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Herwig Gradischnig
Barbara Bruckmüller Jazz Orchestra, feat. Aruán Ortiz: A Chain of Moments
by Artur Moral
Julio Cortázar's Rayuela (1963), Chris Ware's Building Stories (2012), and Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000) are novels--both written and graphic--that stand out, not just for their literary merit, but also for the various ways readers can engage with them. A similar phenomenon occurs on the listening level with A Chain Of Moments: Suite in Five Movements, the ambitious project by jny: Vienna-born pianist, composer and bandleader Barbara Bruckmüller. This was likely not her original intention when, ...
Continue ReadingPeter Erskine: Vienna to Hollywood: Impressions of E.W. Korngold & Max Steiner
by Jack Bowers
From Vienna to Hollywood is versatile drummer Peter Erskine's ardent homage to the (mostly) film music of the renowned Academy Award-winning Viennese composers Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner, who wrote some of filmdom's most memorable themes during Hollywood's Golden Age in the decades from 1930 to 1960. To transpose their film scores to the jazz genre, Erskine uses a talented group of performers from Vienna's JAM Music Lab University (where he serves as artist-in-residence), supplanted on two numbers by ...
Continue ReadingPeter Erskine & The JAM Music Lab All-Stars: Vienna to Hollywood
by Peter Erskine
Hollywood called... ...and Max Steiner was the first of this dynamic duo to answer, arriving there in 1929, initially working for the RKO Studios as an orchestrator and then as a composer. This was not his first affiliation with Hollywood, however; he functioned as Fox Studio's musical director, adding live music to silent films presented in New York theaters where he had already established himself on Broadway. The call to come west must have triggered an urge as primal as ...
Continue ReadingJim Rotondi: Finesse
by Jack Bowers
Finesse is trumpeter Jim Rotondi's ninth recording as a leader but his first using a full orchestra including strings. The band and string section are from Austria, where Rotondi presently lives, performs, and teaches, and each one is quite good. As for Rotondi, besides playing superb trumpet--open or muted--he wrote every song on the album save for two brief “introductory" pieces by Jakob Helling who was the arranger on every number. As if that many instruments weren't ...
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March of the Merry Men
From: Vienna to Hollywood:...By Herwig Gradischnig
