What better venue for Joe Lovano’s birthday bash than at his home town jazz club, Cleveland’s acclaimed Nighttown? Joining the great tenor saxophonist to help blow out the candles (and maybe blow out the roof?) on December 29^th will be wife and vocalist Judi Silvano and the rest of the Lovano Sextet, featuring Ohio resident Carmen Castaldi on drums, Oberlin (OH) professor Dan Wall on keyboards, Youngstown State U (OH) professor Dave Morgan on string bass, and special guest, Cleveland native Jamey Haddad on percussion. The night before, a quintet (minus Haddad) will perform at Porter’s in Erie, PA.

Joe Lovano

Photo by Andrea Canter

Joe Lovano has become one of the most celebrated jazz artists of his generation. Growing up in Cleveland, the son of tenor saxophonist Tony “Big T” Lovano studied with his father and absorbed the influences of Sonny Stitt, James Moody, Gene Ammons, Rashaan Roland Kirk, and Dizzy Gillespie, and later the experimental work of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Jimmy Giuffre. After attending the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Lovano made his recording debut with organ master Lonnie Smith and worked with Jack McDuff before joining Woody Herman’s Thundering Herd. He went on to perform with top big bands and touring artists, winning critics’ polls for performance and releasing a series of acclaimed recordings that garnered many Grammy nominations. He held the first Gary Burton Chair for Jazz Performance at Berklee and currently heads the Caramoor Jazz Festival in upstate New York.

Joe Lovano’s recorded output over the past decade is nothing short of phenomenal, particularly given the wide range of ensemble formats as well as outstanding musicianship. The Joe Lovano Quartets at the Village Vanguard (Blue Note, 1996) was named "Jazz Album of the Year" in the 1996 Down Beat Readers Poll and earned two Grammy nominations. With string quartet, woodwind quintet, voice and rhythm section in arrangements by Manny Albam, Lovano’s Celebrating Sinatra (Blue Note, 1997) followed with another Grammy nomination, and was described by Peter Watrous (New York Times) as “a perfectly balanced piece of work, quiet chamber jazz at its best, with Mr. Lovano's odd phrasing, with its halts and velocity, taking the music somewhere new." Flying Colors (Blue Note, 1998), a duo with virtuoso Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, was awarded four stars by the Los Angeles Times, which noted that “piece reveals yet another perspective on the talent of two extraordinary players, clearly inspired by the setting and each other, creating some of the finest jazz in recent memory."

Next came Trio Fascination: Edition One (Blue Note, 1999) featuring Joe with the incredible rhythm section of drummer Elvin Jones and bassist Dave Holland, prompting the Times of London to comment that "in Joe Lovano…the trio format has found one of its most natural exponents since Sonny Rollins or Joe Henderson...this is state-of-the-art trio jazz." With the follow-up Trio Fascination, Edition Two (Blue Note, 2000), Lovano received his third “Jazz Artist of the Year” honors in both the 2001 Down Beat Critics’ & Reader’s polls.

In 2004, Joe Lovano went in yet another direction with I’m All for You, his first of two recordingswith his long-time collaborators George Mraz and Paul Motian, and featuring keyboard legend Hank Jones. While I’m All for You was an all-ballads recording, the sequel, Joyous Encounter (Blue Note, 2005) was a more diverse program that featured Monk, Coltrane, and Thad Jones’ charts. In a sense this recording is a Jones Family tribute, as Lovano was mentored early in his career in Thad’s bands and collaborated with both Hank, who again is on piano, and the late Elvin Jones, who recorded two tracks on the current playlist, Coltrane’s “Crescent” and Oliver Nelson’s “Six and Four.”

Photo by Andrea Canter

The Sextet

Philadelphian Judi Silvano has been named one of the Top 10 Vocalists by Down Beat three times and has performed and recorded with a long and diverse list of artists from Bill Frisell to Kenny Werner to Charlie Haden, as well as husband Joe Lovano. Yet Silvano is perhaps best known as a devoted educator, progressive composer, and producer who has presented rising vocalists in a program at New York City’s Cornelia Street Café. While her many wide-ranging recordings often edge toward the avant garde, her latest acclaimed release (Let Yourself Go, Zoho Music, 2004), is a set of standards assembled for her mother’s 80^th birthday.

As a seventeen-year-old. pianist Dan Wall won a Hall of Fame Scholarship from Down Beat magazine. During the 1970s and 1980s, Wall played and recorded with Joe Chambers, Al Cohn, Steve Grossman, Eddie Gomez, Eddie Harris, Sheila Jordan, Lee Konitz, Charlie Rouse, and Jeremy Steig; over the years he has also worked with Steve Gadd, Tom Harrell, Billy Hart (a fellow faculty member at Oberlin). Henry Mancini, and Bernard Purdie. A member of the John Abercrombie Trio since 1991 as a Hammond B-3 organ artist, Wall's most recent release with the Trio is Open Land (ECM) which features guest artists Joe Lovano, Mark Feldman, and Kenny Wheeler. His most recent release as a leader is On the Inside Looking In (Double Time Records). Wall, now on the music faculty of Oberlin College, has frequently been selected for Down Beat’s International Critics' Poll.

Assistant Professor of Jazz Studies at Ohio’s Youngstown State University, David Morgan is an acclaimed bassist, composer, and arranger. His credits include work with Larry Coryell, James Moody, Frank Foster, Joe Chambers, Benny Green, Joe Lovano, Bob Brookmeyer, Bobby Watson, and Mose Allison. David performs regularly with the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra, the Jack Schantz Jazz Unit, and with a variety of smaller ensembles. His compositions are played throughout the world; the Jazz Unit released an acclaimed recording of his compositions, entitle Choices. Dan Wall was one of the collaborators on this project.

Percussion master Jamey Haddad is a native of the Cleveland Lebanese community who viewed music as a means of integrating himself into American culture. Playing drums from an early age, he befriended fellow musician Joe Lovano as a teenager, and credits Joe with helping to shape his direction in music. After attending the Berklee College of Music, Haddad played with jazz musicians, studied South Indian music with Ramnad Raghavan, and then received a Fulbright Fellowship to study percussion in South India. The recipient of four National Endowment for the Arts fellowships to pursue jazz and international studies and collaborations, today Haddad works with a wide range of projects--Paul Simon, Dave Liebman, the Paul Winter Consort, and Broadway actress/singer Betty Buckley. He also plays with musicians from all over the globe.

Jazz fans in the Cleveland area have a great opportunity to hear one of the living legends of jazz in the company of as fine an ensemble as you can find on the planet. As the Village Voice proclaimed, "Move over Pavarotti, the great Italian tenor around today isn't Luciano, but Lovano.” At Nighttown on December 29^th, the great tenor celebrates his birthday, and there will be plenty of song and sextet for the occasion.

On December 28^th, 7:30 pm, see Joe Lovano and quintet at Porters, 123 West 14^th St, Erie, PA (call 452-2787 for tickets). See the Joe Lovano Sextet as part of Nighttown’s “Home For The Holidays Series” on Thursday December 29^th; shows at 7 & 9 pm; $25. Tickets and information at www.nighttowncleveland.com. Joe will tour Europe in January before arriving in Oakland as part of McCoy Tyner’s annual residency at Yoshi’s, January 24-29 ( www.yoshis.com).