Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify
Four-time Juno Award winner Neil Swainson was born and raised in the province of British Columbia, moving to his home base of Toronto in the late ‘70s. Over his career he’s recorded on albums with George Shearing, Jay McShann and Woody Shaw and performed with Diana Krall, Nancy Wilson, Mel Torme, James Moody, Lee Konitz and many others. Initially released in 1988, the bassist’s only album as a leader, “49th Parallel,” has now been made available again. It features a quintet with jazz legends Joe Henderson on tenor and trumpeter Woody Shaw, drummer Jerry Fuller and Gary Williamson on piano.
Los Angeles-based composer/arranger/orchestrator Jeremy Levy has co-led the Budman/Levy Jazz Orchestra since 2007, played lead trombone for the Brian Setzer Orchestra, and has been involved in the upper reaches of the film, TV and video game music industry for well over a decade. Looking to create an ambitious project for his own jazz orchestra, Levy was inspired to adapt Gustav Holst’s symphonic masterpiece, “The Planets,” while attending a performance at the Hollywood Bowl in 2017. The piece provided Levy with sweeping and dynamic materials to develop. In the hands of his elite colleagues from the L.A. studio and jazz scenes, Levy’s innovated arrangements are broad, bold and swinging.
Also this week, veteran Toronto-based drummer Joe Bowden mixes in a little funk with the jazz on “Roots—Tales of the Urban Yoda”;
“Bridges” is the long anticipated debut recording from saxophonist and composer Jesse Ryan, an eclectic offering that straddle both jazz and Afro-Caribbean traditions;
and drummer Bobby Wiens also offers up his first recording as a leader, “Talking Drums.”