Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify.
Throughout the past 40 years, Antonio Adolfo has had a very busy career as a pianist, composer and arranger. Born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, his teachers included Eumir Deodato and Nadia Boulanger. Adolfo has worked with such major singers as Elis Regina, Flora Purim and Milton Nascimento and has recorded more than 25 albums as a leader. He has long considered it a major goal to someday record an album with a larger ensemble, a big band with a full understanding of both Brazilian music and jazz. “Encontros—Orquestra Atlantica” is the realization of that dream. After having seen a performance in Rio by Orquestra Atlantica, a Brazilian orchestra founded in 2012, Adolfo invited the group to be a major part of his new recording. The result is an exciting set comprised of nine of his originals plus Miles Davis’ “Milestones.” The inventive arrangements mix together the sound of big band jazz with such Brazilian styles as samba, bossa nova, baiao, frevo, and the afoxe.
When saxophonist Cory Weeds gets an idea for a project and decides to pursue it, chances are it’s going to happen. Case in point: “Explosion” by the Cory Weeds Little Big Band. The idea to form a little big band—so named because there are eleven musicians in the ensemble and not 16 or 17, the typical number in big band—came to Weeds after he looked at the liner notes for two classic albums he hugely admires by the Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis Big Band (“Trane Whistle”) and Gene Ammons (“Late Hour Special”). He was shocked to see that neither tenor-led recording from the early 1960s used a full big band, yet both have an impactful big band sound. Weeds curated a dream lineup of top players from Vancouver, Edmonton and New York, and was equally ambitious in commissioning two of Vancouver’s best big band arrangers—Jill Townshend and her husband Bill Coon—to create the charts.
Also this week, “Nightconcert” is a never-before-released performance by the Erroll Garner Trio from 1964 at the Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.
The Scott Gwinnell Jazz Orchestra delves into the compositions of the late pianist Mulgrew Miller with “Mulgrew-ology”.
Drummer Bobby Sanabria and his Multiverse Big Band present a new treatment of a timeless Leonard Bernstein masterpiece with “West Side Story Reimagined.”