Saxophone • Clarinet
Michael Steinman was kind enough to record our recent recital of the Jon De Lucia Octet at the City College of New York. A few of my original arrangements along with Bill Holman and Dave Van Kriedt’s!
I am very excited to share an upcoming concert with you all. Over the last few years I have been collecting and transcribing music from the Lee Konitz Meets Jimmy Giuffre album, an album from 1959 that I’ve always loved. I have 5 of the 9 charts, and to augment I have a couple of my own arrangements along with some recent finds from the Library of Congress that I mentioned in my previous post about Gerry Mulligan. There aren’t that many recordings for 5 saxes and rhythm, so it’s been fun finding music to add to the rep. I have been fortunate to be in contact with Lee about this project, and we were even able to have a nice reading session up at City College this past spring. And through it all I’ve been talking and working with the great tenorist Ted Brown, who played on the original recording.
Ted will be our special guest for the upcoming concert at the Drawing Room in Downtown Brooklyn and I truly hope you can make it. Tickets are very limited, and you can get them here: Eventbrite. Please also check out the Facebook event: Jon De Lucia Octet. This will be a great intimate venue for this music, with a great band. I’ll be playing lead alto on this one, and on second we’ll have John Ludlow, a great young altoist and protege of Hal McKusick, who played on the original Giuffre/Lee recording. John actually plays the horn used on the recording! Tenors will be covered by the great Jay Rattman and Marc Schwartz, with Ted as guest soloist. Andrew Hadro joins us on bari. In the rhythm section I am honored to have Ray Gallon on piano, along with Aidan O’Donnell and the brilliant Steve Little on the drums.
The date is October 22nd, a Saturday evening. This is sure to be a special performance and I hope you will join us!
I will also mention that we have a little series going in October. Marc Schwartz’s Octet, in which I play tenor, will be at the Drawing Room the following weekend, on the 29th. Here’s his event listing: Facebook Event.
This has been quite the spring, finishing up my Masters here at City College in the next couple of weeks and having some amazing musical opportunities. I have yet to share on here a little bit of our reading session with Lee Konitz and Ted Brown, which we had at the College, playing the music of Jimmy Giuffre which they recorded in 1959. That experience, playing next to those guys on this music that I’ve listened to so much over the years, is hard to describe! We have yet to book a show for that group in the city but I hope to soon.
Today I just wanted to share Michael Steinman’s post covering my graduate recital a few weeks ago. Here is the link: Jazz Lives.
And here is one of the tunes we played. We were honored to have Steve Little on this, and Ray Gallon as well. Once I have finished my work here at the school I will return to this blog in earnest. Thanks for listening!
This is going to be a great show, we’ll be playing two sets, so please do come hang out. This is five days after our recording date, the band will be at its peak condition! Ibeam is a great space for listening, and we can all hit the bar afterwards. Come support our upcoming release and check out these great musicians who I’ve had the pleasure of playing with since I moved to the city but have never recorded as a band.