A beautiful if chilly day for daughter’s first clinical at St. Joe’s

My terrific daughter Elisabeth put her request in last week and tweaked it early yesterday, discovering that she’d been tardy by 30 minutes in the original. So I set my iPhone 6 alarm to 6:30 a.m. as a fail safe, even though I was fairly certain I’d be bright and smiling for her 7:30 arrival…

Aretha Franklin, Wynton Marsalis, legends, will be coming to Syracuse in July

The names were announced for this July’s M&T Syracuse Jazz Fest and the top two were huge. Aretha Franklin will be singing on Saturday night, July 18, on the rolling hills of the campus of Onondaga Community College, and Wynton Marsalis will lead the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra the night of July 17. That’s…

A jazz singer who seeks discipline and adventure

You can’t always get what you want, right, Mick? But if you try some time, you just might find … Well, as much as he wanted to get me some phone time with rising star jazz vocalist Cecile McLorin Salvant for my weekly community blog column today for Syracuse Public Media site waer.com, her publicist…

From the slightly Wayback Machine, my video of the Heath Brothers

On Halloween, I was lucky enough to catch the Heath Brothers performing as part of the Legends of Jazz series at Onondaga Community College. Great show by 89-year-old saxophonist Jimmy Heath, his 80-year-old drummer brother Tootie and their younger mates Michael Karn on upright bass and Jeb Patton on piano. I wrote about it here.…

New rooms, familiar players, cool release … and I still dig the Syracuse sound

Back when I covered the Central New York music scene for the big daily, I always had it in the back of my mind somewhere that these voices, these talents, these people I was hearing, seeing, watching, following, talking with, tracking, well, they were as good as the folks other people doing this job in…

For Jimmy and Tootie Heath, the brotherly love of music started in Philadelphia

In 1975, three siblings who grew up in Philadephia thought they’d pool their vast talents in jazz as the Heath Brothers. The eldest, Percy Heath, played double bass. Middle man Jimmy Heath was a star of alto sax. Kid brother Albert “Tootie” was the drummer. They’d been in the bands of Dizzie Gillespie and John…

A return to OCC for Corea sounds great forever

The last time Chick Corea played on the campus of Onondaga Community College some three years ago the American jazz legend was on a huge stage with one of the world’s biggest band’s headlining an enormous free jazz festival. Yes, that night in June 2011 was hugely memorable for all that saw that tingling set…

The night before the Bash, fans and bands meet and eat

While putting together today’s Benny’s Lost ’80s Bash fundraising concert for the Carol M. Baldwin Breast Cancer Research Fund of Central New York, Syracuse native Greg Ross came up with a different wrinkle. Fans of Benny Mardones were able to purchase tickets for last night’s Eat and Greet at the Gem Diner to meet the…

One-hit wonders? No, they have more to deliver

Oh, the world of the one-hit wonder. How many bands would have killed for that single hit, that taste of fame, the bucks that may have come along with it. How many bands wave their hands at that notion, saying, we don’t measure our worth in mass popularity, maybe even making a bit of fun…

A good time on the rolling hills

My posts Saturday and Sunday about the M&T Syracuse Jazz Fest concentrated on the music. Big time, big fun for the 32nd edition of the free-admission event. For my weekly community blog for Syracuse public media site waer.org, I commented about how the return this summer to the rolling hills of Onondaga Community College brought…