of the group – two members Bob Bates and Joe Dodge – quit the group. They were replaced by Eugene Wright and Joe Morello. Eugene Wright’s presence in the band put the band on a black list for some venues since he he was a African American. Many concerts were called off because club owners were averse to having an African-American play in their premises.

Upon realizing that there were plans to not film Wright during a particular television show on which they were performing ,Dave canceled the appearance, winning praise from other musicians and many jazz critics. 1959 saw the release of Time Out which had the one quality of Dave Brubeck that he is known by today – unusual time signatures. Despite them not being in common time but instead in 5/4 time, the album was a hit and the album was soon certified platinum. When Dave plays Take Five at concerts, the audience almost always goes wild with applause.

Dave’s next act was a musical that he and his wife Iola wrote – a jazz musical based on the experiences that they had during an international tour on behalf of the US State Department. It had all the big names of the time – Louis Armstrong, Hendricks & Ross, Lambert and Carmen McRae. Later albums of the quartet include Time Further Out: Miro Reflections (1961), Countdown: Time in Outer Space,Time Changes and Time In. All these albums had iconic album covers by contemporary artists. They held a concert titled At Carnegie Hall in 1963 which was described as Dave Brubeck’s greatest concert, but 40 years later he is still playing great concert after great concert.



Leroy

Anirban Bhattacharya asked:


Jazz is the form of music, which has been getting bigger since its inception and Big Band, is a music ensemble, linked with jazz and developed over thirty years. The specialty of Big Band Jazz Music is its feet tapping rhythm, conducive to excite your heart beat. Jazz, Hip Hop, Rap, Soul, Funk, Rhythm and Blues fit in the famous music genres belonging to music umbrella of African Americans, with talented artists expressing themselves. Using their music heritage, they communicated their culture and the American Spirit

African American music based steeply on accent, as well as rhythm that fluctuates in relation with one another revolutionized the European music, which had been deeply rooted on melody. Big Band Jazz Music developed as a result of this merger in around 1898 leading to loose-structured, but unusual rendering of music that was all the rage using different distinctive playing techniques.

Big Band comprise of about 12-25 musicians. The rhythmic “call and response” of jazz music are made into rich music with its rhythmic segment including banjo, bass, vibes and piano, saxophones, trombones and trumpets.

Tools for Teaching Jazz

Teaching jazz is said to be among the most potent methods for learning it. The approach is to reduce fundamental principles to bare bones and teach it without adopting jargon usage. Inventing creative analogies that you come upon everyday is something jazz students can comprehend. This teaching process will aid in getting a deeper perception about intricacies of the subject and stay focused.

It assists in intensifying the comprehension of various aspects (for instance finger style, chords, scales, strumming, rhythms, slides, arpeggios) and numerous concepts and various techniques in Jazz making it much easier for students to pick it up.

Jazz Play Alongs

For jazz music lovers, even a musical idea implementation has got far reaching effect and makes them feel like in a groove. Now days, there are more and more Jazz Play Alongs like books, sheet music like guitar and piano sheet music, guitar scales, as well as tablature, songs sung by some popular artists and CDs with live band, where you get to play along to finish the music piece.



Austin

Akhila Choudhary asked:


Jazz enjoys a universal popularity. This form of music emerged in the beginning of the 20th century in the African- American community of the United States of America. The repetitive patterns of ‘call’ and ‘response’ define the jazz music. The various types of rhythm patterns that are prevalent in the jazz music are reggae, blues and the swing patterns.

A kind of musical assembly associated with the jazz music is known as the big band jazz music. This sort of ensemble can also be called as jazz band, jazz orchestra, jazz ensemble and dance band. However there is one primary difference between the big band jazz music and the other forms of jazz music. While the most of the jazz combos are highly improvised or and created spontaneously, the music that is played in the big bands jazz music is often arranged and prepared from before. In this form of music, the notations are notated on the sheet music in advance.

Started as an experimental form by the African slaves the jazz music attempted at combining the African folk culture with the American form of music. The most attractive fact about the jazz music that draws so many musicians to this form of music is its wide periphery that offers you to experiment with this musical pattern. The warm sound of jazz music also creates positive vibes in the mind of the listeners.

Nowadays, more and more people are getting attracted towards learning jazz music, particularly jazz guitar playing. If you wish to learn to play jazz guitar getting the apt guitar that has a distinctive jazz sound is very important. Of course jazz can be played on any kind of guitar, but the guitar with ‘f’ holes in its body, piezoelectric pickup and arched top are what gives a distinctive sound quality to the jazz music. In fact these guitar types give the warm and expressive feeling to the jazz music that this form of music is normally associated with.

To learn to play jazz guitar you need to listen to jazz music a lot. You have to have real passion fro this kind of music. Taking professional training or following online lessons can also help you to learn to play jazz music properly.



Mathew

sweepersan asked:

Jazz guitarist Bobby Broom and his trio play jazz straight up on their first live CD, “The Way I Play”.

Brent

Logan Young asked:


If you’re serious about learning to play jazz guitar, you will need to memorize a few standard tunes. Many people already know this, and the first place they head to is to a fakebook. They’ll try to learn some tunes that way and wonder why their playing ends up being rigid.

We don’t want to say that a fakebook isn’t a great tool, but there are other ways to learn that we would like you, as the jazz guitar player, to open yourself to. For example, you can always learn some of your favorite tunes by listening to them over and over and then learning to play them during your jazz guitar lessons or practice time.

- Hear the song. One way to learn a tune for your gypsy jazz guitar is to listen to a tune over and over. Keep listening to it until it becomes so embedded in your mind and heart that you’ve memorized the tune even when it isn’t playing on a CD. Doing this will help you replay the song and harmonize it in different chords and transitions.

- Once you’ve got the tune memorized, find the tune on your fretboard. If it helps, you might also consider hooking up jazz guitar amps to help you hear and give it a more “real play” feel to your practice. Sing the tune and try to figure out the notes going back and forth until you’ve learned the tune. Don’t be concerned about playing it in the right key, just be concerned with learning the play the tune. Remember to add in learning the chord changes and you might also want to add in your own substitutions for the tune.

As you’re learning to play jazz guitar this way, you’re also learning to hear the song and replay it on your jazz guitar. If you stick to the music sheets, you might find that you’ll have a harder time feeling the music and putting some “soul” into it.

While your play might be technically correct, it will still lack the essence of the song. You decided to become a jazz guitar player because you somehow connected with the music, not because you wanted to be a technically great player.

If you learn how to hear a song and then recreate it, you’ll be taking yourself through an important learning activity that sets the foundation for your improvisations and solos down the line. You see, you’ll need to learn how to hear the music naturally before you begin doing improvisations.

Imagine how you’d feel if you were able to learn a new tune this way. You’d feel pretty motivated to stick with your jazz guitar learning and you might even be inspired to delve deeper into the art of playing jazz guitar.



Louis

Victor Epand asked:


At first glance, a tenor guitar does not appear to differ greatly from a standard classical acoustic or electric guitar. The tenor’s shape is (usually) similar to the more standard models, and so is its size. Upon closer inspection, however, a careful observer will note that this instrument has only four strings, as opposed to the six usually sported by guitars. Such an observer will also notice that the tenor guitar is slightly smaller than its relatives. However, it is usually the musical genre that makes a tenor guitar easy to identify. These instruments are most commonly used as rhythm instruments in jazz and blues music

Although it is now quite hard to pinpoint when the very first tenor guitar was built, they appear to have been used by musicians for at least 100 years. Certainly tenor guitars have been around since first decade of the twentieth century, because published and dated instructional books for the tenor guitar from that era that still exist today. The roots of the tenor guitar may be traced to the tenor banjo, an instrument popular in the early 20th century for its suitability to the new style of music we now know as jazz. Accordingly, some of the earliest tenor guitars seem to have been produced by banjo manufacturers.

Companies began to produce tenor guitars in earnest toward the end of the 1920s, a trend that compliments popularity timeline of jazz music. Some such companies, such as National, Martin and Gibson, still exist today, but many have gone out of business or discontinued their tenor guitar lines. Although the six-string guitar eventually became the common instrument of choice for most guitarists, the tenor guitar has maintained a place in jazz and blues and can sometimes be heard in country, western swing and even pop music.

Tenor guitars can be either acoustic or electric. They are, as mentioned, are generally shaped like a standard guitar. However, the bodies of some instruments are pear-shaped, like a lute, or round, like a banjo. Both body types are probably throwbacks to the instrument’s roots. A tenor guitar is about 23 inches in length, approximately 3 inches shorter than the average six-string guitar. As for other guitar characteristics, the variety is broad: these instruments can be flat top, arch top, wooden, metal, hollow body or solid body. A true tenor guitar, however, always has four strings.

Today, the six-string guitar is still the most popular version of the instrument. However, tenor guitars have experienced a slight revival in recent years. Today, of course, they rather rare and can be difficult to acquire. Some companies still manufacture tenor guitars, such as Amistar in the Czech Republic, but private luthiers actually create many of the new tenor guitars. Such specialized guitars are made-to-order to the musician’s specifications. The other option, of course, is to hunt down a vintage tenor guitar. Up until the recent revival, such instruments were regarded as having little value. This situation, however, has now changed. Vintage tenor guitars, especially those in good condition, are now considered very valuable to both artists and collectors.



Agnes

Clyde Lee Dennis asked:


Standards is the latest Jazz CD put out by the highly talented Stanley Clarke who once again has delivered a brilliant collection of tracks. I’m confident Stanley Clarke fans, and Jazz fans alike will be pleased with this one.

This one literally grabs your attention right from the start with Lover Man and won’t let go until the very last note of the very last song We Three Kings, which is another great track by the way.

One of the nicer things about a CD like this is when the talent is this rich even if Jazz isn’t your favorite genre you still can’t help but appreciate the greatness of the artist.

Overall Standards is an outstanding release. What I call must have music. I give it two thumbs up and is most definitely a worthy addition to any Jazz collection. Truly an outstanding Jazz CD. One of those that is completely void of any wasted time, as each track is simply superb.

While this entire CD is outstanding some of my favorites are track 2 – Mack The Knife, track 11 – Christmas Time Is Here, and track 12 – We Three Kings

My Bonus Pick, and the one that got Sore [...as in "Stuck On REpeat"] is track 1 – Lover Man. Good stuff!

Standards Release Notes:

Stanley Clarke originally released Standards on August 15, 2006 on the Kind Of Blue label.

CD Track List Follows:

1. Lover Man – (with Stanley Clarke) 2. Mack The Knife – (with Stanley Clarke) 3. Salt Peanuts – (with Stanley Clarke) 4. I Mean You – (with Stanley Clarke) 5. Now’s The Time – (with Stanley Clarke) 6. Take Five – (with Stanley Clarke) 7. Jeru – (with Stanley Clarke) 8. Manteca – (with Stanley Clarke) 9. Oleo – (with Stanley Clarke) 10. Perdido – (with Stanley Clarke) 11. Christmas Time Is Here – (with Stanley Clarke) 12. We Three Kings – (with Stanley Clarke)

Stanley Clarke; Patrice Rushen; Ndugu Chancler. Recording information: Ocean Way, Hollywood, California (2001).



Hazel

Clyde Lee Dennis asked:


Little Johnny C is the latest Jazz CD put out by the highly talented Johnny Coles who once again has delivered a brilliant collection of tracks. I’m confident Johnny Coles fans, and Jazz fans alike will be pleased with this one.

It’s a rare day indeed that I get a CD from an artist that I can truthfully say does not have a bad track in the bunch. I’m more than happy to announce that’s exactly what I must say about this one. There simply is NOT a bad one in the bunch. No fillers here at all.

Jazz music fans will recognize some of the well known guests that have been assembled to play along with Coles on several of the tracks. Artists like Bob Cranshaw and Walter Perkins just to name a couple.

If you’re a Johnny Coles fan this is a CD your collection flat cannot be without. In fact, this is one of those CDs that you don’t even have to be a fan of Coles, or even Jazz to know is good. This is just good music. Period.

While this entire album is outstanding the truly standout tunes are track 4 – My Secret Passion, track 5 – Heavy Legs, and track 6 – So Sweet My Little Girl.

My Bonus Pick, and the one that got Sore [...as in "Stuck On REpeat"] is rack 1 – Little Johnny C. What a nice track!

Little Johnny C Release Notes:

Johnny Coles originally released Little Johnny C on February 15, 2005 on the Blue Note Records label.

CD Track List Follows:

1. Little Johnny C 2. Hobo Joe 3. Jano 4. My Secret Passion 5. Heavy Legs 6. So Sweet My Little Girl

Personnel: Johnny Coles (trumpet); Leo Wright (flute, alto saxophone); Joe Henderson (tenor saxophone); Duke Pearson (piano); Bob Cranshaw (double bass); Pete La Roca, Walter Perkins (drums).

Recording information: Van Gelder Studios, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey (7/18/1963); Van Gelder Studios, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey (8/9/1963).



Brodie