Mark Turner 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 Mark Turner:
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: Mark Turner
- City: New York City
- Country: United States
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Born in 1965 in Ohio and raised in Southern California, I grew up surrounded by music. There was always a lot of R&B and jazz and soul and gospel going on in the house all the time, he recalls. This was in the early 70s, when the whole integration and civil rights thing had begun to go mainstream, and my mother and stepfather were in the first wave of young black professionals and intellectuals who moved to upper-middle-class white neighborhoods. They and their friends were always going out to see live jazz. I was intrigued by that, and I was intrigued by the whole history of jazz music and African-American culture, as well as the music itself. And my father, who died when I was one and a half, had played saxophone, so maybe I was looking for a connection with him too.
After starting out on clarinet in elementary school, I gravitated towards saxophone in high school, while also exploring my talent for the visual arts. Although I briefly studied design and illustration at Long Beach State University, my passion for jazz ultimately led me to pursue a career in music. I studied and dissected the work of such saxophone giants as John Coltrane, Joe Henderson, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, Warne Marsh and Lester Young in the pursuit of my own musical voice.
I really got into it and worked really hard, just trying to figure out who I am. That's how I am with everything. It took a while, and it was kind of an arduous struggle, but it allowed me to figure out what I wanted from music. Even when I was spending my time sounding like other people, I felt like that was part of my path to sounding like myself. The more you spend time with the form and the language, the more your own personality comes out.
After graduating from Bostons prestigious Berklee College of Music in 1990, I moved to New York. Between 1995 and 2001 I recorded five albums of my own—Yam Yam, Mark Turner, In This World, Ballad Session and Dharma Days—while keeping busy as a collaborator and sideman.
It was around 1992 that I began to notice or feel that what I was doing was uniquely mine. It had been two and a half years of struggle, but the summer of 1992 was the period where I was finally able to hear it. Maybe no one else would notice, but that's where I could see how things were gonna go.
Contact Information
- Email: winwin@me.com
- Telephone: 212.212.8888
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Twitter: markturnerjazz
- ▶ Website: http://markturnerjazz.com
- ▶ YouTube Music: http://music.youtube.com/channel/UCUYt6CfKaqoa9lYI-Mvw2hA
- ▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/6ymLizMskVol73exzqzOBQ
- ▶ Spotify 2: http://open.spotify.com/album/4rP5qYtTUgaqLHNUJmvNIk
- ▶ Spotify 3: http://open.spotify.com/album/2EZmzJgxlf21SPRymPeQ2H
- ▶ Spotify 4: http://open.spotify.com/album/6kH8QpNHYkUXZlqU2787NB
More
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Quotes, Notes & Etc.
A few months ago I had an experience that starkly demonstrated how important Mr. Turner is among younger musicians. While reporting on the Thelonious Monk Institute saxophone competition in Washington an annual contest that has become something like the Van Cliburn competition of jazz I heard 15 young players. As expected, most of them drew much of their sound from one source: John Coltrane. There was no mistaking that gruff, keening tone, those scale-based patterns. But to my surprise, the second most prevalent sound among the 15 was very different. It was lighter, more evenly produced from the bottom to the very top of the horn, in long, chromatic strokes. At first I thought it was the sound of Warne Marsh. But there was no reason to think that Marsh, who died in 1987 and was always a minority taste, had suddenly become au courant. Then I realized that it was the sound of Mark Turner.
– Ben Ratliff, the New York Times
I think Mark Turner is one of the most important players that has come along in the last 20 years, easily the most influential. He never seems to have any doubt about what hes doing.
– Ravi Coltrane (from his Before & After listening session, Jazz Times)
His music is the freshest thing around. I want to write like that. Its out music that still sounds very musical and consonant.
– Luciana Souza, singer and composer
I went and practiced with him once. He showed me these music books of things he writes out; just in one book of 36 pages he had tons of different chords and exercises. Because of the purity of his approach, he influences a lot of different people in that way either like me, who does freer stuff, or someone else, who does straight-ahead music: it doesnt matter.
– Bill McHenry, Musician
Clips (more may be added)
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The Art of Mark Turner // Jazzcampus (1080p HD)
131 views
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BIMHUIS TV | Mark Turner Quartet
85 views
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.
