World Stars at Budapest Jazz Club - ALERANT Jazz Night: Jerry Bergonzi Quartet (USA)

Jerry Bergonzi’s career started in the late 70’s with one of the most-in-demand formations of those days, the Dave Brubeck Quartet. Although the classic old warhorse, one of the most often played tunes in the world, Take 5 had been composed by Jerry’s predecessor, Paul Desmond, Jerry himself also did justice to it several times. However, his fame and success is not due to that but rather to him going his own way by moving ahead with Coltrane’s legacy in a most individual manner.

At the end of the 80s Bergonzi returned to his hometown, Boston that had also given birth to numerous world class players. There he started recording under his own name, those albums sold extremely well both in the States and in Europe. By then he was heading his own groups, the quartet Con Brio or the Trio Gonz. When Michael Brecker’s young pianist, by now the world famous Joey Calderazzo recorded his first album for Blue Note, alongside Brecker and Branford Marsalis, he invited Bergonzi to the sax section.

Bergonzi’s energetic playing hugely impressed the guys at Blue Note as well, so that the following year he too could make his own album, „Standard Gonz” with them. Up until now he has recorded nearly thirty albums. The last one came out last year under the title „By any other name” on which the saxophonist tagged by the American critics as „a musicians’ musician”  is playing standards like „Giants steps”, „Bye bye blackbird” or „Joy spring”. His intellectual, but nevertheless fun-loving and boundary-breaking approach is demonstrated by the titles he gave the above mentioned tunes: „PG 2013”, „Of a feather”  and „Sprung”.  Although foreign critics recommend the album mainly for „serious jazz fans”, our audience shouldn’t dread the prospect of endless solo outings, because Bergonzi who can make his sax sound every which way, will also include several of his older and lighter tunes in the repertoire.