Roger Neumann

Roger Neumann is a Los Angeles-based jazz saxophonist, flutist,composer, arranger and music educator. He has written arrangements for such notable performers as Count Basie, Buddy Rich, Ray Charles and The Beach Boys. In addition to his prolific career as a performer and composer, he is an active music educator not only in and around the Los Angeles area but at venues across the country. He is also the principal director of Buddy Collette's JazzAmerica, a non-profit organization that provides free jazz education to young players.

Neumann was born in 1940 in Minot, North Dakota but moved to Spencer, Iowa at age 4. He began studying reeds at a young age under the tutelage of his father, Hugo Neumann-- a professional sax player. The younger Neumann began playing professionally in Sioux City and the surrounding Northwest Iowa area while enrolled as a student at the Morningside College Music Conservatory. Cutting his musical teeth in the Billy Redman Orchestra, a 17-piece territory band, and in Sioux City's prolific after-hours jazz clubs in the late 1950s, Neumann developed a fat, bluesy tenor sound reminiscent of Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster. Another member of the Redman band at the time was Benny Goodman Band alumni, trombonist Rex Peer, and it was Peer who encouraged Neumann's aspirations to become a full-time performer. After graduation from Morningside, Neumann toured with the Lee Castle Band in the Midwest and then moved to Minneapolis to join the Jack Gilespie Band. He left the road thereafter to teach instrumental music in Iowa public schools for the next three years.

In 1965, Neumann enrolled at the Berklee School of Music to pursue a graduate degree. On the day after finishing his Berklee degree a year later, Neumann was offered a job by Woody Herman to join Herman's Thundering Herd Band, with whom he toured for the next year, winding up in California. Neumann is heard with that edition of the Herman band on the 1967 "Thundering Herd Live at The Big Sur Jazz Festival" album.

After leaving Herman, Neumann worked with a progression of outstanding groups, including the Bob Crosby Band, Jimmy Dorsey Band, Les Brown Band, Benny Carter Band, with Peanuts Hucko and with jazz singing legend Anita O'Day.

In 1978, he formed his own group, "Roger Neumann's Rather Large Band," consisting of the cream of the crop of West Coast jazz musicians. The band won immediate critical acclaim for two albums on the SeaBreeze Label, — "Introducing Roger Neumann's Rather Large Band" (1983) and "Instant Heat" (1994). Against all odds, both albums enjoyed a modicum of commercial success at a time when interest in big band jazz was on the wane-- a tribute to Neumann's composition and arranging genius-- and both albums continue to enjoy regular airplay on coast-to-coast jazz radio. Neumann's hard-driving arrangements for the Rather Large Band, executed by such veteran sidemen as Hernan Riley, Blue Mitchell, Bob Enevoldsen, Bob Hardaway, Med Flory and John Heard resurrected an interest in big band jazz that had ebbed since the great Buddy Rich Big Band recordings of the late 1960s.

In the early 2000s, Neumann played baritone sax and contributed arrangements for the uniquely refreshing Phil Norman Tentette, waxing 3 albums with the group. In between he worked studio gigs and has both scored and appeared in several movies, including "La Bamba!" starring Lou Diamond Phillps as '50s rock star Ritchie Valens. Neumann has also anchored the sax section in virtually every Ray Anthony Band LP in the past 20 years. He has toured Japan nine times. In 2006, Neumann won the LA Jazz Society's Award as JAZZ ARRANGER OF THE YEAR. He appeared with the Benny Carter Tribute Band a year later alongside some of the most distinguished players in jazz.

Neumann has worked tirelessly as a music educator, sponsoring jazz camps and youth jazz clinics from coast to coast. His most recent work has been with his own Quartet, which is continuosly active in LA's best clubs. In 2002 Neumann returned to Sioux City to headline the JAZZ TOWN REUNION FESTIVAL, and graciously paid tribute to his roots in jazz and to those earlier musicians who inspired him in his professional career. Neumann is married to jazz singer Madeline Vergari.

*REFERENCE: Hittle, Jon B., "JAZZ TOWN," Part II, Weekender Magazine, March 2002)

External links

* [http://iowalakes.edu/faculty/ayres/Roger%20Neumann.htm "Roger Neumann"]
* [http://www.seabreezejazz.com/onesheet.cfm?CatID=SEAB_2053 "Instant Heat"]