Cannonball

Richie Cole

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Richie Cole plays the music of Cannonball Adderley featuring Reggie Watkins on trombone.

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Meet our newest friend and artist: Nancy Kepner!

Nancy is a singer-songwriter based in Pittsburgh, PA who has found a voice by writing "Comedic Geek Culture Songs, thought provoking songs, and songs based off of Random suggestions" across many platforms. Now, we're bringing a full band sound to her original, quirky writing and are having a blast! You'll be able to find her newest full band releases here and her bi-weekly new songs on her YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/HeartfeltHumor

Proud - of Who I Am
All proceeds of the sale of this track will go to the Trevor Project-a LGBTQ youth suicide prevention organization.

Welcome to the website of Mark Perna, bassist, trombonist and producer of Richie Cole, Don Aliquo, Nancy Kepner, Peter King, Jazz Trip, Jack Erdie and groups under his own name among others.  You can listen to or purchase a wide variety of music including the critically acclaimed Richie Cole Plays Ballads & Love Songs.   You can also view thousands of pictures and videos.  

Click on the images below to see the Richie Cole, Don Aliquo or Perna, Sakash, Susoeff, Wendt and Watkins photo sets.













Click on the album cover to enter the Mark Perna Music Store where you can buy the critically acclaimed Richie Cole Plays Ballads & Love Songs album in CD or download among many other albums
Mark Perna Music Store
Mark Perna Music Store

Downbeat magazine 9/28/16 

I was just notified that our new album, Richie Cole Plays Ballads & Love Songs is going to be reviewed in the January issue of Downbeat magazine!  Woo-hoo!  I'll post the review when it's published.

The first Trailer for Richie Cole Plays Ballads & Love Songs posted 9/5/16 



 The first section is actual video from the recording session on 9/8/15.  The interview was done at the 3rd Street Art Gallery in Carnegie, PA on 9/1/16.  Aaron Jackendoff was the videographer on both sessions.  He and I cut it together on 9/4/16 and 9/5/16.  The music was recorded at Heid Audio and engineered by George Heid and Jim Barr.  Jim Barr did the mixing and mastering.

Recording Update posted August 30, 2016 

We are just about done with the album cover for Richie Cole Plays Ballads & Love Songs.  It should be going to Disc Makers in short order.  I'll post the artwork here as soon as we have everything finalized.  The cover design was by Jenny Wilson and Jim Barr did the actually setting.  He realized her original vision with just a couple of minor modifications.  I don't want to understate how much work he put into getting the cover to look the way it does.   It was a tremendous effort.  

Jim Barr has been laboring over the first two (of 7) Don Aliquo CD covers.  He came up with a design that will allow each individual CD to have it's own design but if you have the whole set of 7, it will be clear that each CD is part of a set.  I'll post the artwork for these discs as soon as the design is completed.  We should have these sent to Disc Makers in short order as well.

As soon as we are done with three CDs above, we have to complete the the artwork for next two Don Aliquo CDs, the artwork for the first Richie Cole Pittsburgh Alto Madness Orchestra CD entitled "The Many Minds of Richie Cole" and we're going to get to work on the artwork for the first new Perna, Sakash, Susoeff & Wendt CD in 10 years.   The latter was recording in early August (see blog post below).  

We have a bunch of recordings in the pipeline including recordings with Peter King, Samantha St. John and Jenny Wilson that are in various states of completion and a bunch of stuff that in the planning stage.  We'll have a second Richie Cole Pittsburgh Alto Madness Orchestra CD out before Summer 2017 and we have plans to take that band back into the studio soon to record even more new Richie Cole arrangements.  He's been writing feverishly for that past few months.  And I, for one, can't wait to play them.

The Year of the Don (Aliquo) posted August 18, 2016 

If you read the previous post about the Richie Cole projects, well here's an interlude to that project.  During the mixing process, my good friend and a truly soulful guy, George Heid came out and asked me if I wanted to see my archives.  My archives?  He and engineer Jim Barr left the control room of the studio and came back with boxes and boxes of DA-78 tapes.  I had kind of forgotten about all of this.  Between about 2002 and 2010, I did a LOT of recording.  I did at least a dozen sessions with the great Don Aliquo.  I made a couple of CDs of my own that I never released.  

Here's the dirty little secret: it's fun to record but it's a total drag to turn those recordings into commercial CDs.  It's tedious and expensive and I didn't want to store another pile of unsold CDs in my garage.  Also, between 2002 and 2010, it was a lot harder to promote a local project.  Nowadays, we have easy to create websites that we can sell our stuff through.  We have Facebook so we can annoy our friends with our commercials for our projects.  Back then, the best you could do was schlep CDs to gigs and hope to sell them.  

Anyway, right away I found two complete projects of my own and 6 complete and already mixed Don Aliquo albums.  And it's all good stuff.  And there's even more stuff that we haven't found yet.  I know there will be at least 7 Don Aliquo CDs released during this next year.  There may be more.  

After looking at all of this already recorded good stuff, I had a bit of an epiphany with Don's material.  Why not, release one new Don Aliquo CD per month for 6 or 7 months in a row?  Would that not be cool?  So we're doing it.  Starting in October, we'll be releasing the first CD called Lullaby For Joan and it features the recordings that Don and I did in 2003 and 2004 with drummer and composer Rodger Ryan.  Rodger died in January 2005 and these recordings have just been sitting in the proverbial vault all of this time.  Also on the album are Ken Karsh, Victor Garzotto and Mike Sakash.  The second CD will be called One For the Joes and features the classic Don Aliquo Quartet of the mid-late 2000's with Victor Gazotto, John Schmidt and myself.  After that we have two CDs with Eric Susoeff and Tom Wendt.  Once was recorded in 2008 and the other in 2009.  Both were standards dates so we'll be calling them The Standard Don vols 1 and 2.  The fifth CD will be an all Wayne Shorter album.  Tom Wendt, Ken Karsh and Victor Garzotto are on that one.  The 6th CD is going to be called The Chamber Don and will feature duos with me.  Don and I did hundreds of duo gigs between 2002 and the present.  And some trios with Kevin Moore on piano.  Kevin took over the piano duties from Victor in the Don Aliquo Quartet around 2010 and has been the regular guy since then.  And the 7th CD is still in the formative stages.  Around 2006 or 7, I put together a session with Ben Opie, Don, Tom Wendt and myself and we just played.  No tunes, no sketches, no plans, no discussion.  We improved around each other for about 45 minutes.  Stopped.  Took a short break.  Came back and did another 35 minutes.  I'm thinking about editing the session down a bit and releasing it along with free improvisation Don and I did with Kevin Moore and calling The Out Don.  

We're calling this project The Year of The Don.  And it's going to be a tremendous celebration of Don's musical life.  I love the guy and I'm really glad I'm able to do this for him.  Jim Barr came up with the album cover concept art.  Each album will have a separate cover but if you put them together, you'll be able to see that they are a set.  If we can pull it off, Don's face will appear on the spines of the CDs if you put them all together in order.
  

Richie Cole Plays Ballads & Love Songs posted August 17, 2016 

I met Richie Cole in the Fall of 2014.   I was asked to play in his Alto Madness Orchestra rehearsal band that met on Wednesdays on the North Side of Pittsburgh.  Richie had moved to Pittsburgh earlier in 2014 to be with his daughter and grandkids.  After the third session, we were sitting around BS-ing and he said to me, "y'know, no one in this town will give me a gig."  I looked at him and said, "are you free next Tuesday? I've got a gig for you."   I introduced him to my friend and drummer buddy Vince Taglieri who at that time was part owner of an Italian restaurant called San Lorenzo that was located in the Lawrenceville section of Pittsburgh.  Our other buddy, guitarist Ron Wilson and I had been helping Vince out by moving our weekly jam session down to Vince's restaurant for the traditional "Jazz Night" so common in your better Italian restaurants.  I had just invited the world famous Richie Cole down to join our cheesy little combo.  Great friendships have started from less.

In early January 2015, during one of the sessions at San Lorenzo, I asked Richie if he'd wanted to record the Alto Madness Orchestra.  I knew the Orchestra was Richie's baby.  He'd written about 6,000 charts over the years for it.  Quickly, we assembled Reggie Watkins on trombone, Rick Matt-tenor sax, Joe Badaczewski on trumpet, Patrick Whitehead on piano, Vince and myself and set out for George Heid's studio in the Pittsburgh suburb of Aspinwall.   The original plan was to do two sessions and put out an album.  After the second session, everybody was just getting into the groove and we extended to a third session.  Pretty soon, it was two or three times per month from February 2015-November 2015.  When engineer Jim Barr and I started mixing the first album in November 2015, we had almost 50 songs recorded but that's another story.

Our story begins in August, 2015.  Reggie approached me and told me the Steel Town Horns had gotten a fairly big money gig offer for one of the days we had scheduled for recording.  The Steel Town Horns is Reggie's group with Rick Matt and J.D. Chaisson who had by this time replaced Joe Bad as the trumpet player.  Joe had a great opportunity to go on the road with Brandon Flowers and left the band in July 2015.  They work as a horn section for touring bands around the country.  I, of course, told them to take the gig.  We had the studio booked so I asked Richie and the rhythm section (minus Patrick Whitehead who was out of town) which by this time had added guitarist Eric Susoeff if they wanted to just go in and record some tunes.  Everyone was up for it and we went in completely without a plan.  Usually, you have some plan going into the studio.  Songs picked out.  Maybe rehearsed or at least talk about basic arrangement. We had nothing.  Richie just called out tunes as if it were a gig.  I really didn't have a goal for the session either.  I figured we'd get some material for the archives and maybe put it out someday possibly as bonus material for an Orchestra album.  

After the session, which went very well.  We were totally relaxed because there wasn't any pressure at all on us.  All first takes.  No edits.  The next day, as I was listening to the rough mixes, I made a couple observations: 1) 8 of the 11 tunes we played were ballads, 2) we kicked ass and 3) after a quick check of Richie's discography, I confirmed that he had never released a dedicated ballads album.  I went to Richie and told him we had most of an album of ballads and what did he think about recording a couple more and releasing it as Ballads album?  It was kind of a dumb question because Richie has never met an album he didn't want to release.  The man releases a new CD just about every time he takes a dump.  He assented but was more interested in finishing the Orchestra album.  So we recorded 3 more ballads prior to the next Orchestra recording session and we quickly mixed it and put it aside to finish the first Orchestra album.  

And there it sat for 6 months while Jim Barr and I worked on the Orchestra album.   Every Tuesday from November through May, we worked on this thing.  I'm going to make an album someday and call it "Tuesdays with Jim".  We brought in people for overdubs (George Jones on conga and Mark Lucas for some rock guitar for example).  We mixed and we mixed.  We tried different combination of songs.   We came to some startling discoveries while mixing that made us go back and remix everything we had done to that point.  It was a LONG process.  Finally, we finish it in May.  I called everyone up and told them it was done.  I've made a lot of albums and the one thing that is completely common to all of them is this: you never finish an album, you just stop working on it at some point.  We stopped working on it.

I contacted super publicist Terri Hinte about representing the albums.  I sent her both the first Richie Cole's Pittsburgh Alto Madness Orchestra CD now titled The Many Minds of Richie Cole and the Ballads album now titled Richie Cole Plays Ballads & Love Songs (we added the "& Love Songs" because one of the songs wasn't technically a ballad although it was still a love song; buy the album if you want to know which one it is).  A couple of weeks later I get an e-mail from her.  She says the Ballads album is "just gorgeous".  A few more weeks go by and I call her.  She says she loves the Ballads album but the Orchestra album just wasn't for her.  To be fair to Terri, Richie is a very funny guy and I loaded the Orchestra album up with humor.  Richie's kind of humor.  It wasn't Terri's kind of humor.  We did a quick reverse, now the Ballads album is the Prime album and the Orchestra album is in second place.  We set up release date for the Ballads album of October 21, 2016.  That's the day it drops and by that time, you'll be able to buy it directly through this website.  We have some CD release parties scheduled for around that time as well.   The Orchestra album will be released locally in the Pittsburgh area around the same time and then we'll do a national push after the first of the year in 2017.

In the meantime, I still have about 30 PAMO tracks to mix of which about 15 of them will end up on the second CD. And Richie continues to write so we'll reconvene the band soon and start recording again.



 

New recording with Perna, Sakash, Susoeff & Wendt! posted August 17, 2016 

In 2005, Mark Perna put together probably his best, most versatile group.  Cleverly called Perna, Sakash, Susoeff & Wendt after the last names of it's members, the band boasted some heavy writing talents in alto and bari saxophonist Mike Sakash and guitarist Eric Susoeff.  And with drummer Tom Wendt, perhaps the youngest old master alive, the band produced two CDs of original material.  The first, in 2005, was entitled Forward Falling and the second in 2006 was entitled Indian Spring.  Both CDs will soon be available as CDs or downloads through this very website.  Then in Spring 2006, Mike Sakash moved to Maine and the band went on hiatus.

That hiatus was broken in 2016 when Mark Perna, a man who when he isn't playing bass or trombone, is a medical physicist realized that Maine was only a couple of states away and not in some alternate dimension and could be reached by airplane, a newfangled device allowing for very fast travel.  Swiftly acting on this cutting edge news, Perna booked a flight for Sakash and a very happy and emotional reunion of their rockin' teen combo occurred on August 8, 2016 when the band reunited in the studios of George Heid in Aspinwall, PA (a suburb of Pittsburgh, PA).  With trusty engineer Jim Barr on the job, the band quickly cut enough tracks for a new album on August 8 and 9.  

World famous jazz legend Richie Cole joined the boys for a couple of tracks on August 8 playing Richie's tunes James St. and Harold's House of Jazz.  On August 9, master trombonist Reggie Watkins joined the band for 3 more tunes.  You can hear two of the tunes recorded that night in the Music section of this very website. Check out Play Your Seuss Off and Bluette for a sample of what happened on those two glorious nights.  Also check out the photos of the session taken by boy genius Aaron Jackendoff.

The next session is already scheduled for November 11 and 12 when Perna will again use the magical airplane device to shuttle Sakash back to the 'Burgh for more recording goodness.  

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