Randy Brecker

On Tuesday, I got a chance to meet and work with one of my musical heroes, trumpet artist Randy Brecker - he came to town with the UNO Jazz Ensemble to perform a concert at Southeast - he also performed with the LSE Jazz Band which I direct. Randy is a multiple Grammy Award winner, and was one of the players I tried to emulate when I was a student in high school. You might remember the band I had in college with Matt Wallace, Andy Hall, and Bill Bolmeier - we were trying to play some of the tunes from the Brecker Brothers albums that Randy recorded with his brother Michael.

In addition to his jazz performances with many of the great players of the last 40 years (Jaco Pastorius, Dave Sanborn, Horace Silver, Larry Coryell, and many, many others), Randy has also performed and recorded with pop and rock artists as diverse as Steely Dan, Frank Sinatra, Chaka Khan, Frank Zappa, George Benson, Bruce Springsteen, Parliament-Funkadelics, and James Taylor.

A pic of Randy and me after the concert - in the process of autographing the CD he was giving me:

Here is some video of his performance with my students - Randy's solo starts at about 4:30 into the recording (btw, the first trumpet soloist is my son Tommy). The piece the kids are playing is an original composition called Southeast Six Step - commissioned specifically for the LSE Jazz Ensemble I, and written by Eric Richards.