Bob Wilber’s The Six

In the early 1950s, Bob Wilber (1928-2019) was having a musical identity crisis. He had been a protégé of the masterful Sidney Bechet during 1946-48 when he was virtually the great soprano-saxophonist’s only student. Attracted to early jazz, Wilber for a period sounded like a duplicate of Bechet, particularly on soprano. While the association helped him at first and resulted in some record dates both with and without Bechet, Wilber eventually realized that he would go a lot further and be much more satisfied if he could develop his own musical personality. After working with some slightly more modern musicians, studying with altoist Lee Konitz in 1952, and serving in the military, in 1954 he formed The Six. By then Wilber had temporarily given up the soprano and instead was doubling on clarinet and tenor. For this unusual group, Wilber reunited with trumpeter Johnny Glasel (who had worked with him in the late 1940s) and sought to play a wide-range of styles and songs. Featuring Porky Cohen (and later Sonny Truitt) on trombone and a rhythm section, the band recorded three albums during 1955-56. While some of their songs have the spirit of New Orleans jazz and the group recorded “Riverboat Shuffle” and “St. James Infirmary,” their music is actually often a lot closer to West Coast cool jazz of the 1950s and small-group swing than to trad jazz. The advanced harmonies of thei
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Since 1975 Scott Yanow has been a regular reviewer of albums in many jazz styles. He has written for many jazz and arts magazines, including JazzTimes, Jazziz, Down Beat, Cadence, CODA, and the Los Angeles Jazz Scene, and was the jazz editor for Record Review. He has written an in-depth biography on Dizzy Gillespie for AllMusic.com. He has authored 11 books on jazz, over 900 liner notes for CDs and over 20,000 reviews of jazz recordings.

Yanow was a contributor to and co-editor of the third edition of the All Music Guide to Jazz. He continues to write for Downbeat, Jazziz, the Los Angeles Jazz Scene, the Jazz Rag, the New York City Jazz Record and other publications.

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