Author: JazzBariSax Curator, Andrew Hadro

Paul Nedzela’s debut album released today

As mentioned previously, Baritonist Paul Nedzela is releasing his debut album as a leader. Today, July 12th in fact. 

The album is simply titled, “Introducing Paul Nedzela”, and he’s brought in a great group of musicians to support him.

Paul was a student of the late Joe Temperley, and now holds the baritone chair in Wynton Marsalis’ Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. In this author’s opinion, Paul is one of the best baritone saxophonists out there. He gets some solo opportunities in the LJCO, but its great to see him have a chance to really showcase his writing, blowing and small group work.

I’ve only made it through the whole album once, but rest assured its going to stay in rotation. Paul has a beautiful sound, unique to him, but clearly influenced by the baritone greats. 

Use the links below to check out Paul’s album.

Lauren Sevian discusses her favorite baritone solos

JazzTimes.com has posted a nice article with baritone saxophonist, Lauren Sevian, in which she discusses some of her favorite and some of the most iconic baritone saxophone solos. They have even created a nice Spotify playlist so you can listen to everything referenced.

Lauren is of course well versed in all the different baritone saxophone recordings, and I think her list is an excellent one with quite a bit of variation and hitting a lot of the major solos. Definitely a great starting place for a young baritone saxophonist or someone interested in delving deeper in the deep saxophone.

Check out the full article:

Artist’s Choice: Lauren Sevian’s Favorite Baritone Sax Solos

Paul Nedzela releases single from upcoming album.

Paul Nedzela holds the baritone chair in the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. In between all of the rehearsing, performing, and traveling he’s managed to record his first album as a leader and has just released a single from it.

The full album will be released in July 12th. I’m looking forward to hearing it, and many of you should be too.

Head on over to read more about it and check out the single titled “Lisa”

https://www.outsideinmusic.com/artistsandreleases/2019/6/14/paul-nedzela-lisa

Video Interview with Pepper Adams

Check out this unique interview with Pepper Adams from 1977!

A fantastic chance to hear him speak – he even covers the reason behind his then recent departure from the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis band.

Thanks to Gary Carner of www.pepperadams.com for putting up the link for this. Gary has collected an incredible number of interviews (many audio only) with Pepper that you can check out here:
http://www.pepperadams.com/Interviews/index.html#

Have you met the Baritone Army?

Stefan Zeniuk is perhaps most known for wielding his creation, the Flame-O-Phone. He is also often part of various rock, and jazz groups in addition to many different types of unique performance art.

Stefan wrote an article for the Red Hook Brooklyn Based Star Revue paper for the 10th anniversary of his creation, the Baritone Army. They are known for bizarre and humorous appearances mostly around New York City but have expanded globally as well. One of their more extravagant projects are their videos “The Honking Dead” a baritone saxophone based parody of the popular show, “The Walking Dead”.

Check out his recent articles here.

New article in Downbeat from Josh Sinton

The NYC baritonist, Josh Sinton has an in-depth and informative article in the May 2019 edition of DownBeat magazine as part of the recurring ‘Reed School’ series. Josh goes into great detail about his work to expand his dynamic abilities and also about the inspiration for this endeavor, Harry Carney.

My own personal opinion is that with the under-appreciation and stereo-typing of the baritone saxophone, it is more often than not considered a loud instrument, but frankly it should have just as much of a dynamic range as any other woodwind. As such, I’m glad Josh has put this out into the world with a step by step account of how he’s approached working on dynamics.

Josh’s writing is very thorough but readable. I’d recommend that any baritone saxophonist looking to round out their abilities check out this article.

Celebrating 20 years on the internet!

A while back I wrote a post marking the 11th year that I have been in charge of this site. I refer to it as curating because a lot of the content on the site comes from and features other places on the internet. I also encourage fellow baritone saxophonists to submit and provide content as much as possible. Quite a bit of the biographical information on this site pre-dates my time at the helm.

According the venerable Way Back Machine, also known as the internet archive, the earliest incarnation of this site was captured on January 29th, 1999 – Exactly 20 years ago today! So happy birthday JazzBariSax.com!

For fun you can check out what the site looked like when it started:
https://web.archive.org/web/19990129031403/http://www.geocities.com/BourbonStreet/Delta/8586/

And here is what it looked like 11 years ago after I took it over and established it at the current domain, jazzbarisax.com:
https://web.archive.org/web/20091019002804/https://www.jazzbarisax.com/

The earliest I can remember visiting this website is sometime when I was in High School. I had great teachers, but I did not have access to a teacher that was a dedicated baritone saxophonist so this site really let me explore the world of the baritone, and I was thrilled to be able to take over and continue its work.

The site still receives hundreds of visits daily, and transcriptions from the repository have been downloaded over 200,000 times! I have been very gratified to learn and be told that many young baritone saxophonists enjoyed this site and learned about some of the greatest baritonists for the first time here. I don’t update daily or even weekly but I hope to keep this site alive, and available for all baritone saxophonists around the world to learn about the King of All Instruments.

Here’s to another 20 years,
Andrew Hadro
Curator, JazzBariSax.com

New musician directory online

Pianist Randy Halberstadt has created an ambition new project. It is a set of directories online for professional musicians. He has it divided into different categories, such as vocalists, bass players, brass players, wind players etc. Each listing includes contact info for as well as basic info such as instruments played, genres, skills etc.

The purpose of these directories is to allow people to find musicians for gigs (or subbing possibilities), to get contact info for musicians they already know, or any of the other host of reasons you’d want to find musicians in a new area. There is no cost to peruse or to join the directories, so if you’d like to do so feel free to check them out here:

https://randyhalberstadt.com/directories/

Larry Dickson releases fourth and final album in series

I have covered Larry Dickson’s first, second, and third, installments in his 4 album project that mirrors the seasons. Today I am happy to say I’ve had a chance to enjoy the latest one from his quartet titled, “Winter Horizons”.

Similar to all of the other albums this album is very well done. The playing on the album is great, but what always stands out to me is Larry’s choice of songs and arrangements. There is an especially nice arrangement on Well, You Needn’t. On this disc there is a balanced and enjoyable mix of originals, standards, Thelonious Monk songs, and even a less-known but very enjoyable Billy Taylor original. 

The format is again a  chordless quartet. Being familiar with the baritone saxophone one might immediately think of the Mulligan/Chet Baker quartet. But this album uses alto saxophone instead of trumpet. This instrumentation might lead you to remember the “Two of a Mind” album that Mulligan did with Paul Desmond, but that’s not really the feeling here either. Rick Van Matre has a more modern slightly edged alto sax sound that contrasts nicely with Larry’s more mellow rich sound.

Bravo to Larry Dickson for another tasteful and enjoyable album.
For those looking to get a copy please contact Larry directly.