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Zan Stewart

In 2009, when he was 65, Zan Stewart felt it was time for a major life change. He decided to leave daily journalism – where he had worked as a jazz writer for close to 30 years at The Los Angeles Times and the Newark Star-Ledger – to focus on music. “It felt like it was time to see what might happen if I devoted myself to the horn, to writing music, and to teaching, seeing where they might take me,” says Stewart, a student clarinetist at age six and a tenor saxophonist since 1966. “I had done a ton of writing – around 2000 profiles plus many more reviews and other short pieces. I had contributed to the music that way, and now I wanted to explore another avenue.” And so he has. The multi-talented Stewart – who has also written for Down Beat, among other music magazines, and has penned liner notes to over 200 albums and multi-CD sets, earning a prestigious ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award in the process – has moved to Richmond Annex in San Francisco’s East Bay after a 9-year-stretch in West Orange, N.J., and set up shop. “My days are centered around practicing, writing music, and developing other aspects of my musical career,” says the saxophonist. “It feels great.” Since arriving in Berkeley in 2011, Stewart has been an active participant in the Bay Area’s jazz scene, sitting in at various jam sessions and fronting quartet performances at such rooms as Duende in Oakland, and the Firehouse Gallery and Nick’s Lounge in Berkeley. The band, whose members are absolutely top drawer, features two bebop-to-modern masters – drummer Ron Marabuto and pianist Keith Saunders– and the on-the-rise bass ace Adam Gay. The leader is featured on saxophone, and also offers microphone commentary. The band has recently completed its first CD, which will be released in late March. “We mix it up on the album, playing hip songs from the jazz repertoire along with my originals,” says Stewart, whose jazz heroes include Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, and Sonny Rollins. In playing gems from jazz’s past, like Charlie Parker’s “Diverse” and Bud Powell’s “Webb City,” Stewart feels he is helping to keep a deep music alive. “These songs may have been written in the 1940s, but when played with vigor and punch, as is our style, they have a contemporary aspect, because they are being played in the present, not the past,” he says.

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Tenor Saxophonist Zan Stewart Debuts On CD With "The Street Is Making Music"

Tenor Saxophonist Zan Stewart Debuts On CD With "The Street Is Making Music"

Source: Terri Hinte Publicity

In the course of his prolific career as a jazz journalist, writing for the Los Angeles Times, the Newark Star-Ledger, and Down Beat magazine, among many other publications, Zan Stewart established himself as one of the best in the business. He won a prestigious ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for his notes to an Eric Dolphy boxed set, and kept up a busy pace over a span of 35 years profiling major jazz musicians and annotating over two hundred albums. On the ...

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Website

Jazz Scribe/Saxophonist Zan Stewart Intervewed at AAJ

Jazz Scribe/Saxophonist Zan Stewart Intervewed at AAJ

Source: All About Jazz

For the last five years, Zan Stewart has been the voice of New Jersey jazz. A tenor saxophonist who occasionally plays in local clubs, Stewart, who has also written for the Los Angeles Times, appears several times a week in the Newark Star-Ledger, the Garden State's largest newspaper. He reviews performances in a variety of Jersey and Manhattan venues, offers comprehensive artist profiles in the paper's Friday “Ticket" section, writes brief notices of upcoming gigs, and critiques recently released compact ...

"Stewart possesses a fat, rounded tone that owes more to Don Byas and Coleman Hawkins than latter day tenor icons like John Coltrane and Michael Brecker". —Andrew Gilbert, Berkeleyside.com 2011

Primary Instrument

Saxophone, tenor

Location

San Francisco

Willing to teach

Beginner to advanced

Credentials/Background

I help students better understand how to play the saxophone (I teach alto and tenor), how to get a rich sound, how to make the music they are playing come alive and sing. Flexible hours. $50/hour.

Music

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