Ben Markley Archive

Clockwise: The Music Of Cedar Walton – Ben Markley Big Band featuring Terell Stafford – OA2

by Audiophile Audition | Mar 16, 2017 | Jazz CD Reviews

Clockwise: The Music Of Cedar Walton – Ben Markley Big Band featuring Terell Stafford – OA2 22139, 75:42 ****: A creative outing that is  full of  intelligence and inquisitiveness. (Ben Markley Big Band = Ben Markley – piano; featuring Terell Stafford – trumpet) Cedar Walton, who died on August 19, 2013, at age seventy-nine, was an American who originally made his name as a hard-bop pianist with the early sixties version of the Art Blakey Jazz Messengers. His first recording session with the band included several players who became household name such as Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, Curtis Fuller, Jaymie Merritt in addition to Blakey. The name of the recording label was Mosaic. As he developed his style as a pianist, he also showed promise as a composer wherein many of his efforts became recognized as jazz standards  such as Bolivia and Holy Land among others, and are showcased here in big band arrangements. Ben Markley and his cohorts from the University of Wyoming and Denver Colorado have put together a smart aggregation that has taken Markley’s charts of Walton’s tunes to deliver a solid session. Opening with “Cedar’s Blues” the saxophone section shows its harmonic chops early on, leading […]