Kelly Bucheger

When I was a kid I played those LPs to dust -- I couldn't get enough of Bruce and Ferdinand Povel. It was nice to finally see it out on CD. Bruce has some great stories about that date...

No it don't! You should just get a big Play button -- hit that puppy and it plays! The little "Get Widget" blurb is only an ad for bloggers who want the same widget on their own blog...

I've just finished my final recording session with my group Harder Bop, with Bruce Johnstone as a special guest. Here is his feature, short & sweet -- this is an unmixed session tape, and it already sounds, if I may say so myself, pretty damn great, dagnabbit! THIS is why I wanted Bruce to play on my record... If you wonder what Bruce is sounding like these days, check it out, on my blog: A Simple Wish, featuring Bruce Johnstone

Chicago School tenor players are the folks who studied with Captain Walter Dyett at DuSable High: Gene Ammons, Johnny Griffin, Clifford Jordan, John Gilmore, Von Freeman, et al. I think there are some shared affinities in their playing -- in particular a cry in the tenor's upper register. Texas Tenors include big-toned players like Buddy Tate, Arnett Cobb, Illinois Jacquet, Booker Ervin, Fathead Newman, and Dewey Redman. Me too. For what it's worth, I did something along these lines for Irv Williams, a Twin Cities tenor player receiving a Jazz Master's Award from Arts Midwest. The asked me to put together a chart showing where Irv "fit in." The chart is obviously Irv-centric, and a graphic designer had his way with it before it made its way to print, but here's a scan that gives some broad info along these lines: Indeed! Grossman started out almost entirely Trane-influenced, without any discernible Newk in there at all. And then, somehow, in the '80s or '90s, he started to *really* channel late-50s Sonny ... so that you'd be hearing something that almost sounded like outtakes from Sonny Rollins Live in Stockholm 1959. Except that Steve would be "doing" Sonny but then would interject crazed Trane-changes passages. It was weird and exhilarating...

(Hi Organissimo! After posting this topic at the Sax On The Web forum, someone there suggested I check out this forum, and that it might be worthy thread fodder here...) Houston Person is coming to Buffalo at the end of October, and I've been asked to have a pre-concert "conversation" (the gig's at an art gallery, so they do this sort of thing) about where HP fits into the "Boss Tenor" tradition. Which has gotten me thinking about The Jazz Tenor in general -- it seems to me the tenor *more than any other instrument in jazz* has been codified into distinct "classes": the Chicago school, Texas tenors, Boss tenors, etc., based mainly on similarities in sound and phrasing. Moreover, categorizing tenors started early in the music's history: not long after Coleman Hawkins "invented" THE jazz tenor approach, ditching slap tonguing and pairing his big sound with aspects of Louis Armstrong's phrasing, Lester Young came along with more melodic lines, and softer tone and phrasing. And once those approaches were recognized, every subsequent tenor player was weighed and measured to see if he was a Hawkins guy or a Young guy. Meanwhile, emerging from these 2 main branches were the regional schools mentioned above: the Chicago school and the Texas Tenors, along with groups of players who shared certain traits and affinities, like the Boss Tenors. (I seem to remember Dave Liebman, just slightly tongue in cheek, putting himself in the Brooklyn Jews school, with Steve Grossman and Bob Berg, and with Philly-born Michael Brecker as a later "honorary" member...) Anyways, I'd love to hear from anyone who has any thoughts about this admittedly geeky subject area in jazz history. What other "tenor schools" are out there (like those California guys: Dexter most prominent among them...)? Anyone disagree with my notion that no other jazz instrument has been quite so "codified" as the tenor? What "schools" are out there for other instruments?