Valery Ponomarev

Feature CD Review: Valery Ponomarev's "Our Father Who Art Blakey"

For Release: January 28, 2020
Review by Malvin Massey, Jr., 1/28/2020

This Feature CD Review is from Russian trumpet master Valery Ponomarev and his big band live. The album is "Our Father Who Art Blakey: The Centennial" and is a tribute to Art Blakey and his band.

Ponomarev has lived in the United States since 1973. At 6 years old, he became fascinated with the sound of the bugle. He heard it at school and admired the older student who played it.

After cajoling from Valery and the other younger boys, he convinced the reluctant older student to let him play the horn. He says that when he tried it, he instantly knew how to play it, and played the same notes he had heard verbatim.

He became interested in jazz after hearing it on Voice Of America and felt a particular affinity for Clifford Brown and Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers.

While in college, he gathered all the recordings of the group that he could find in Moscow. Although he was a trained musician by this time, he still listened to Clifford Browns solos and learned the verbatim by ear.

He left the Soviet Union and ended up becoming a member of the Jazz Messengers. To him it was a dream come true.

Some years later, as he was about to become a father and could not continue to travel with the band, he sought a replacement trumpeter. He just happened to have heard a young 18 year old trumpet player who impressed him with his skill and knowledge of the music, so he introduced Wynton Marsalis to Art Blakey as his replacement.

He formed his own band, Universal Language, and began to perform and record on his own. He has never lost his affinity for Clifford Brown and has performed using Art Blakey charts, with particular interest in the days when Clifford Brown was the original trumpeter for the Messengers.

This CD is his second tribute to the band. He has enlisted the cream of the crop of first call New York jazz musicians in this effort.

The tracks are some of his favorites, and they are all done with the swing and style of the Jazz Messengers, with just a little difference in some of the arrangements to make them fresh. If you like good trumpet sounds and swinging jazz, this feature will delight you.