Jazz Legend Benny Golson Live at The Jazz Station!

Location

The Jazz Station

Approved

No showings at this time.

The Jazz Station is honored to present the Benny Golson Quartet. The band will include the outstanding pianist Mike LeDonne, the amazing bassist Ray Drummond, and Portland's powerhouse drummer Mel Brown!

(http://www.bennygolson.com/).

We will present two shows at 7:30 and 9:30 pm. Advance tickets sales will begin in early February.

Jazz legend Benny Golson is a renowned composer and saxophonist who has performed in the bands of world famous Benny Goodman, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Earl Bostic and Art Blakey.

Benny Golson has made major contributions to the world of jazz with such jazz standards as:

Killer Joe, I Remember Clifford, Along Came Betty, Stablemates Whisper Not, Blues March, Five Spot After Dark, Are you Real?

Benny Golson is the only living jazz artist to have written 8 standards for jazz repertoire. These jazz standards have found their way into countless recordings internationally over the years and are still being recorded.

He has recorded over 30 albums for many recording companies in the United States and Europe under his own name and innumerable ones with other major artists. A prodigious writer, Golson has written well over 300 compositions.

For more than 50 years, Golson has enjoyed an illustrious, musical career in which he has not only made scores of recordings but has also composed and arranged music for:

Count Basie, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Sammy Davis Jr., Mama Cass Elliott, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Shirley Horn, David Jones and the Monkees, Quincy Jones, Peggy Lee, Carmen McRae, Anita O'Day, Itzhak Perlman, Oscar Peterson, Lou Rawls, Mickey Rooney, Diana Ross, The Animals (Eric Burden), Mel Torme, George Shearing, Dusty Springfield

His prolific writing includes scores for hit TV series and films:

M*A*S*H, Mannix, Mission Impossible, Mod Squad, Room 222, Run for Your Life,

The Partridge Family, The Academy Awards, The Karen Valentine Show, Television specials for ABC, CBS and NBC Television specials for BBC in London and Copenhagen, Denmark Theme for Bill Cosby's last TV show, A french film 'Des Femmes Disparaissent” (Paris)

He has written music for national radio and television spots for some of the major advertising agencies in the country. Some of these commercials were for:

Borateem, Canada Dry, Carnation, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Clorox, Dodge, General Telephone, Gillette, Heinz Foods, Jack in The Box, Liquid Plum'r, MacDonald's, Mattel Toys, Monsanto, Nissan, Ohrbachs, Ore-Ida Frozen Potatoes, Parliament Cigarettes, Pepsi Cola, Texaco

Benny Golson has absolute mastery of the jazz medium. He has not only blazed a trail in the world of jazz but is passionate abuot teaching jazz to young and old alike. He has lectured at the Lincoln Center through a special series by Wynton Marsalis. He has lectured to doctoral candidates at New York University and to the faculty at National University at San Diego.

Honored with doctorates from William Paterson College, Wayne, NJ and Berklee School of Music, Boston, MA, Dr. Golson has also conducted workshops and clinics at:

Appalachian University, Boone, NC Berklee School fo Music, Boston, MA Eastman School of Music, Rochester, NY Howard University, Washington, DC Julliard School of Music, New York, NY Manhattan School of Music, New York, NY New England Conservatory Paris Conservatory, Paris, France Rutgers University, New Orleans, LA Stanford University, Stanford, CA University of Denver, Denver, CO University of Idaho, Moscow, ID University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA Lawrence University Conservatory of Music, Appleton, WI William Paterson College, Wayne, NJ

Golson's musical odyssey has taken him around the world. In 1987 he was sent by the US State Department on a cultural tour of Southeast Asia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma, Singapore. Later, Philip Morris International sent him on an assignment to Bangkok, Thailand to write music for the Bangkok Symphony Orchestra.

A live performer who consistently knocks audiences off their feet, Benny Golson has given hundreds of performances in USA, Europe, South America, Far East and Japan for decades.

AWARDS
- Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award
- Mellon Living Legend Legacy Award
- University of Pittsburgh International Academy of Jazz Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award

LATEST CD: "NEW TIME, NEW 'TET"
Benny Golson's newest CD (Concord Jazz) features the recording debut of Golson's "new jazztet,' a stellar sextet that revives that legendary group's highly regarded three-horn front line along with its classic, tight ensemble work and sophisticated sound.

Led by Grammy "Lifetime Achievement" award winning saxophonist-composer Benny Golson, this version of the jazztet features heavyweight jazz musicians on each instrument: trumpet master, Eddie Henderson; trombone virtuoso, Steve Davis; the brilliant Mike LeDonne, piano; bassist extraordinaire, Buster Williams; and percussion ace, Carl Allen.

NEW TIME, NEW 'TET elaborates the traditional jazztet concept. This album's song choices advance a subtle but genuinely seductive proposal: what if jazz, conventionally defined, is overdue for re-inspection and revision? What if "jazz" and "classical" music are closer in spirit and artistic execution than standard views of their difference comprehend?

NEW TIME, NEW ‘TET is an album with an implied "suite," in which Golson joins new compositions inspired by Giuseppi Verdi and Frederic Chopin to a standard jazz repertoire. The artistic result is philosophical musing that erupts into a street party. At one moment, vocalist Al Jarreau reprises Golson's classic "Whisper Not," while at another moment, we encounter the uproarious (and comic) "Gypsy Jingle-Jangle."

On one side, Sonny Rollins' mainstream "Airegin," on the other side, "Uptown Afterburn." Highlights abound from beginning to end. Golson's haunting and floating "From Dream To Dream" is a brilliant vehicle for trombonist Steve Davis' melodic elegance, while the insistent "Love Me In A Special Way" invokes nobility rare in any art form or cultural moment. If you recall classic film noir themes that often play through Golson's capacious mind, then "Verdi's Voice" awaits your attentive engagement - a composition that resurrects a tradition of songwriting, long gone, designated by the somewhat covert "Bronislau Kaper."

Why renew the Jazztet legacy? For his part, Golson notes that, "the task of re-conceiving a group with the strong identity and powerful longevity of the original jazztet is no obvious matter. The choice of new players is crucial, of course. They must be up to the job of making a new group sound every bit as identifiable and engaging as the earlier band - but not in competition with it. In short, the new Jazztet has to have its own artistic identity while it also carries on the highly acclaimed Jazztet tradition. I think we've done that here."

For three years, between 1960 and the end of 1962, the original co-led Benny Golson-Art Farmer Jazztet made seven albums that sold very well and launched that sextet to a high plateau where gigs at all the best jazz venues awaited. Before that carefully mapped-out group dynamic emerged, featuring new and long popular Golson compositions, Farmer worked mostly on the West Coast with bandleaders Jay McShann, Johnny Otis and Gerald Wilson. On the East Coast he played with saxophonist Gigi Gryce and joined pianist Horace Silver's Quintet. When Farmer and Golson created their now-legendary Jazztet in 1959, jazz was quite possibly at its peak of innovation. In retrospect, it's clear that it's six-man format and tightly integrated voicing launched one of that era's most compelling and artistically enduring ensembles.