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Mark Turner


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Mark played a great set this summer at The Newport Jazz Festival with the band, Fly.

He will be playing with Greg Osby's group next Saturday, September 25th at the culminating free outdoor concert of the Berklee Beantown Jazz Festival.

Massachusetts and Columbus Avenues, Boston, at 12noon.

Edited by stevebop
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Didn't find a thread which discusses the art of Mark Turner. So here we go ...

Any rumors that he is going to release a new album...

i haven't heard anything. but anything w/ him playing is always welcome.

I guess we're the only 2 who give a s**t.

nope: go see my two lonely posts in the "Live From Small's" thread in the Jazz Radio & Podcasts section (they're the last two posts in the thread) posted before this thread was started :)

Edited by thedwork
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I heard Turner last night at Jazz Gallery in a quartet with Avishai Cohen, Joe Martin and Marcus Gilmore. At times some of the tunes felt a little long - a little editing of the solos might have helped keep the listener focused - but overall a good night of music. I also had the extra treat of meeting our own Tom Marcello in person.

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One thing that hasn't been mentioned is the Lennie Tristano/Warne Marsh influence on Turner. He included a Tristano tune on his first Warner Bros. album, and he joins Lee Konitz on half of the latter's Parallels album. He sounds very good on Parallels, if more conservative than usual.

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Turner has always acknowledged that Marsh was an influence on his playing. There is actually a graduate thesis available on the internet by a California saxophonist titled "Saxophonist Mark Turner's Stylistic Assimilation of Warne Marsh and The Tristano School" that had some interesting discussion on the issue. By coincident, the final tune Turner played when I heard him last week was his composition "Lennie Groove", which I assume is dedicated to Tristano. Notwithstanding all that, to my ears Turner's playing today is not as audible revealing of the Marsh influence as it was at the time he recorded with Konitz or with the Konitz influenced alto Nat Su.

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  • 2 months later...

In retrospect, I'm not sure I "get" him. The Fly show I saw was good, but his soloing seems to lack fire. I just saw him last weekend with the Billy Hart Quartet and when it was his turn to solo, I found myself waiting for him to finish. He seemed pretty dis-engaged, too.

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In retrospect, I'm not sure I "get" him. The Fly show I saw was good, but his soloing seems to lack fire. I just saw him last weekend with the Billy Hart Quartet and when it was his turn to solo, I found myself waiting for him to finish. He seemed pretty dis-engaged, too.

His playing is certainly more "cerebral" than hard blowing or passionate and for that reason probably not as easy for many listeners to get into.

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  • 4 years later...

3.-turner.jpg

Heard this band in person in Chicago about six weeks ago and thought I was going to die of boredom. Turner and Cohen's solos sounded like (to borrow an old phrase from Bob Belden) second trumpet parts. I used to find Turner interesting at the time of "Dharma Days," but this stuff seemed to me like an alternate-world science fiction variant on the old "time but no changes" thing of the Miles-Shorter-Hancock-Carter-Williams quintet, but here it's more or less changes and time but with no resulting discernible (at least by me) sense of traction in either realm. At one point I thought that this lack of traction was the musical/rhetorical point, but if so, what was the point?

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