A couple of weeks ago Erin sent me this article in the New Yorker about a Marsalis CD in production. I was delighted to see some familiar names mentioned, and that Andy Farber was conducting the music on the CD. I have to admit though that I only l i g h t l y skimmed the article the first and on the second times around I saw Andy Farber’s name.  Long story short, a phone call to Maestro Farber pointed me in the direction of ticketmaster.com. It was only after I had decided to buy tickets that I discovered we had GREAT seats to see not just a jazz concert, but a new silent film accompanied by Wynton Marsalis, pianist Cecile Licad and a 10-piece all-star jazz ensemble at New York’s famous Apollo Theater. Fantastic! Shot by Academy Award-winning cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (Deliverance & The Deer Hunter)  ’Louis’ is a semi-fictionalized account of a young Louis Armstrong and his first cornet. It stars a wonderful young actor named Anthony Coleman, who was in the audience that night.
Wynton Marsalis led the all-star jazz ensemble, which included some of New York’s finest musicians such as Marcus Printup, Ted Nash, Kurt Bacher, Vincent Gardner, Wycliffe Gordon and Dan Nimme. The awesome percussionist Arnie Kinsella, Jr. was back there looking like a a Manhattan Project physicist doing his thing  - gotta love it. This top-notch group filled the Apollo Theater with music from 19th century American composer L.M. Gottschalk and pieces written by Marsalis especially for this production.
The Apollo. Louis Armstrong. Wynton Marsalis – what could be more Jazz than that? Maybe if we were magically transported to 1901 New Orleans.  Many of you already knows the legendary theater where Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Marvin Gaye and Sarah Vaughan started their careers.  If you are from overseas or you were stuck in a cave for the past 70 years,  know that long before “American Idol” and “America’s got talent” there was  ”Showtime at the Appolo”. Walking into the Appolo makes you feel special. Drum roll … as we walked into the Apollo, we were star struck!
I don’t remember ever having seen a live orchestra accompanying a silent film.  Sure, I had seen Chaplain movies on the big screen, and documentaries and biopics of Harold Lloyd, but never a full length film with the intended musical accompaniment.
Maestro Farber conducts
Of course, calling it a silent film is a slight misnomer because the theater was anything but silent. Keeping in time with the Marsalis ensemble (conducted masterfully by Maestro Farber), the audience cheered for Satchmo’s dreams of playing the cornet and for his heroism toward the young mother named Grace, played by Shanti Lowry.
Shanti Lowry in the audience
There are a few reviews comparing the look and feel of ‘Louis’ to the Spielberg-esque Schindler’s List washed-out cinema-scope, and I have to say that thought came to my mind as well. In the case of ‘Louis’ however, there is no unyielding ennui, or terrorism or Nazis.  In fact, I seriously doubt there could be a happier movie about an impoverished, fatherless 6-year old in in turn-of-the-century New Orleans. ‘Louis’ was written in part by Hyatt Hotels heir/filmmaker Dan Pritzker, who reportedly invested millions of his own dollars into the production. What else is there to say except, good for him!
As the credits rolled we met up with producer and engineer Jeff “The Jedi Master” Jones. Jedi is involved in the ‘Louis’ soundtrack production and rode his bike to the theater as he lives just a few blocks away.  His first interest in music was listening to Armstrong, so this night was for him a passion come full circle. He confirmed for Erin that the Harlem Wishing Tree stump was indeed back stage, but he had declined to touch it out of respect for America’s next great musical discovery. Incidentally, our own Kenny Rampton who played on the CD recording, was away, headlining the Edinburgh International Festival concert. My understanding is that the soundtrack is to be released at some time in the near future. I am sure this will be at least nominated for best soundtrack of the year.
Wanna see a sneak peak? Please keep in mind that the music here can’t begin to compare with how awesome it sounded live. With that disclaimer – here’s the trailer from Wynton Marsalis’ youtube site: LOUIS, a silent film (2010) – trailer
In a wealth of caution, I’ve held off on the following announcement but  –Wily Bo Walker remains the #1 UK Indie Blues Artist in the Myspace charts and ‘Same Thing’ is No 3 In UK Blues and No 9 in the US! Read the rest of this entry »
Not a lot. Unless of course you are like me and decide to transplant some Neve soul into an ADA-8000. Â I have this Behringer ADA-8000 with a burned out power supply anyway … Â time to experiment!
You are looking at the main section of the Behringer ADA-8000. The red arrow points to the shorting/burned out capacitor that destroyed the transformer. After ordering a new transformer and getting everything to work, I started to tinker. Read the rest of this entry »
A few months back I was complaining about the lack of women in brass. It’s true – most professional brass players are dudes. Since the birth of my daughter, I’ve begun to notice these things. This week however, I traveled to Buckinghamshire to work with blues musician Bo Walker on his latest project. The train ride was unseasonably warm, and I was hoping for something to distract me.
Exhibit A: "Is that an alto horn?"
I know what you are thinking – the young woman in Exhibit A caught my eye. Â Sort of. Â Look at what she has parked at her feet. Â I suspected an alto horn case! Â Its not often you see people traveling with the lesser-played brass instruments (I bet you do not even know what a Alto horn is), and a female brass musician to boot. I am always asked if I my trombone is a bag of golf clubs…
Intrigued, I very politely (this being England) turned  and asked her about it. Turns out her name is Wendy, and she was on the way to Chesham to visit family. Read the rest of this entry »
Thursday night (June 6, 2010) was the “Lineup of A Lifetime” concert - a tribute to 30 years of composing and arranging by Moshe Laufer. To those of you who aren’t familiar with Jewish music, Moshe Laufer is one of the three people (together with Mona Rosenblum and Israel Lamm) who shaped Jewish music in the past 40 years. These days Jewish music sounds more like pop/rock rather than Klezmer, and Moshe wrote hundreds of tunes. The night was a night to remember as the biggest names in Jewish music from near and afar were on stage to honor him. Photographer Baruch Ezagui , shlager.net and thejewishinsights.com  provided these snazzy pictures!  Â
With at least 50 #1 hits under his belt, Ken is great at getting the sound he is looking for, and he needed an extremely fast turnaround time and lots of options. Trumpeter Tony Gorruso accompanied me to Ken’s home studio and the three of us arranged the tracks at top speed, aiming for a deep monster brass sound.
This shot looks north-ish from a rooftop at 39th and 9th right across from the New Yorker Hotel. I was up there playing around with my camera which is a no-big-deal S570 Nikon point and shoot.  I found a panorama setting, and this quintessential ‘New Yorky’ skyline photo was the result.
This was a interesting story you did on your blog. I hope you write more till ill be back next time. Then i collected some hints about my favorite producer to share with you. I wrote some news over one of my favorite musicians Schiller aka von Deylen and the new CD named Atemlos. If possible you like my hints.
So we were walking down 42st. street a few weeks ago (OK – lots of weeks ago… note hat). While passing Times Square, the person I was with said – “Hey that girl is the same one on the poster”. I was like “nah…”, but then – lo and behold it WAS! So i decided to get one too. I now have a picture of the “Grand Theft Auto” girl even before she became (becomes?) famous. She was with dude that was taking pics with his point and shoot.
“I basically sampled some of your samples (lol) and made brass ‘hits’ of my own” is how engineer Carole Wolf described incorporating the New York Brass free sample library into her recent work.
Carole did the pre-production at home, and the rest of it was polished and tweaked at The Loft recording studio in Columbus, Georgia. She thoughtfully emailed us a completed track.
What you are hearing is the swooning Neo-Soul vocals of Nesrin Asli along with MC Cyryus, Kevin Lamar on drums and acoustic guitar by Marshall Ruffin. Oh – and brass comes from here – which Carole has layered-in with utmost delicate subtly.
I love how Nesrin’s electrified voice climbs up and down the easy the walking beat. We are please to have contributed to this fabulous sound.
Don Downs, Tony Gorruso and Your Truly recorded for Israel Lamm and Nochi Krohn on Friday aboard the USS Nimitz. Ha-ha. No really, it’s just my studio. We’re sitting in front of two personal mixers which are part of the studio’s really cool personal monitoring system that I’ll blog about in the near future.
We look a little self-conscious here. Maybe it’s because none of us are wearing earphones as we would during an actual recording. I forgot to take a picture until we were nearly done, and said “look natural” on the ten-second dash back to my chair.
Trumpeter Kenny Rampton (and his friends) posted on Facebook a great list of descriptive Mingus composition titles … I thought they were cool and so pasted them here.
(That is Kenny leading the Mingus Band band trumpet section at the Jazz Standard. They usually play 2 sets Monday Nights. Sorry about quality, blame my Cellphone [or as my grandma says CelleryPhone])
* The Shoes of The Fisherman’s Wife are Some Jive Ass Slippers
* All The Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother (based on All The Things You Are)
* Wham Bam, Thank You Ma’am! (based on What Is This Thing Called Love).
* Passions Of A Woman Loved
*”If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats” (aka Gunslingin’ Birds) (also name of a popular blog)
Hello there, I was just wandering the internet and came across your website . Thought I’d say hello and tell you that I’ve enjoyed my visit here, hope you have a good morning !
If you have ever wanted to MacGyver your own trombone at home out of some scrap copper, shoe laces and a box of thumb tacks, this is your opportunity. I found this Discovery Channel documentary that is specially tuned so all you DIYers out there can participate.
R&B recording artist Steph Newton incorporated samples from our totally awesome free sample collection in a recent song “Outta My Depth.” You can find this track on her new EP ‘Everything You Need’.  Sounds great!
Have you used any NewYorkBrass.com free samples in songs? Tell us about it!
It’s worth listening to the whole clip from beginning to end. Also listen to how deep and clear the drums sound, this is in part due to the incredible hardware and software design.
All these drum grooves are taken from actual songs that Gal recorded, the sound is not mixed, and is “straight from the board…”
Song Index: 00:00 – 00:21 - medium slow rock groove – tempo 70 00:21 – 00:33 - medium slow rock groove with a flam on the X stick – tempo 81 00:33 – 00:53 - medium slow rock groove with shuffle feel- tempo 78 00:53 – 01:17 - medium streigh a head rock – tempo 127 01:17 – 02:08 - half time slow rock with a shuffle feel turns into double time – tempo 120 02:09 – 02:34 – light rock with 16 feel ghost notes on the snare – tempo 104 02:35 – 03:15 – medium slow rock groove – tempo 86
Just a quick post to say that our new business card arrived. Â :)
When I started the design, I knew I wanted something that I could give out containing all the contact information people need, but I also wanted it to complement the website theme. Version #1 had emails and telephones. Version #2 had also “NewYorkBrass.com brass, strings, woodwinds, rhythm sections and kichen sinks”
Then it hit me, and this is what I came up with:
Simple! It allows our musicians to give out the cards and write on the back their personal or other information.
Zubin Mehta recently endorsed and collaborated on a really cool interactive classical music children’s book, which is in the final stages of production and QA and will be available in stores across the globe starting in July.
About a year ago we have been approached to help arrange music for an interactive classical music children’s book, by Amit Sopher of Classikids.com, who produces interactive books for children. Amit developed a very interesting electronic platform that plays 10 minutes of high quality mp3 on a surprisingly good speaker.
To kick off the project, I contacted the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra’s personnel manager - Mr. Stewart Taylor. Mr. Taylor is my teacher, mentor, and close friend, and was played principal trombone for many years.  He suggested talking to another friend – Mr. Yaacov Mishori. Mishori, now retired, served as principal horn player of the IPO, as IPO spokesman and was a member of the management. Mishori has written other books and today teaches at the Buchmann-Mehta High School and presents a weekly radio program.
About a year ago my (then) two year old daughter Maya came to the studio and decided to try out the trombone, sorry trumpet (“No Maya, It’s a trumpet” “yes trumpet”) .
I was shure she wont get any sound out of this, I was wrong, she has a natural talent for waking up the neighbors and reducing the real estate prices in the neighborhood. Apparantly, in the video, she suddenly decided to betray the family-business, and try the flute… to my great chagrin…
I videod it with my phone and forgot about it. Last week my memory card in my phone got filled up, and during the cleaning-up process, I found this cute clip:
I absolutely enjoyed all of your instructions. I would love to thank you for getting the time to write this blog. But I just have one question; do you have an RSS Feed I can subscribe to? Please let me know. Thanks a lot.
We worked together on song “My Religion is Freedom”
Awesome! When song was relised, every musician asked me “Who play drums and brass? We hear -it is not sampler. Who in Latvia can play like this?”, and I proudly said , be smart, use WWW and musical surprise will be at next day!!! . Cooperation whith Daniel and Gal is one of my best musical experience .
All this is finally behind! Best part was colaboration with YOU! Awesome!
Tv picture is unbelievable poor and don’t reflect truth.
You never believe me. Loosing, I saved money. Oslo is most expensve city in a world. Simple double in midclass hotel is around 400 usd per night. For 2 weeks with teem of 12….!!!!
Anyway couple of nice words:
Awesome job! When song was released, every musician asked me “Who play drums and brass? We hear -it is not sampler. Who in Latvia can play like this?”, and I proudly said , be smart use WWW and musical surprise will be next day!!! . Cooperation with you and Gal is one of my best musical experience .
I’m traveling a lot. After all this eurofiction, me and my wife went on long vacation, and now I’m working on my next project.
Zigmars is a composer and keyboardist with 40 years of stage experience. Between 1993-2007 he was bigest radio owner in Latvia and owned 3 national networks. One month before sub-prime crisis in US in 2007 he sold his business to Irish company (In his words “do you believe in God?”)
Erinee 
Chad Steinerkert 
Anonymous 
Russ Filmore 
Archie Kottler 
Eusebia Gedris 
Keasley 
Maragaret Weikal 
Estelle Azzopardi 
, be smart, use WWW and musical surprise will be at next day!!! . Cooperation whith Daniel and Gal is one of my best musical experience .
So jealous of your mad skillz.
I am just a tinkerer…