Mark Perna Music

I want to thank everyone who came to the CD release parties at the Press Bistro in Johnstown for Richie's party and at James St. in Pittsburgh for Don's party.  I really want to thank everyone who supported us by buying CDs.  This endeavor is insanely expensive to maintain and your support is essential to keeping it going.  We have a bunch of great projects that we'll be releasing this and next year but without your support, it just won't happen.

I'd like specifically thank a few people who really went above and beyond:  first the musicians: Kevin Moore on both nights,  Vince Taglieri, John Schmidt, Eric Susoeff and, of course, Richie Cole (who gets a special thanks for coming and sitting in at Don's party) and Don Aliquo.  I'd like to thank the wonderful musicians who sat in with us: Mary Anne Mangini, Ray Bruckman on both nights, Josh Ben, Andy Fite, Alec I-don't-know-your-last-name-and-I-should from Press Bistro.   I'd like to thank Josh Ben, Amber Humbert and Ray Bruckman for doing a fabulous job selling CDs at James St.; the night's success is largely due to your efforts.

Jim Barr and Aaron Jackendoff-my production team. If not for you guys, these CDs would not have been made nor marketed.  The projects would have been still born.  I'd still be thinking about making CDs if not for you guys.  Your ideas, sweat and diligence are what make this production company function. I can't do this without you.

Thanks to Kevin Saftner and his crew at James St.  and Jeremy Shearer and his crew at Press Bistro for having us and treating us so good.

I hope I didn't miss anyone.

Buy more CDs and downloads!

Thanks, 
mark



 

So we're getting a new furnace.  Stay with me, it ends up being relevant.  In order to get the new furnace into the house, I had to clean the basement up to make room for the guys taking out the old furnace and installing the new one.  While doing so, I stumbled upon a cache of Don Aliquo recordings that I had completely forgotten about dating from 1998 to 2002.  All were well recorded and mixed.  The performances are exceptional as well.  Some are even great.   Some date back to Don's original sessions at Studiophonix 3001 in Mt. Pleasant in 1998 and 1999 and a few later ones from 2001.  Others were from Mr. Smalls in 2002.  Yet others date to 2002 at Heids.  There are a bunch of trio sessions with John Schmidt, Don and I and one quartet session adding Eric Susoeff.  There's a duo session from Heids with Don and I.  Some of the sessions from Studiophonix date from the DNA album (which will be remastered and made available here after the Year of the Don project is complete).  For those of you that don't know, DNA was Don's second album (released 1999) and featured Don with Don Jr., Eric Susoeff, John Schmidt and myself.   We didn't use all of the material that we recorded for that album.  There were a bunch of great performances that we didn't have room to include on DNA.  They will be seeing the light of day now in the Year of the Don project.

As you can imagine, this changes the dynamic of the 7 album Year of the Don set.  We've already completed albums 1-5 (all available right here in the MPM store in download form and albums 1 and 2 are available as CDs as well.  The others will be available in CD form soon).  We're working on albums 6 and 7 and those will be completed as envisioned but, with all of the additional newly discovered material, we're planning on issuing 2-3 "bonus" discs.   

It looks like there will CD release parties on the third Saturday  of the month at VOMA in Johnstown every month through June and possibly July 2017 now.

I had the honor of playing the last Pittsburgh Mellon Jazz festival in 2002 opening for Dr. John.  The year before, Pittsburgh-based Mellon Bank had sold it's retail banking operation and this was the last year they would underwrite events like the Jazz Festival.  The band was my working band of the time with alto and bari saxophonist Mike Sakash, alto saxophonist Dave Turner and drummer John Schmidt. Collectively we were called Perna, Schmidt, Sakash and Turner.  Guitarist Eric Susoeff, who has been my strong musical ally and buddy for decades, played with us whenever he could and for the show we added the great tenor and soprano saxophonist Eric Defade. This band recorded two albums (Ferocious Boogie and Tales of the Singing Monkey) both of which are available as downloads and/or CDs from Mark Perna Music.  They were also featured on the first album issued under my own name (Voodoo Science) which is also available through the MPM store.  

We played four tunes that day.  The first, called Smooth Telemarketer, was written by Dave Turner.  The second through fourth were written by me.  Fall Out, Bursting with Love and Wind, Rain, Fire & Schmidt were all standard parts of our repertoire in 2002.  We had a steady 4 night per week gig at a restaurant called Valhalla in the Strip District of Pittsburgh.  Valhalla closed in 2003 and there's a restaurant called Eleven where it used to be.

In 2002 though, Dan Melnick producer of the Mellon Jazz Festival (among many others throughout the US), had asked for my help with the local portion of the Festival where other artists would play local venues of which Valhalla was one.  He generously asked me if I wanted to play the big stage.  We were one of only two local acts on the big stage.  Gene Ludwig with Ken Karsh was the other.  Dr. John was the feature act.

We managed to get through almost our entire set before it started raining.  You can see it coming down during Eric Susoeff's solo in Wind, Rain, Fire & Schmidt.

Dave Turner's parents shot the video which, in 2002, was on a big old VHS camera.  I transferred it to DVD so this is a second generation copy.  

I want to thank Eric Susoeff for this video.  I've been going through my archives looking for old recordings for the Don Aliquo project (Year of the Don; see an earlier blog post for details) when Eric showed up with a giant box of recordings of EVERY session we've ever done together going back to 1999.  This video was among booty.  I had long ago lost my copy.  In addition to this video, he had at least 6 or 7 sessions that I had completely forgotten about including a great take on one of them of "Play Your Seuss Off" from a 2006 session with Mike Sakash, Eric Defade and Tom Wendt (in addition to Esus and myself) that will end up on our forthcoming album "Reunion".  He also had at least 4 sessions with Don Aliquo that I'll be pulling material from for the Year of the Don project.  In fact, the last portion of the project has been extensively revised from my original vision because of this bounty of newly discovered material.








 

Currently the Richie Cole Plays Ballads & Love Songs is available as a digital download through CD Baby, Amazon, iTunes and here at Mark Perna Music.  It is available for purchase as a CD only through CD Baby and here at Mark Perna Music.  If you purchase it here at MPM, we will not charge shipping and, in most cases, will ship it the same day as the order.  We are in the process of figuring out why it isn't available through Amazon yet.  We should have it cleared up shortly.

 

Richie Cole Plays Ballads & Love Songs is now available both CD and as a download!  Available at CD Baby, Amazon and iTunes or click on "MPM Store" right here on this very website and we here at Mark Perna Music will rush a copy off to you.  If you buy the CD, you get a free download of the album so you can start listening to it right away.  

The attached video is the definitive story of how Richie Cole Plays Ballads & Love Songs came to be.

On October 15, 2016, The Richie Cole Plays Ballads & Love Songs quartet performed on the syndicated public radio program The Saturday Light Brigade with long time host Larry Berger.    You can listen to the program here: http://neighborhoodvoices.org/live-music-richie-cole-quartet  Special thanks to Chad Green for the great mix.  And for those wondering why I played electric bass instead of my customary, and probably more appropriate, double bass, we had about 2 minutes to set up the entire band.  It's hard enough to mic a double bass under the best of circumstances and having played the show before, I figured it would make life easier for everyone if I brought something I could just plug in and go.   

Richie Cole Plays Ballads & Loves Songs have garnered two reviews so far.  

The first is from the Midwest Record Entertainment Reviews, News and Views  10/15/16 

RCP  
RICHIE COLE/Plays Ballads & Love Songs: A session that happened by happenstance, most of these tracks are first takes recorded in Cole's recently adopted home of Pittsburgh. What's really of interest here is that 45 years into his career as a hard blowing bopper, this is his first album of ballads and slow songs and it's a doozy. Staunchly backing up his claim that he makes his sax sing, this is a lyrical, lovely album where the slow pace never become tiresome wearing out it's welcome. Loaded with the mark of a pro playing something he really wants to play, this is a boatload of standards with Cole wringing out stuff you never heard in them before. An absolute must hear of an album. Well done, indeed. 

http://midwestrecord.com/MWR1155.html
 

The second is from the Buffalo News:
 

Published  October 13, 2016 

JAZZ 

Richie Cole, "Plays Ballads and Love Songs" (Richie Cole Presents, Available next week) 

Say what? "Alto Madness" through bebop is Richie Cole's game, not ballads. You've got to remember that Cole is the first jazz musician to make a plausible jazz version of the theme from "I Love Lucy." 

That's why this is a mind-boggling first ballad album by Richie Cole in his 45-year career. It came about this way: Cole and an orchestra had rented a Pittsburgh studio to record a lot of the music for a previously released album but another opportunity for the orchestra musicians came along. So Cole and his rhythm section remained to play whatever they wanted. After eight tunes, they realized they'd been playing ballads. So they went the whole way for a ballad record. 

But even there, Cole is in the "alto madness" business whenever possible. Would you believe Johnny Mathis' seldom jazzified "Chances Are?" And "It's Magic?" And, are you ready, a jazz version of "The Internationale"  which he plays --no, caresses. By God, it works as a ballad. "I don't play the saxophone, I sing the saxophone" he says, and proves on the best of this. Even when Cole is not the great bebop comedian of the alto saxophone, he'll find a way to give you bebop vaudeville somehow. 

3 stars (out of four)

http://buffalonews.com/2016/10/13/richie-cole-makes-ballad-record/