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Benjamin Boone: Confluence: The Ireland Sessions
by Paul Rauch
Saxophonist/composer/educator Benjamin Boone is known as a project artist in the first degree. His collaboration with major modern poets has produced a foursome of albums on the Origin Records label, including two with US Poet Laureate, Philip Levine. His saxophone approach could be described as colorful melodicism, a quality accentuated by Boone's open ended compositions that lack the confinement of dense chordal harmony. His playing can then function off the leash so to speak, darting off in a full spectrum ...
Continue ReadingBenjamin Boone: Confluence - The Ireland Sessions
by Jason Crane
"A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions." --Oliver Wendell Holmes “It's not that the Irish are cynical. It's rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody." --Brendan Behan The Oliver Wendell Holmes quote is loftier, but the Brendan Behan quote gets closer to the heart of the matter on saxophonist Benjamin Boone's new album Confluence: The Ireland Sessions, which finds Boone ...
Continue ReadingBenjamin Boone: Caught in the Rhythm
by Paul Rauch
The connection between poetry and jazz music is a delicate one. It has been documented so infrequently, in performance and recordings, that one still conjures the flicker of an image of Jack Kerouac reading in some dark Greenwich Village cafe with Steve Allen or Zoot Sims, surrounded by beret-wearing, cappuccino-sipping beatniks. The work of Fresno-based saxophonist Benjamin Boone has assisted in widening that view through four albums recorded for the Origin Records label, including the fourth, Caught in the Rhythm ...
Continue ReadingBenjamin Boone: The Poets Are Gathering
by Paul Rauch
Saxophonist Benjamin Boone continues his ambitious foray into jazz and poetry, this time recruiting an impressive cadre of poets for his aptly entitled release, The Poets are Gathering (Origin, 2020). The union of poetry and jazz has never been so powerfly presented, reflecting the past year of the worldwide Black Lives Matter movement, the universal role of the poet, and the power of art and voice to raise awareness and inspire change. The album employs the likes of US Poet ...
Continue ReadingBenjamin Boone: The Poetry of Jazz and the Ghanaian Connection
by Duncan Heining
So, Down Beat picks your record, The Poetry of Jazz, as one of its year-end top three. You put out a second volume, which is similarly well-received. Now here's the conundrum. Do you lock into the niche and follow up with more of the same? Or do you go for broke with that program masterpiece you always dreamed of? If you're saxophonist-composer Benjamin Boone, the answer's neither of the above. Instead, Boone has opted for a set with ...
Continue ReadingBenjamin Boone: Joy
by Chris M. Slawecki
Benjamin Boone's set with this band born and grown in Ghana is a genuine cross-cultural jazz Joy. The seeds of Joy were planted when composer-saxophonist Boone spent a year as a US Fulbright Scholar in Ghana in sabbatical from his professorship at California State University (Fresno), to study the country's music and musical traditions. The music Boone found made him feel at home: “These guys know American jazz inside and out--but with a definite Ghanaian twist," he explains. ...
Continue ReadingBenjamin Boone with the Ghana Jazz Collective: Joy
by Dan Bilawsky
When saxophonist Benjamin Boone took a sabbatical from his teaching position at California State University Fresno to travel to Ghana as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar, he envisioned a yearlong educational immersion in the music, arts and broader culture of the region. What he couldn't have imagined, which became reality, was connecting with a set of Accra-based musicians who would welcome him into the fold as a band mate. Eager to document this newfound partnership before he returned to America, Boone ...
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