The Ed Palermo Big Band - I've Got News For You: The Music of Edgar Winter (October 15, 2021)

The ED PALERMO BIG BAND Delivers an Entrancing Tribute to Legendary Texas Blues/Jazz Multi-Instrumentalist EDGAR WINTER

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I’VE GOT NEWS FOR YOU: THE MUSIC OF EDGAR WINTER

An Instrumental and Vocal Tour de Force, the Sky Cat Records Release Features Palermo’s Swaggering 17-Piece Jazz Orchestra Joyfully Conjuring a Soul-filled, Blues-Drenched Sound

Guest Artists Include Guitarists Robben Ford and Jimmy Leahy, Violinist Katie Jacoby, and Vocalists Kimberly Davis, Keith Anthony Fluitt, Vanesse Thomas, Chrissi Poland, Deb Lyons, Carlos Murguía, and Rob Paparozzi

For acclaimed jazz big band leader, arranger, composer and saxophonist Ed Palermo, Edgar Winter wasn’t just a gateway drug to jazz. To a youth raised on New Jersey's shore, the music of the Texan multi-instrumental star was a mind-expanding key that unlocked the overlapping realms of blues, jazz and rock. There’s a straight line between Palermo’s teenage immersion in Winter’s music and the emergence decades later of his big band, which has earned international renown for its authentically warped arrangements of Frank Zappa’s music. Palermo has long included Winter material in the band’s wide-ranging book, but his new album on the Sky Cat Records, I’ve Got News For You: The Music of Edgar Winter, is his first dedicated to his early inspiration. Slated for release on Oct. 15, 2021, the album is almost indecently fun, as if someone crossed the New Testament Count Basie Orchestra’s book with a Zappa-designed R&B revue.

With his adventurous spirit and talent-packed big band, Palermo is ideally placed to celebrate a singular artist who, Winter himself acknowledges, “is primarily thought of as a rocker,” known for virtuosic scorchers like “Frankenstein,” an instrumental tune that was “almost a precursor of heavy metal and fusion,” Winter said. “But I also love jazz and classical and if there's one common thread that runs through all my music, it is blues."

Palermo was a budding high school saxophonist with little interest in jazz when he experienced an epiphany listening to the first albums by Beaumont, Texas blues guitarist Johnny Winter, who featured his younger brother Edgar on keyboards, vocals, and most importantly alto sax. “The saxophone playing really blew my mind,” Palermo says. “He’s playing the most killing bebop, fast and smooth. I knew then I wanted to play like that. To this day my main influences are Cannonball, Phil Woods and Edgar Winter, and David Sanborn too.”

The album opens with a blast of boogie, “I Hate Everybody,” a song from Johnny Winter’s 1969 album Second Winter. The track features some stellar work by well-traveled rock guitarist Jimmy Leahey and soul-stirring vocals from Carlos Murguía, a singer best known for his work with an array of Latin music superstars. On “Tobacco Road,” a standout track on Edgar’s 1970 debut album Entrance, Palermo showcases guitar legend Robben Ford and the great Kimberly Davis, whose powerhouse performances throughout the project reveal several different sides of the longtime vocalist for Niles Rodgers’ pioneering disco/rock band Chic.

“The hardest part about this album was figuring out who was going to sing,” Palermo said. “On Entrance, Edgar’s singing is astounding. Me and Steve Jankowski realized we need singers who can make the songs their own. Kim Davis is one of my favorites, and she nailed it.”

A forthright rocker delivered with swagger and confidence by vocalist Chrissi Poland, a longtime member of Sam & Dave soul legend Sam Moore’s band, “A Different Game” is another gem from Entrance. She’s matched in intensity by a violin solo by Katie Jacoby, who’s been touring lately with The Who. While the song never made it into Winter’s working repertoire, this rendition should put it back into circulation. And for vocal magic, it’s hard to beat Keith Anthony Fluitt on the ballad “Dying To Live,” a devastating indictment of humanity delivered with the sweet soul crooning of a master whose credits include Ashford & Simpson, Quincy Jones, and Michael Jackson.

As an arranger, Palermo has found inspiration reconfiguring the rock canon for his big band, and he’s got plenty to work with in Winter’s discography. His version of “Peace Pipe,” another tune from Entrance, transforms a solo where Winter scats a unison line along with his organ and arranges it for five saxophones. That’s Barbara Cifelli romping on the baritone sax and Ted Kooshian raising hell on the organ. Palermo takes a turn in the spotlight on “All Out,” a jaunty but harmonically treacherous piece “that Winter told me he envisioned as a theme for Johnny Carson introducing some guest,” Palermo said.

The album’s tour de force is Palermo’s arrangement of “Winter’s Dream,” the suite that takes up the first side of Entrance. The seven movements go from strength to strength, starting and concluding with the enviably versatile Deb Lyons on the album’s title track and its reprise. Other highlights include an imploring Fluitt taking “Where Have You Gone” deep into the pews, and a headlong sprint through “Fire and Ice” evidences much more of the former than the latter. “It’s the song that caught my ear as a kid,” Palermo said. “He plays so fast. It’s a great jazz/rock tune, and more than any other song it changed my life.”

The album closes with a pair of songs, “You Are My Sunshine” and “I’ve Got News For You,” that embody the dualities that bedevil American society: black and white, urban and rural, country and soul. Both pieces were show-stoppers for Winter, and in the hands of an albino white bluesman, polar phenomena are integrated into one irresistible celebration. Palermo based his arrangement of “Sunshine” on a version he heard Winter play in the early 1970s at a concert he recorded on a little reel to reel rig.

“Edgar gets on the piano and says here’s a song done a lot of ways, and he starts playing these very sophisticated chords, very Mose Allison,” Palermo said. “The band kicks in after the verse with these unbelievable emotional chord changes and he’s singing the hell out of it.”

Vanesse Thomas, the daughter of Rufus Thomas and Aretha Franklin’s favorite backup vocalist, is more than equal to the task, offering a performance for the ages. And she’s equally effective on the closer, “I've Got News For You,” a tune indelibly associated with Ray Charles. If Brother Ray got married to Betty Carter after they waxed “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” the couple may have ended up like Thomas and Rob Paparozzi, who bicker and accuse each other of stepping out on a hilarious duet. It’s a fittingly unexpected conclusion for a tribute to an artist who confounds categorization.

Winter has been part of Palermo’s music since the beginning, literally. On his first big band album, 1982’s Papier Mache, he connected with Winter through drummer Terry Silverlight “and got Edgar to take a couple of solos” on the title track, Palermo said. “As the years went by periodically I’d arrange other songs of his and I’d send them to him and he was always complimentary. ‘All Out,’ that’s an obscure song from Jasmine Nightdream, and he was touched that I would take a song that wasn’t a hit. These are deep cuts. I’ve known him for close to 40 years.”

Clearly, Palermo is no Johnny-come-lately to the genius of Edgar Winter. But 2021’s I’ve Got News For You: The Music of Edgar Winter should serve as a wake-up call to music fans who’ve been sleeping on Winter’s treasure-laden discography. It should also alert fans of big band music to Ed Palermo’s expansive, exceptional and often surprising discography. With this outstanding big band blues tribute – the result of decades of admiration for Winter’s music, and decades of experience leading and arranging music for his stellar musicians – Ed Palermo sets himself apart as one of the most vital bandleaders and versatile arrangers in 21st century big band jazz.

One of the news worthy messages behind I’ve Got News for You is that contemporary big band jazz is one of American music's most vibrant, inclusive, significant and delightfully entertaining forms, able to evolve and embrace all popular genres to create hybrid American music that is simultaneously rooted in the tradition and startling, refreshingly new. Another notice implicit in I’ve Got News for You: The Music of Edgar Winter: we should watch where the romantic visionary arranger Ed Palermo leads big band music next. 

1. I Hate Everybody

2. Tobacco Road

3. Peace Pipe

4. All Out

5. A Different Game

6. Dying to Live

7. Jump Right Out

8. Entrance

9. Where Have You Gone

10. Rise to Fall

11. Fire and Ice

12. Hung Up

13. Back in the Blues

14. Re-Entrance

15. You Are My Sunshine

16. I've Got News For You

PREORDER

The Ed Palermo Big Band - The Adventures of Zodd Zundgren (CUNEIFORM RECORDS 2017)

The Ed Palermo Big Band brings together two fave 1960s American Pop/Rock Superheroes for

The Adventures of Zodd Zundgren,

a Dizzying and Ingenious Reinvention of Music

by Frank Zappa and Todd Rundgren

Ed Palermo may have gained an international following with his ingenious orchestral arrangements of Frank Zappa tunes, but he’s hardly a one-trick pony. Earlier in the year, the saxophonist released an uproarious double album The Great Un-American Songbook Volumes 1 & 2, a project celebrating an expansive roster of songs by successive waves of British invaders, from the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Jeff Beck to King Crimson, Traffic, and Jethro Tull.

With his new big band project, slated for release on Cuneiform Records on October 6, 2017, Palermo is back on his home turf, but the landscape feels strange and uncanny. He’s reclaiming the Zappa songbook, filtering Frank through the emotionally charged lens of the polymathic musical wizard Todd Rundgren in a wild and wooly transmogrification, The Adventures of Zodd Zundgren. Working with the same stellar cast of players, Palermo somehow captures the essence of these iconoclastic masters, making Zappa Zappier and Todd more Rundgrenian.

He sees the Zappa and Rundgren as embodying a ying and yang approach to life that played an essential role in helping him navigate the minefields of teenage angst in the 1960s. “For most of my high school days my favorite musicians were Zappa and Todd Rundgren,” Palermo says. “Rundgren had his songs about self-pity, which were exactly what I needed back then. I’d go out with a girl and whatever party I brought her to she’d go and hang out with another dude. Todd understood. At the same time, Zappa had these snarky songs like ‘Broken Hearts are for Assholes.’ It was tough love. You gotta broken heart? Deal with it. Todd Rundgren’s music was there to give you a hug. I wanted to contrast the hard-bitten Zappa followed by a bleeding heart Rundgren ballad.”

Though the title suggests a forced merger, The Adventures of Zodd Zundgren doesn’t mashup the oeuvres of the two masters. Rather, the album mostly alternates between the composers, creating a deliciously dizzying whipsaw as the two diametrical stances sometimes blur or even switch. Zappa’s soaring fanfare “Peaches En Regalia” is more inspirational than smarmy, with a particularly eloquent alto sax solo by Cliff Lyons, while a brisk and forthright version of Rundgren’s “Influenza” showcases the muscular lyricism of violinist Katie Jacoby, one of the orchestra’s essential voices.

Palermo reaches deep into the Rundgren songbook for “Kiddie Boy,” a stinging blues from 1969’s Nazz Nazz, the seminal second release by his underappreciated band Nazz (an album which originally bore the Zappaesque title Fungo Bat). Drawing directly from the maestro’s original horn arrangement, Palermo displays some impressive guitar work on a vehicle for Bruce McDaniel’s blue-eye vocals. Napoleon Murphy Brock delivers a poker-faced rendition of Zappa’s surreal “Montana,” the tune that turned a generation on to the lucrative potential of floss farming, and McDaniel and Brock join forces on Rundgren’s deliriously silly “Emperor of the Highway,” an homage to Gilbert and Sullivan.

The contrasting sensibilities of the Zundgrens comes into sharp focus in the center of the album. While Palermo has recorded Zappa’s “Echidna’s Arf (Of You)” this time he replaces the horns with McDaniel’s intricately layered vocals via the miracle of multi-tracking. From Zappa’s playfully odd metered work out the big band saunters into Rundgren’s greatest ballad “Hello It's Me,” an arrangement for McDaniel’s most impassioned crooning based on the original version from 1968 album Nazz (not the hit from his solo Something/Anything? album).

Tenor saxophonist Bill Straub swaggers through Rundgren’s “Wailing Wall,” which is sandwiched between two slices of Zappa at his snarky best, “Big Swifty Coda” and “Florentine Pogen,” another superb feature for Brock. Palermo spotlights a dark and wondrous Zappa obscurity with “Janet's Big Dance Number,” a brief piece recovered from 200 Motels featuring Ben Kono’s noir tenor solo. From that unified hedgehogian arrangement Palermo unleashes the multifarious fox on Rundgren’s “Broke Down and Busted,” a portmanteau arrangement that touches on Rundgren’s “Boat on the Charles,” the Ramsey Lewis hit “The ‘In’ Crowd,” Zappa’s “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It,” and even traces of Steely Dan’s “Pretzel Logic.” It’s a tour de force that feels like stream of consciousness journey, though the id truly emerged on the closing hidden track. In what has become a Palermo tradition, he includes yet another version of an enduring lament about the difficulties of relationships, arranged this time in Nazzian style by McDaniel.

The seamless ease with which Palermo and his crack crew navigate between the Zappa and Rundgren shouldn’t come as a surprise. Over the years Zappa’s music has proven supremely pliable in Palermo’s capable hands, as evidenced further by a recent concert at Iridium that paired his songs with standards indelibly linked to Ol’ Blue Eyes (is there an album The Adventures of Zinatra in the future?). Everything he brings into the big band is a labor of love.

“Todd Rundgren holds a very special place in my heart,” Palermo says. “I realized I was in love with my girlfriend (now wife) listening to his album Something/Anything? It was about 2 years ago doing our regular hit at The Falcon that I decided to have Zodd Zundgren night. A lot of people who like the music of Zappa also like Rundgren and Steely Dan, but there are enough Steely Dan cover bands out there.”

Born in Ocean City, New Jersey on June 14, 1954, Palermo grew up in the cultural orbit of Philadelphia, which was about an hour drive away. He started playing clarinet in elementary school, and soon turned to the alto saxophone. He also took up the guitar, and credits his teenage obsession with Zappa to opening his ears to post-bop harmonies and improvisation.

Palermo caught the jazz bug while attending DePaul University, and took to the alto sax with renewed diligence inspired by Phil Woods, Cannonball Adderley, and Edgar Winter (the subject of an upcoming EPBB project). Before he graduated he was leading his own band and making a good living as a studio player recording commercial jingles. But like so many jazz musicians he answered New York’s siren call, moving to Manhattan in 1977. After a year of playing jam sessions and scuffling Palermo landed a coveted gig with Tito Puente, a four-year stint that immersed him in Afro-Cuban music.

An encounter with trumpeter Woody Shaw’s septet at the Village Vanguard in the late 1970s stoked his interest in writing and arranging for larger ensembles, and by the end of the decade he had launched a nine-piece rehearsal band with five horns. Between Don Sebesky’s well-regarded book The Contemporary Arranger and advice from Dave Lalama and Tim Ouimette, “I got a lot of my questions answered and I’ll love them forever,” Palermo says. “Then the real education was trial and error. I lived in a little apartment with no TV or furniture. All I had was a card table, and once a week I’d rehearse my nonet, then listen to the cassette of the rehearsal and make all the changes.”

Palermo made his recording debut in 1982, an impressive session featuring heavyweights such as David Sanborn, Edgar Winter and Randy Brecker. As a consummate studio cat and sideman, he toured and recorded with an array of stars, including Aretha Franklin, Eddie Palmieri, Celia Cruz, Lena Horne, Tony Bennett, Mel Tormé, Lou Rawls, Melba Moore, The Spinners, and many others. As an arranger, he’s written charts for the Tonight Show Band, Maurice Hines, Eddy Fischer, and Melissa Walker. Employed frequently by bass star Christian McBride for a disparate array of projects, Palermo has written arrangements for a James Brown concert at the Hollywood Bowl, a Frank Sinatra tribute featuring Kurt Elling, Seth McFarland, and John Pizzarelli, and a 20-minute medley of Wayne Shorter tunes for the New Jersey Ballet.

Palermo had been leading his big band for more than a decade before the Zappa concept started coming together. Inspired by electric guitar master Mike Keneally, who performed with Zappa on some of his final concerts before his death in 1993, Palermo decided to arrange a program of 12 Zappa tunes. When the time came to debut the material at one of the band’s regular gigs at the Bitter End in early 1994, a sold-out crowd greeted the band.

He earned international attention with the ensemble’s 1997 debut The Ed Palermo Big Band Plays Frank Zappa on Astor Place Records, which received a highly-prized 4-star review from DownBeat. With Palermo’s brilliant arrangements and soloists such as Bob Mintzer, Chris Potter, Dave Samuels, Mike Stern, and Mike Keneally, the album made an undisputable case for the Zappa jazz concept. In 2006 he released another collection of Zappa arranged for his jazz big band, called Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance, on Cuneiform, thus beginning an ongoing collaboration with that label. While Palermo has written more than 300 Zappa charts, he’s cast an increasingly wide net for material. Recent releases like 2014’s Oh No! Not Jazz!!, 2016’s One Child Left Behind and 2017’s The Great Un-American Songbook Volumes 1 & 2 - all on Cuneiform and all recipients of DownBeat’s coveted 4-star ratings - featured a bountiful selection of his original compositions and material by composers not named Frank Zappa. 

Nothing demonstrates the ensemble’s ongoing vitality better than the stellar cast of players, with longtime collaborators such as violinist Katie Jacoby, baritone saxophonist Barbara Cifelli, drummer Ray Marchica, and keyboardist Ted Kooshian. Many of these top-shelf musicians have been in the band for more than a decade, and they bring wide-ranging experience, expert musicianship and emotional intensity to Palermo’s music.

The band’s following continues to expand with its monthly residency at Iridium and bi-monthly gigs at The Falcon. In addition, performances (some headlining) at jazz festivals across the USA are winning new fans of all ages for the band. Palermo’s profile in the jazz press is also rising fast, with articles and feature stories appearing this past year in such publications as Jazz Times and Jazziz. Regarding recordings, albums by The Ed Palermo Big Band have been critically acclaimed and also embraced by the general public-jazz and rock fans alike. Palermo has already recorded dozens of new tracks for The Great Un-American Songbook Volumes 3 & 4, and is hoping Zodd Zundgren helps introduce Rundgren’s ingenious, heartfelt music to a new generation.

The Adventures of Zodd Zundgren Track Listing:

1. The Solemn Z-Men Credo (0:25)

2. Peaches En Regalia (Frank Zappa) (3:19)

3. Influenza (Todd Rundgren) (5:50)

4. Yer Fast (Todd Rundgren) (1:27)

5. Absolutely Free (Frank Zappa) (4:26)

6. Breathless (Part 1) (Todd Rundgren) (1:38)

7. Big Swifty (Frank Zappa) (1:16)

8. Kiddie Boy (Todd Rundgren) (3:43)

9. Montana (Frank Zappa) (6:42)

10. Emperor of the Highway (Todd Rundgren) (1:38)

11. You Are What You Is (Frank Zappa) (1:45)

12. Echidna's Arf (Of You) (Frank Zappa) (3:54)

[featuring The Louisiana Swindle Singers]

13. Hello It's Me (Todd Rundgren) (3:31)

14. Big Swifty Coda (Frank Zappa) (1:35)

15. Wailing Wall (Todd Rundgren) (4:00)

16. Florentine Pogen (Frank Zappa) (7:25)

17. Flamingo (Todd Rundgren) (2:23)

18. Marqueson's Chicken (Frank Zappa) (3:53)

19. Song of the Viking (Todd Rundgren) (1:58)

20. Janet's Big Dance Number (Frank Zappa) (1:51)

21. Broke Down and Busted (Todd Rundgren) (5:13)

22. Breathless (Part 2) (Todd Rundgren) (0:51)

23. Zoot Allures (Frank Zappa) (2:50)

24. Yer Fast (Reprise) (Todd Rundgren) (0:54)

25. [Hidden Track]

The Ed Palermo Big Band

Rakishly Ribald Reeds: Cliff Lyons, Phil Chester, Bill Straub, Ben Kono, Barbara Cifelli

Triumphant Trumpets: Ronnie Buttacavoli, John Bailey, Steve Jankowski, Steve Jankowski

Terrifying Trombones: Charley Gordon, Mike Boschen, Matt Ingman

Pulsating Piano: Bob Quaranta

Scintillating Synth/Sampler: Ted Kooshian

Browbeating Bass: Paul Adamy

Dare-Devil Drums: Ray Marchica

Iconic Electric And Acoustic Violins, Villainous Vocals: Katie Jacoby

Gallant Guitar And Valorous Vocals: Bruce Mcdaniel

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Producer: Bruce McDaniel

Executive Producer: Ed Palermo

Alternative Executive Producer: Kellyanne Conway

Mostly recorded at Peaceful Waters Music, July 17, 2016-June 2, 2017.

Wayne Warnecke: Engineer

“Peaches En Regalia”, “Absolutely Free”, “Wailing Wall” and “Janet’s Big Dance Number” recorded at Jankland Recording, Wall Township, NJ.

Steve Jankowski: Engineer

Mixing, mastering, and additional recording by Bruce McDaniel at Rock Ridge Recording, New Orleans, LA.

Art & design, concept: Hugh Brennan

Illustrations: Matthew Brennan

All arrangements by Ed Palermo with the exceptions of:

“Big Swifty #1 and #2”, “Echidna’s Arf (Of You)”, by Bruce McDaniel.

“Flamingo” brilliantly arranged by Pierre Piscatelli.

“Marqueson’s Chicken” transcribed by Bruce McDaniel, arranged by Ed Palermo.

“Echidna's Arf (Of You) ” all vocals arranged and performed by Bruce McDaniel.