November CD of the Month: Jimmy Greene-“Beautiful Life”

Jimmy Greene     Beautiful Life     Greene Music Works/Mack Avenue Records

Jimmy Greene is part of a group of rising young jazz lions who hail from Hartford, CT and who have been instructed and influenced by the legendary saxophonist Jackie McLean who was the professor of jazz studios at the Hartt School of Music of the University of Hartford.  After McLean passed away, the school was renamed the Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz at the Hart School and Denver’s own Javon Jackson was named McLean’s successor. Even as a teenager, Jimmy displayed a propensity for learning and teaching jazz history leading to instructing master classes and lecturing in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Israel and Russia.  While still attending school, Jimmy began performing and recording with some of the most prestigious names of jazz, Horace Silver, Freddie Hubbard, Steve Turre, Harry Connick Jr and dozens more.  Jimmy Greene’s newest recording, Beautiful Life is his 9^th as a leader, without a doubt it is his most important and personal project to date.

  On Dec. 14, 2013 Mr. Greene’s 6-year-old daughter, Ana Grace Márquez-Greene, who shared his passion for music and loved to listen to her father play, was a student at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. That was the day a gunman killed Ana along with 19 other children and 6 educators.

“I don’t know if we’ll ever feel whole again,” Mr. Greene said of his family, Nelba Márquez-Greene, his wife, and their son, Isaiah, 9, who was also in the school that morning but was unharmed. “I still cry every day — we all do. I don’t know if there’s a day when we won’t.” It was a month or so before Mr. Greene could even pick up his saxophone. But eventually he did. Jimmy’s latest album, Beautiful Life, was inspired by a homemade book Greene’s daughter, Ana, made for her father. The book, containing various drawings of flowers made by the youngster, was entitled “Ana’s flower book for Dad.”

For the recording of Beautiful Life, Jimmy had no problems enlisting some of jazz’s best current musicians to participate, artists such as Kenny Barron, Christian McBride, Kurt Elling, Pat Metheny and others were more than willing to be a part of Greene’s passionate project. Instead of a mournful tribute to his daughter, Mr. Greene chose to celebrate Ana’s joyful approach to life, albeit a tragically brief one.

Proceeds from the album will go to the Ana Grace Project aimed at preventing violence as well as The Artists Collective, which exposes children to the arts.