Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Viva Conrad!


© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.




When we posted our 2-part profile on trombonist Conrad Herwig which you can locate by going here and here, the crackerjack broadcast services at CerraJazz LTD had not as yet developed a video to accompany it.

The graphics team has now rectified this omission.

The audio track was chosen from the second category of Conrad’s work as described in this opening sentence to the earlier piece:

“Conrad Herwig is one of the leading trombonists on today’s Jazz scene. This piece explores his work from two perspectives: [1] the Criss Cross Jazz recordings that he has made under his own name and also with groups led by tenor saxophonist Walt Weiskopf and trumpeter Greg Gisbert and [2] the theme albums that he has developed both as a tribute to Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter and as a way of interpreting their music in Latin Jazz contexts.”

The tune used in this video is tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter’s  “Ping Pong” which gets its name from the rhythmic vamp that underscores the theme.

You can hear this vamp at the outset up to 0:09 seconds and again during the last 8 bars of each solo.

The melody is played from 0:10 to 1:06 minutes.

This track has a little bit of everything going on in it:

[1] a fiery trumpet solo by Brian Lynch which begins at 1:07 minutes,
[2] an intricately conceived solo by Conrad that shows his mastery of the trombone starting at 2:02 minutes,
[3] a fluid and graceful piano solo by relative newcomer Luis Perdomo which commences at 3:48 minutes and
[4] a well-crafted drum solo by Robby Ameen beginning at 4:38 minutes. Robby’s brilliance with Latin rhythms is such that rarely is a Latin Jazz album made in New York without him in the drum chair.