As a classical music buff, I purchased this CD being curious of the works of the so-called “Girl Gershwin” Dana Suesse and of the other lesser-known composers of the “jazz age.” What I discovered was a “Suite for Banjo” written in 1922 by Harry Reser and orchestrated and performed by Louisiana’s own Don Vappie. Harry [...]
Tag Archives: Don Vappie
Don Vappie with the Hot Springs Music Festival Symphony Orchestra conducted by Richard Rosenberg, Jazz Nocturne: American Concertos of the Jazz Age (Naxos Records)
July 1, 2011 – 12:50 am
The Weekend’s Highs and Lows
October 18, 2010 – 10:13 am
The Highs: – Otis Taylor’s version of “Hey Joe” during the Crescent City Blues and BBQ Festival Saturday. Don Vappie played banjo with Taylor throughout the set and played a fevered, rhythmic solo when his turn came. Alvin Youngblood Hart followed him on guitar with a solo that was so thoroughly inside the blues idiom [...]
Lawrence Sieberth, New New Orleans (Musikbloc)
September 1, 2009 – 12:01 am
Larry Sieberth has been an ace sideman on the local modern jazz scene for decades, rarely drawing attention to himself despite consistently tasty work. In recent years he’s been plumbing traditional jazz waters, most notably with banjoist Don Vappie, and now we have this album of traditional solo piano. All cuts here are from the [...]
Don Vappie: Give Me Back My Banjo
November 1, 2008 – 12:01 am
In 2007, the Folk Alliance hosted a concert by three banjo players at Memphis’s Marriott Hotel. The three men sat in a semi-circle of chairs, the drum-like bodies of the banjos in their laps, the thin sticks of their fretboards pointing to two o’clock. It was a historic occasion, for all three men were African-American, [...]
Taking Back the Banjo
March 1, 2008 – 12:01 am
If there was a moment where the banjo was branded with a stereotype, it would have to be when Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight went on a canoe trip down the Cahulawassee River in the film Deliverance. Years later, the banjo cannot entirely shake the associations, so it’s thought of first and foremost as a [...]
