#JimSnidero : Jazz Alto Saxophone Revisited

by Steven A. Cerra
Tuesday, June 27, 2017

“For most of the last three decades, the tenor saxophone has dominated the forest of jazz woodwinds, its dark, obviously romantic shadow all but obscuring the once-prominent alto sax. In recent years, though, the alto saxophone's singular, sexy intensity has again gained fashion, re-establishing its vital niche in the jazz environment. You can thank guys like Jim Snidero for helping make it so.” - Neil Tesser, Jazz writer/critic

“I want to be as creative as possible.  But I don’t think you ever can exhaust straight-ahead music. There are so many things that you can do just by changing a few notes, by changing phrasing, by changing octaves. I sense something missing in the shape of a line and the time feel of cats who haven’t gotten deeply into Bird and bebop. Basically, I want my music not to sound straight-ahead but still have that bebop attitude—a bit of abstraction and a bit of grease.” - Jim Snidero

“he takes this music for quartet and quintet beyond the jam session mentality that assures so many small-group sessions of only momentary interest. In an area of music that is underused—in fact, largely undiscovered—by most jazz artists, he invests his work with dynamics” as well as “harmonic shape and texture.” - Doug Ramsey, Jazz author, writer, critic

Whenever I listen to the music of alto saxophonist Jim Snidero, it always makes me wonder why I don’t do so more often.

It’s all there: the bop tradition of Bird, Cannonball and Stitt; some freer post bop influences; gobs of technique; impressive improvisation ideas; an irrepressible sense of swing.

What makes the music of Jim Snidero even more impressive is that he didn’t begin his career in Jazz until the early 1980s. 

Given the relative paucity of the US Jazz scene at that time, it’s amazing that he found the music at all, let alone his own direction in it.

Here’s a quick synopsis of Jim’s background and credentials as excerpted from the Concord Music website:

“A teenage student of Phil Woods and a product of the jazz program at the University of North Texas in Denton, Snidero received postgraduate training with organist Jack McDuff in 1982-83. He side-manned from 1983 to 2003 with the Toshiko Akiyoshi Big Band, played with Eddie Palmieri from 1994 to 1997 and with the Mingus Orchestra from 1999 to 2001, and has appeared as a sideman on albums by pianists David Hazeltine and Mike LeDonne [who also plays Hammond B-3 Organ], tenor saxophonist Walt Weiskopf, and trumpeters Joe Magnarelli and Brian Lynch. Since the late Eighties, he’s led numerous ensembles featuring the top musicians of his peer group, and toured them extensively in the U.S., Japan, and Europe.”

Paralleling Jim education and work experience is the fact that Jim continues to grow and develop his own, personal vision and sound as a Jazz artist.

Or as Neil Tesser explains it:

“More to the point, Snidero has identified, studied, and even elaborated upon the classic virtues of his instrument. These include a fierce rhythmic authority, which dovetails with the instrument's natural bite (and without which the alto can sound gray and fallen), and the ability to really fill the horn: to "sing out," whether it be through a single note or a flurry of wildly complicated improvisation. But it all starts with the sound.

read more: http://jazzprofiles.blogspot.com.br/2017/06/jim-snidero-jazz-alto-saxophone.html