USAF Airmen of Note: Aim High/The 2024 Jazz Heritage Series

by Jack Bowers
November 15, 2024

Aim High, recorded as part of the 2024 Jazz Heritage Series, is the forty-sixth album by the U.S. armed services' premier jazz ensemble, the Airmen of Note, founded in 1950 to honor the tradition of Major Glenn Miller's Army Air Corps dance band, which entertained the troops during World War II until Miller's untimely death in 1944. Those who have heard no more than one of those recordings would no doubt agree that any accolades aimed at the AON have ...

Jeremy Cohen: Raymond Scott Reimagined

by Walter Atkins
July 25, 2023

Raymond Scott Reimagined is an engaging collaborative project with Quartet San Francisco, Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band and the Grammy winning acapella group Take 6 on two tracks. The album is a thoughtful and stylish interpretation of Raymond Scott's legacy. It is also interspersed with audio tidbits featuring Scott's singular musical approaches. The album kicks off with the enticing “Powerhouse," familiar to anyone who has watched a Warner Bros Looney Tunes cartoon. “Toy Trumpet" is a tasty composition ...

Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band: The Reset

by Jack Bowers
December 16, 2021

Gordon Goodwin's dynamic Big Phat Band rumbles back onto the scene with The Reset, a somewhat less-than-big-phat album whose dual purpose, according to Goodwin, is to express hope and gratitude in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic and to honor one of Goodwin's mentors, the late Sammy Nestico. Goodwin calls the album an EP, whose twenty-eight minute playing time places it in roughly the same ballpark as a vinyl LP from the good old days before digital recording and streaming. ...

Take Five with Gordon Goodwin

by AAJ Staff
October 21, 2021

Meet Gordon Goodwin Having amassed 21 Grammy nominations, four Grammy wins and three Emmy wins, Gordon Goodwin is one of the most decorated big band leaders in the 21st century. As the leader of Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band, an internationally renowned ensemble with a reputation as one of the most exciting in jazz, the BPB has released eight critically acclaimed records, including Life in the Bubble, (Telarc, 2014) which garnered four Grammy Nominations, and won the Grammy ...

Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band: Act Your Age

by Edward Blanco
December 13, 2008

Band leader, composer and instrumentalist Gordon Goodwin takes his 18-piece Big Phat Band to another level, producing a rare CD/DVD set and garnishing a heap of praise from critics and the Grammy folks alike. Act Your Age is one heck of an album, having received three 2008 Grammy nominations for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album, Best Instrumental Composition (Goodwin's “Hit The Ground Running"), and Best Instrumental Arrangement (Goodwin's arrangement of “Yesterdays"). This makes for a total of 11 nominations, and ...

Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band: The Phat Pack

by Jack Bowers
August 2, 2006

The suave and irrepressible Rat Pack, whose urbane image was shrewdly nurtured for so many years by Ol' Blue Eyes, meistersinger Frank Sinatra himself, is no longer with us. Luckily, we have as partial solace The Phat Pack, the convivial third recording by jack-of-all-trades Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band. Goodwin bows respectfully to his illustrious predecessors by reprising two songs closely associated with members of the Rodent Gang, Sinatra's “It Was a Very Good Year" and Sammy Davis Jr.'s “Too ...

Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band: XXL

by Russell Moon
November 12, 2003

We still have a few weeks before he hear Auld Lang Syne, but I'm going to vote early. I hold in my hands the Album of the Year.

XXL is the Big Phat Band's second album. Its first, Swingin' For the Fences, was nominated for two Grammys two years ago. Composer/arranger Gordon Goodwin has won three Emmys for his work on cartoons. He formed the band as a studio unit, but it now performs twice a month in the Los ...