Meet The Itchy Fingers Saxophone Quartet

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

You won’t believe your ears!

Peter Bernstein/Larry Goldings/Bill Stewart- "Dragonfly"

The Beautiful Sound of Buddy Childers

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Lead players, those who perform the principal line/melody in a big band, rarely get much notice or attention from the broader Jazz audience.

There is usually one in each section of a big band – trumpets, reeds and trombones – and “in addition to playing the high part, the lead player decides matters of phrasing and articulation for the section as a whole. Lead playing is a specialty requiring particular skills, and lead players are frequently not as adept at improvisation as others in their sections.” [Robert Witmer, The New Grove Encyclopedia of Jazz].

There are of course exceptions to this last point , but even in Randy Sandke’s excellent essay on The Trumpet in Jazz in Bill Kirchner, ed., The Oxford Companion to Jazz,, lead players such as Maynard Ferguson, Cat Anderson, and Ernie Royal are mentioned more because of their prowess as section leaders and their ability to hit stratospheric high notes, rather than as soloists who have contributed as one of the instrument’s stylists.

Thanks to a friend in southern Oregon, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles doesn’t miss much in the way of what’s going on in the world of Jazz trumpet.

As a result, and with special thanks to him, we learned that trumpeter and flugelhorn player, Buddy Childers, became a triple threat over the years: lead player, soloist and, ultimately, big band leader where his skills were on display in both capacities.

Interestingly, as Harvey Siders explains in the following segment from his insert notes to Just Buddy’s CD [Trend/Discovery[TRCD-539], Buddy’s first big band under his own leadership didn’t happen until he had been in the business almost 30 years.

“You can take a trumpet player out of a big band, but you can't take the big band out of the trumpet player. Case in point, Buddy Childers, whose trumpet and flugelhorn skills have graced or goosed many a big band: Count Baste, Woody Herman, Benny Goodman, Quincy Jones, Benny Carter, Char­lie Barnet, Georgie Auld, Clare Fischer, Bob Florence, Frank DeVol, Les Brown, and above all, Stan Kenton.

How many musicians can boast of beginning a career by breezing through an audition with Stan Kenton? Childers can.

He left high school in Chicago at age 16 and latched on to the father image of Stan the Man. This was dur­ing World War II, when Uncle Sam was depleting the ranks of the big bands. Buddy claimed there was one thing in his favor when he passed the audition so easily: ‘They knew I couldn't be drafted for a couple of years. The army couldn't touch me.’

Misplaced modesty. Even then there were few trumpeters who could touch him, how else could he explain accumulating eleven years with the Kenton band whose complicated, demanding charts separated the men from the boys - and often separated the men from their chops!

What separated Childers from his life-long ambition to form his own big band was a series of activities that tend to rob the talented of their most pre­cious commodity: time. In Childers' case, they included playing with many bands and combos, writing for so many of them, becoming involved with photography as a full-time occupation, and his obsession with flying. (Childers has been a licensed pilot for nearly 40 years.)

All those time-stealing detours also kept Buddy from issuing his first album as a band leader. (He did front quartet and quintet albums in the 50s.) He had to leave Los Angeles -- his adopted home since 1943 - to do that.  In 1983, Childers moved back to Chicago, formed a band of dedicated, like-minded swingers, played at a dub every Monday night for over a year, in the process gathering material for what is now in this jacket.”

Buddy eventually moved back to Los Angeles where he led his own big band until his passing in 2007.

Along the way, hhe made a beautiful recording with composer-arranger Russ Garcia that really showcased his talents as a soloist.

The recording is entitled Buddy Childers with the Russ Garcia Strings and on it Buddy displays the fluid facility that is a characteristic found in the work of many of the more widely recognized Jazz trumpet soloists.

What isn’t often heard in the solo work of others is the beautiful, “legit” sound that Buddy gets on the horn, his precise execution of the technical aspects of playing the instrument, and the complete command of breath control that allows him to play long phrases and embellishments with ease.

If you will forgive the play on words, Buddy was certainly The Man when it came to The Horn, whether it was the lead or the solo chair.

After listening to Buddy’s beautiful sound it’s no wonder that the clarion call of the angels was Gabriel’s “trumpet.”

Here’s a video tribute to Buddy that features him performing Matt Dennis’ Angel Eyes from the Buddy Childers with the Russ Garcia Strings CD.

VeeJay Records – A Tribute

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“There’s still nothing to beat the special thrill you get when you hear somebody who is absolutely new to you, of whom you have never heard before and who just simply knocks you out.

This shock of recognition is one of the greatest kicks in jazz. Just as those rare moments when everything goes right, the whole thing falls into place and everybody is together, is what keeps the musicians going through the bad times, so the now and then discovery of a beautiful, exciting new voice in jazz is what keeps the listener plowing through all those LPs.

When I first played this LP, I recognized no one on it. After I looked at the personnel, I knew I had heard some of the men before and heard of some of the others. But what shattered me, racked me up and made me play it over and over was the work of a man I had never heard of, of whose existence I hadn't dreamt but whose music hit me with exceptional force.

His name is Frank Strozier and he plays the alto saxophone. Predictions are chance-y things at best, but I'll chance one right here. We've all been waiting for something past Bird to happen to the alto. Ornette Coleman is taking it in one direction and it is welcome news. Frank Strozier, it seems to me, is taking it in a parallel direction bowing, not to Bird directly, but to John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins and possibly to Ornette, as well. He rips into his solos with the agonized wail that Coltrane has made a specialty of; he packs each long line, breath-taking in its searing irregularity, with high-voltage emotion. To come through on record as he does, he must be something else in person. Hearing him, as I did, for the first time in the context of this LP, was an exciting and thrilling experience. I am sure we will all be hearing a lot more from this Memphis-born youngster.”

- Ralph J. Gleason, Jazz author/critic

VeeJay Records was founded in Gary, Indiana in 1953 by Vivian Carter and James Braden, a husband and wife team whose first initials gave the label its name.

The company’s Jazz recordings were a small portion of its releases as it was primarily a rock ‘n roll label.

Gratefully, however, and as you will no doubt observe from the cover art in the video tribute, it provided a number of then fledgling Jazz artists an opportunity to display their talent to a broader audience through its LP’s.

Not surprisingly, given the fact that Gary is 26 miles SE of Chicago, many of VeeJay’s Jazz recordings favored musicians who were or had been primarily based in The Windy City such as pianist Eddie Higgins, tenor saxophonist Eddie Harris and the MJT +3, although it also featured early albums by trumpeter Lee Morgan, tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter and pianist Wynton Kelly.

Chicagoans, bassist Bob Cranshaw and drummer Walter Perkins, dubbed themselves the Modern Jazz Two [“MJT”] and the “3” is made up of Willie Thomas on trumpet, also of Chicago, and Harold Mabern on piano and Frank Strozier on alto saxophone, both born and bred in Memphis, TN.

The tune on the audio track is Ray Bryant’s Sleepy which is based on an AABA structure but the “B” bridge or release is 12-bars while each of the “A’s” is 8-bars.

The tempo is doubled during the second 6-bars of the bridge and played with a triplet feeling in 6/8 time.

Walter Perkins announces the exit from the bridge with a thunderous backbeat that he plays simultaneously with the left hand on the snare drum, the right hand on the floor tom tom and the right foot using the bass drum beater ball.

Does anyone play Jazz at this tempo anymore?

The Brussels Jazz Orchestra: [More] Meeting Colours

More from guitarist Philip Catherine's "meeting" with The Brussels Jazz Orchestra on their Meeting Colours recording this time featuring trumpeter Bert Joris who takes an exquisite solo on Philip's tune Happy Tears beginning at 2:55 minutes [checkout drummer Martijn Vink's "Chinese/Turkish" trash cymbal sound behind him - Dizzy Gillespie loved the sound of that cymbal when he soloed]. Bert also did the arrangement. Click on the "X" to close out of the ads, should they appear. The visuals are meant to be a complement to the music, not an end in themselves. Just another way to help represent it. 

Ivan Lins, Leonardo Amuedo and Stefano di Battista

The sound track for the following video is from an Ivan Lins performance with the Metropole Orchestra that took place on May 14, 2006 at the Philharmonia, in Haarlem, The Netherlands. The full orchestra sits this one out leaving matters to Ivan, who performs the vocals and keyboard accompaniment, guitarist, Leonardo Amuedo and alto/soprano saxophonist, Stefano di Battista. The tune is Lins' Dinorah, Dinorah.  Ivan's music is not purely Bossa Nova, nor Jazz, in the traditional sense of those terms [whatever that means], but it swings like mad, thanks in no small part to the cookin' rhythm section of Aram Kersbergen on bass and Martijn Vink on drums. The solos by Leonardo and Stefano are quite accomplished and Ivan uses his voice like another percussion instrument at times to add even more movement to the piece. The audience literally roars its approval at the end. When it's happening, there's nothing quite like the sound of music captured in-performance.

Ted Gioia – The Jazz Standards – A Review

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“THE JAZZ STANDARDS will be indispensable for any fan who wants to know more about a jazz song heard at the club, or on the radio. Musicians who play these songs night after night will now have a handy tome, outlining their history and significance which tells how pieces have been performed by different generations of jazz artists. And students learning about jazz standards now have a reference work to these cornerstones of the jazz repertoire.”

- Christian Purdy, The Oxford University Press

“In his latest book - The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire – Ted Gioia talks about Jazz from the singular perspective of the music and not from the more accustomed standpoint of the musicians who made it.”

- the editorial staff at JazzProfiles

“lf you look up just one title in The Jazz Standards, before you realize it you will have spent an intriguing hour or two learning fascinating and new things about old songs that you have known most of your life."

—Dave Brubeck

I look forward to Ted Gioia’s next book about Jazz with the same excitement and anticipation that greets the arrival of the next recording by one of my favorite Jazz artists.

The guy can flat-out write, he’s a magnificent story-teller and he has a depth and a breath of knowledge about Jazz which rivals that of any writer on the subject.

I know his next book is always going to be good so I grudgingly allow him the necessary time to research it and write it because I can’t wait to read it.

In this regard, Ted’s The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire - forthcoming from Oxford University Press in July/2012 – doesn’t disappoint.

In his writing, Ted has a “conversation” with the reader.

His style is never polemical or didactic like those academic treatises that only twelve other people on the planet can read, let alone, understand.

Be it specifically about Jazz on the West Coast from 1945–1960 or more generally about the entire history of Jazz, Ted’s writing is personal and he teaches you stuff about Jazz.

His approach is reminiscent of your favorite high school teachers; you really wanted to learn from them because they knew what they were talking about and they made the subject fun and interesting.

This is no less the case with Ted’s latest book - The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire – in which he talks about Jazz from the singular perspective of the music and not from the more accustomed standpoint of the musicians who made it.

If you’ve ever wished for a “road map” through recorded Jazz tunes, this book is it.  It offers “… an illuminating look at more than 250 seminal Jazz compositions …, “recommendations for more than 2,000 recordings with a list of suggested tracks for each song, [each accompanied by] “… colorful and expert commentary.”

The reasons for how and why this book came together are clearly explained by Ted in the following excerpts from his Introduction.

“When I was learning how to play jazz during my teenage years, I kept encountering songs that the older mu­sicians expected me to know. I eventu­ally realized that there were around 200 or 300 of these compositions, and that they served as the cornerstone of the jazz repertoire. A jazz performer needed to learn these songs the same way a classical musician studied the works of Bach, Beethoven, or Mozart.

In fact, I soon learned that knowledge of the repertoire was even more important to a jazz musician than to a clas­sical artist. The classical performer at least knows what com­positions will be played before the concert begins. This is not always the case with jazz. I recall the lament of a friend who was enlisted to back up a poll-winning horn player at a jazz festival—only to discover that he wouldn't be told what songs would be played until the musicians were already on stage in front of 6,000 people.

Such instances are not unusual in the jazz world, a quirk of a subculture that prizes both sponta­neity and macho bravado. Another buddy, a quite talented pi­anist, encountered an even more uncooperative bandleader—a famous saxophonist who wouldn't identify the names of the songs even after the musicians were on the bandstand. The leader would simply play a short introduction on the tenor, than stamp off the beat with his foot... and my friend was expected to figure out the song and key from those meager clues. For better or worse, such is our art form.

I had my own embarrassing situations with unfamiliar standards during my youth—but fortunately never with thousands of people on hand to watch. I soon realized what countless other jazz musicians have no doubt also learned: in-depth study of the jazz repertoire is hardly a quaint his­torical sideline, but essential for survival. Not learning these songs puts a jazz player on a quick path to unemployment.

But no one gave you a list. Nor would a typical youngster of my (or a later) generation encounter many of these songs outside the jazz world—most of them had been composed before I was born, and even the more recent entries in the repertoire weren't part of the fare you typically heard on TV or main­stream radio. Some of these tunes came from Broadway, but not always from the hit productions—many first appeared in obscure or failed shows, or revues by relatively unknown songwriters. Others made their debut in movies, or came from big bands, or were introduced by pop singers from outside the jazz world. A few—such as "Autumn Leaves" or "Desafinado"—originated far away from jazz's land of origin. And, of course, many were written by jazz musicians themselves, serving as part of the legacy of Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, and other seminal artists.

My own education in this music was happenstance and hard earned. Even­tually "fake books" appeared on the scene to clear up some of the mystery, but I never saw one of these (usually illegal) compilations until I was almost 20 years old. When I first encountered The Real Book—the underground collection of jazz lead sheets that began circulating in the 19705—even the table of contents served as a revelation to me. And, I'm sure, to others as well. Aspiring musicians today can hardly imagine how opaque the art form was just a few decades ago—no school I attended had a jazz program or even offered a single course on jazz. Most of the method books were worthless, and the peculiar culture of the art form tended to foster an aura of secrecy and competitiveness. Just knowing the names of the songs one needed to learn represented a major step forward; getting a lead sheet was an unwonted luxury.

A few years later, when I started teaching jazz piano students, I put together a brief guide to the repertoire, listing the songs my pupils needed to learn and the keys in which they were normally played—a rudimentary forerunner to the work you now have in your hands. Still later, as I began writing about jazz, I continued to study these same songs, but from a different perspective. I now tried to unravel the evolution of these compositions over time, understand how different jazz artists had played them, and what changes had taken place in performance practices.

Over the years, I often wished I had a handbook to this body of music, a single volume that would guide me through the jazz repertoire and point me in the direction of the classic recordings. A few books were helpful in my early education into the nuances of this body of music, especially Alec Wilder's Amer­ican Popular Song (1972), but even the best of these books invariably focused on only a small part of the repertoire—mainly Broadway and Tin Pan Alley songs— and dealt very little with this music as it related to jazz. The book I needed didn't exist when I was coming up, and still doesn't. I wanted to delve into these songs as sources of inspiration for great jazz performances—a perspective that often took one far a field from what the composer might have originally intended. I wanted a guide to these works as building blocks of the jazz art form, as a springboard to improvisation, as an invitation to creative reinterpretation.

This book aims to be that type of survey, the kind of overview of the standard repertoire that I wished someone had given me back in the day—a guide that would have helped me as a musician, as a critic, as a historian, and simply as a fan and lover of the jazz idiom. To some degree, this work represents the fru­ition of all my experiences with these great songs over a period of decades. The compositions that were once mysterious and even foreboding have now become familiar friends, the companions of countless hours, and I have relished the opportunity to write about these songs and discuss my favorite recordings. Cer­tainly those readers familiar with my other books will note a more personal tone here, a more informal approach—one that felt natural to me as I delved into a body of work that has become, by now, such a vital part of my life….”

The Jazz Standards is a resource guide and a browser's companion to more than 250 of the most popular Jazz songs and includes a listening guide to more than 2 000 recordings. For each of these tunes, Ted “… explains their role in the art form, compares different performance practices, and serves as a tour guide to the historic recordings that define how these works are played today.”

To give you the “flavor” of the book’s contents, here are three examples drawn from Ted’s annotations about songs reviewed in The Jazz Standards that have always been among my favorite to play on.

Airegin [Sonny Rollins, composer]:

“The song first came to prominence via the 1954 Miles Davis project Bags' Groove, an album that is far less well known than the trumpeter's work from later in the decade. The album presented several songs destined to become standards, including three of Rollins's best compositions: "Airegin," "Doxy," and "Oleo."

"Airegin" offers the most interesting conception of the batch, with an opening that hints at a minor blues at the outset, then morphs into a lop­sided 36-bar form—an oddity, with 20 bars elapsing before the repeat, but then running only 16 bars before coming back to the top of the form—all packed with plenty of harmonic movement to keep things interesting for the soloists.

The opening chords look back to "Opus V," a piece by J. J. Johnson that Rollins had recorded back in 1949, while the second eight bars are remi­niscent of the bridge to Billy Strayhorn's "Day Dream." But the whole as con­structed by Rollins is distinctive and the work ranks among the most intricate of the saxophonist's better known pieces. Certainly "Airegin" showed that in an era when other jazz players were expanding their audience by moving toward either a cool melodicism or an earthy funkiness, Rollins was intent on writing songs that would appeal to other horn players rather than patrons at the jukebox.

"Airegin" did just that. Two years later, Davis resurrected the song for another Prestige session, and this time featured John Coltrane, Rollins's leading rival as reigning tenor titan of modern jazz. Davis made a surprising choice to substitute an 8-bar vamp over an F minor chord for Rollins's orig­inal chord changes during the second A theme; by doing so, he anticipated the modal approach that would come to the fore in his music later in the decade. The tempo is faster here, and the mood much more aggressive, with Trane serving notice that he could play this composition just as well as the composer.

Other prominent soloists followed suit. Phil Woods recorded "Airegin" on his 1957 session with Gene Quill, and periodically returned to the song in var­ious settings over the years. Art Pepper tackled it on his Art Pepper Plus Eleven….

The song has kept its place in the standard repertoire …. For two invigorating [and more recent examples], check out the treatments by Chris Potter and Michael Brecker, both from 1993.”

Love for Sale [Cole Porter, composer and lyricist]:

“Many songs have overcome nonmusical obstacles in gaining acceptance and popularity, but few tunes faced a stiffer challenge than "Love for Sale." For decades, radio stations refused to allow its lyrics on the air. The song, which made its debut in the 1930 Broadway musical The New Yorkers, is sung from the perspective of a Prohibition-era prostitute, and composer Cole Porter did not mince his words in presenting "appetizing young love for sale." Charles Darnton, the reviewer for the Evening World, accused the song of being "in the worst possible taste." The Herald Tribune called it "filthy."

Porter, perhaps in a mood of defensiveness, claimed that it was his favorite among the songs he had composed. "I can't understand it," he griped. "You can write a novel about a harlot, paint a picture of a harlot, but you can't write a song about a harlot." Perhaps most revealing: audience outrage subsided after the Broadway production shifted the setting of the song to Harlem, in front of the Cotton Club, and assigned the number to African-American vocalist Elizabeth Welch instead of Kathryn Crawford, a white singer.

“… jazz artists seldom turned to "Love for Sale" until the late 1940s and early 1950s. Billie Holiday recorded a definitive version, and her persona as a troubled diva who, by her own account, was working as a prosti­tute when this song first came out, gave her a kind of credibility that few singers would want to match. Despite her advocacy, singers long avoided this song. During this period a jazz fan was more likely to encounter the Porter tune in instrumental arrangements by Erroll Garner, Sidney Bechet, Art Tatum, or even Charlie Parker, who recorded it as part of a Cole Porter tribute project for the Verve label shortly before his death. …

Cannonball Adderley recorded a well-known version for his 1958 project Somethin' Else—a rare date that found Miles Davis working as a sideman. …

By the 1960s, the taboo associated with "Love for Sale" had faded, and it became entrenched in the repertoires of jazz players. And for good reason. The opening theme is suitable for vamps of all stamps, from Latin to funky, and the release offers effective contrast both rhythmically and harmonically. A tension in tonality is evident from the outset: this song in a minor key nonetheless starts on a major chord, and seems ready to go in either direction during the course of Porter's extended form. A composition of this sort presents many possibilities, and can work either as a loose jam or bear the weight of elaborate arrangement.”

Poinciana [Nat Simon, composer, Buddy Bernier, lyricist]

“In the jazz world, “Poinciana” is inextricably linked with Ahmad Jamal, whose successful reading of the composition from 1958 helped keep his album Ahmad Jamal at the Pershing: But Not for Me on the Billboard chart for more than two years. But the song long predates Jamal's interpretation, and was composed back in 1936. Glenn Miller performed it in the late 1930s, Benny Carter enjoyed a modest hit with "Poinciana" in February 1944, and Bing Crosby did the same the following month. Carter's version is especially interesting, with its strange groove, half Latin and half-R&B—a stark contrast to the pop-oriented approach Miller had adopted in his treatment.

Around this time, a number of name bandleaders embraced "Poinciana" and it shows up on live broadcasts by Duke Ellington, Jimmy Dorsey, Jack Teagarden, and other jazz stars of the era. … Other recordings that predate Jamal's success include versions by Erroll Garner, Lennie Niehaus, Red Callender, and George Shearing.

But Jamal eclipsed these precedents with a vamp-based arrangement that superimposed the pianist's unhurried phrasing over an insistent, appealing beat—so appealing that his "Poinciana" earned repeated jukebox plays and dance-floor loyalty at a time when modern jazz had largely abandoned these public platforms for crossover success.

Even after Jamal redefined "Poinciana," the song enjoyed a surprisingly varied career. It has been popular with vocal groups, as demonstrated in recordings by the Four Freshman and the Manhattan Transfer. It has appeared on albums de­voted to musical exotica, getting the full Les Baxter "bring-the-Third-World-to-your-bachelor-pad" treatment, and has also been adapted for big bands, Afro-Cuban ensembles, and easy listening orchestras. But I am still under Jamal's sway, and feel "Poinciana" is best served by small combo versions that avoid the mood music baggage and let the song swing. For three striking examples, check out Shelly Manne's fast romp in straight 4/4 walking time from his 1959 performance at the Black Hawk, Sonny Rollins's hot work on soprano sax backed by George Cables's electric piano from 1972, and Keith Jarrett’ s convivial trio rendition from 1999.”

Aside from just devouring the book from cover-to-cover, as I did, you can approach The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire in any number of ways.

You can select one tune, read what Ted has to say about it and then immerse yourself in the example recordings the he lists in the accompanying discography.

You can take Ted annotations for one or more of the Jazz standards and add your own thoughts and list of favorites versions to it.

Or you can create playlists from Ted’s track suggestions and upload them to you favorite media player

Perhaps you might wish to get together with some of your Jazz buddies at a Jazz standards party in which you read and discuss Ted’s take on a tune and play your preferred versions.

I doubt that you will ever come across a book on Jazz that will give you more pleasurable reading while, at the same time, affording you an such interactive platform in which to experience its contents.

However, you approach it, The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire is sure to become a constant companion to your Jazz listening.

Ted has his own website and you can find out more about him by visiting it via this link.

The nice folks at The Oxford University Press who are responsible for publishing the book can be reached here.

For those of you who may have missed it’s first posting of the JazzProfiles editorial staff’s Conversation with Ted Gioia About Jazz, we have brought it up again in the blog’s sidebar [left-hand or columnar side of the blog].

The Brussels Jazz Orchestra – Meeting Colours

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“The music on this record is absolutely outstanding, both in terms of artistic content and in superior form of presentation: within the framework of Bert Joris’ beautiful big band arrangements.

As for the many new compositions included in this album, they represent Philip Catherine’s most recent and successful attempt to develop a new thematic composition language, without sacrificing his well-established and very personal form of musical expression both in writing and on the guitar.

Each new piece has a peculiar and strong musical personality. …

The Brussels Jazz Orchestra’s sound and performance are impeccable and always great and it is incredible how each arrangement, with the perfectly balanced dynamics of this great big band, enhances the beautiful melodies of the compositions. …”

- Adriano Pateri

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles plans to have a lot more to say about the Brussels Jazz Orchestra [BJO] in a future profile [perhaps, two] about this talented, musical aggregation.

Until then, you can sample the music of the BJO on the audio track to the following video tribute to the photography of the late, Helmut Newton which features his intriguingly beautiful portraits of many of the world’s famous actresses.

The tune is entitled On the Ground, one of twelve [12] composed by Belgian guitarist Philip Catherine for his meeting with the BJO entitled Meeting Colours, a compact disc that was recorded and released in 2005 on Dreyfus Jazz [FDM36675-2].

Trumpeter Bert Joris, one of the founders of the BJO, arranged all of Philip’s tunes for the band.

On the Ground is a medium tempo tune that “cooks,” or shall we say, “slow burns,” from beginning to end.

The melody is initially stated with Philip’s guitar voiced in unison with the trombones and blended in places with muted trumpets.

Philip’s solo begins at 1:42 minutes.

Be sure to checkout the shout chorus that Bert creates starting at 3:03 minutes with Philip’s guitar phrased an octave higher, but again, in unison with the band, especially the closing portion with the sax section from 3:53 – 4:23 minutes.