Thursday, April 3, 2008

Randy Brecker

On Tuesday, I got a chance to meet and work with one of my musical heroes, trumpet artist Randy Brecker - he came to town with the UNO Jazz Ensemble to perform a concert at Southeast - he also performed with the LSE Jazz Band which I direct. Randy is a multiple Grammy Award winner, and was one of the players I tried to emulate when I was a student in high school. He and his brother Michael had a jazz/rock band called the Brecker Brothers back in the late 1970s that recorded a number of hit albums - I put together a band with some of my friends that tried to learn and perform tunes from those albums.

In addition to his jazz performances with many of the great players of the last 40 years (Jaco Pastorius, Dave Sanborn, Horace Silver, Larry Coryell, and many, many others), Randy has also performed and recorded with pop and rock artists as diverse as Steely Dan, Frank Sinatra, Chaka Khan, Frank Zappa, George Benson, Bruce Springsteen, Parliament-Funkadelics, and James Taylor.

A pic of Randy and me after the concert - in the process of autographing the CD he was giving me:

Here is some video of his performance with my students - Randy's solo starts at about 4:30 into the recording (btw, the first trumpet soloist is my son Tommy). The piece the kids are playing is an original composition called Southeast Six Step - commissioned specifically for the LSE Jazz Ensemble I, and written by Eric Richards.



At Nicol's request, I dug up an old photo from another time I got to work with a Grammy Award winner - who happened to be a former student. I'm the trumpet player on the left of the row of four horn players - right next to us is my former student James Valentine, now a member of Maroon 5. That was a pretty fun night.


6 comments:

Adrian Olivera said...

When should we expect the Krueger Band album to be released?

kevin said...

Great stuff Bob. It's awesome to see kids get into that kind of music. Loved the tune!

I've been listening to Miles Davis on my computer via Slacker all morning. Jazz on a rainy day can't be beat!

nicol said...

Maroon 5 is AWESOME! I remember that concert well, and remember the "Lincoln guys" on stage. That was neat to find out you were one of them up there. :-)

nicol said...

Also, neat story about meeting Randy Brecker and your son playing the trumpet solo.

kevin said...

Nicol -- from what I'm gathering are you telling us there's a chance you threw an article of clothing at the Maroon 5 concert that could've landed on or near Bob?

nicol said...

Ha! I think Kevin would be a good National Enquirer reporter/ interviewer. :D