Bob Mintzer via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Bob Mintzer:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Bob Mintzer
- City: Los Angeles
- Country: United States
My Life & Work
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Bio:
"Playing music is a life long commitment. There are always new things to consider and develop. I'm exhilarated and humbled by music on a daily basis, and plan to continue on this path until my last day on earth." These words pretty much sums up Bob Mintzer's approach to music.
Bob leads several musical lives that, at times, seem humanly impossible for one person to sustain. He is a 20 year member of the Grammy award winning Yellowjackets, leads his own Grammy winning big band, is the recipient of the Buzz McCoy endowed chair of jazz studies at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, does workshops all over the world, writes books on jazz, writes for orchestra, concert band, and big band, travels with his own quartet, and plays with numerous other bands around the globe. He is equally active in the composing, performing and educational fields.
Bob has written over 200 big band arrangements. His big band music is played over the world, and has influenced numerous big band writers. He honed his big band writing and playing skills in the bands of Tito Puente, Buddy Rich, Thad Jones-Mel Lewis. He has also written works for the National Symphony Orchestra, Metropole Orchestra of the Netherlands. WDR Big band in Cologne, HR Big Band in Frankfurt and was commissioned to write a piece for concert band and tenor sax (Go) by a consortium of 50 universities.
As an instrumentalist Bob has worked with Art Blakey, Jaco Pastorius, Sam Jones, Randy Brecker, Gil Evans, the Yellowjackets, GRP All Star Big Band, Mike Manieri, The New York Philharmonic, to name a few. He has done session work for James Taylor, Steve Winwood, Queen, Donald Fagan, Milton Nascimento, and countless others.
Bob has recorded some 30 solo projects and was awarded with 4 grammy nominations and a Grammy award for best large jazz ensemble recording in 2001 for Homage to Count Basie on the DMP label.
Bob currently resides in Los Angeles in the former house of composer Arnold Schoenberg (his first LA residence, 1934-1936), teaches at USC, travels 4 months out of the year, and, when at home, writes and practices constantly. He is generally considered one of the tenor saxophonists who came out the school of New York players in the 70's, which includes Michael Brecker, Bob Berg, David Liebman and Steve Grossman.
Contact Information
- Email: bobmintzer@aol.com
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Buy My Music (downloads/CDs/DVDs): http://www.bobmintzer.com/cds.php
- ▶ Book Purchases: http://www.bobmintzer.com/music.php
- ▶ Twitter: bobmintzer
- ▶ Website: http://www.bobmintzer.com
- ▶ YouTube Music: http://music.youtube.com/channel/UCwWodBCWvhuXzdWGNuSqrGw
- ▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/5zBJWYhJubIay1AeJsHdqe
- ▶ Spotify 2: http://open.spotify.com/album/5uxEEfgk14VtRysfPiFADQ
- ▶ Spotify 3: http://open.spotify.com/album/5hwyKWB8YnvdkcBXMgF5l3
- ▶ Spotify 4: http://open.spotify.com/album/3wG9E3txa7w0L5BBxlDp6W
- ▶ Spotify 5: http://open.spotify.com/album/5UwY9JWHL1Me1qWAziABWe
- ▶ Spotify 6: http://open.spotify.com/album/1PAy73HWr0xJvxeACwtWMa
Clips (more may be added)
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging from New Orleans to Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... through Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
