Recently I had the pleasure to attend to a wonderful concert of Youssou N’ Dour in Warsaw. This is the video that I produced for Spinearth.tv. Enjoy it!
Today I publish an interview with the American trumpeter Randy Brecker, that I met on July 23rd, 2007 in Matera at the end of a concert in which he played together with saxophonist (and wife) Ada Rovatti and the Lucanian Big Band directed by Dino Plasmati.
During his career Randy Brecker won five Grammy Awards, mixing frequently jazz with different kinds of musical influences. He played with some of the greatest musicians of the Twentieth Century (among which Frank Zappa, Charles Mingus and Jaco Pastorius) and with the most famous rockers (Bruce Springteen e Dire Straits, among the others). Together with his saxophonist brother Michael (passed away on January 13th, 2007) he founded the Brecker Brothers, one of the most influent fusion band of the ’70s.
Below you find the podcast and a transcription of the interview.
How did you start to love music?
«My father was a piano player, and we had music in the family. It’s a very musical family».
How do you remember your first experience as professional musician?
«I don’t think I remember my first gig, but I was around fifteen, so it’s a long time ago, it’s 1955-1960. Maybe in Philadelphia was where I started to play, maybe with people like Lou Tabeking: he was a few years older than me, but we played together when we were very young in Philadelphia».
In the march of time you played with the greatest musicians of the world. I would be curious to know the working method of some of them. Let’s start, for example, from Horace Silver. How was working with him?
«It was very inspirational. He was a wonderful band leader: he wrote all his tunes, and translated his daily experiences, travels, relationships, etcetera, in the music. It’s just what I tried to do when I was writing music: it’s a part of my life, and all the writing was very close to what was going on with my life when I was younger. So I kind of use him as the role model. Still, till this day».
Another one… Charles Mingus?
«Well, Charles Mingus I don’t know very well, I only played on his last record, but I have a lot of respect for his trials and tribulations in life; he was one of jazz’s probably top-two greatest composers, and was fascinating me how much music he was able to write in a relatively short lifetime, all different styles: both Horace Sylver and Charles Mingus were the first fusion musicians – really – cause they fused a lot of different elements of music together. And saw no boundaries».
Another “fusion” musician was Frank Zappa…
«That’s true; he also I didn’t know very well, but he was also very inspirational. His main fusion was to fuse rock and classical, so he was a little different than the other musicians, although Charles Mingus also had a lot of classical music in his compositions too, but Frank Zappa was also very smart and very creative».
The last one is your brother Michael. The Brecker Bros had a great influence in the birth of fusion. I suppose working with him was easier… Continua a leggere ‘Interview with Randy Brecker‘
From now on, even this English part of the site has an RSS feed that you can use to easily keep updated about what’s going on here. Subscribe the feed into your RSS reader and you will be automagically informed every time there will be new content on the site. If you don’t know what RSS are, you can find a really simple and even funny description in the following video.
Hello! It’s quite strange to write the first post for the English version of this blog. It’s strange because while I feel like a newbie who needs to introduce himself to the readers, at the same time this blog is celebrating the hundredth post in the Italian version, inaugurating this English area and refreshing a bit the graphic design.
So, who am I, and what is this blog about? My name is Filippo Maria Caggiani, I’m a music journalist, and this blog is – quite obviously – a music blog.
Trying to make a super-summary of the previous hundred posts, I could say that this blog was born in 2006, when I wanted to take note of a four months’ period of staying in Portugal. Then, focusing more on the music topic, I started to make exclusive interviews to some artists (available as podcast), analyzing tunes, reporting breaking music news, or simply writing my points of view about music events. Sometimes happened to watch music things from a slightly different perspective, like when I lived in Germany for some months, or like now that I’m living in Poland.
By the way, there are a lot of different ways in which the world of music can be told through music in words.
Just stay tuned!
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