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Bob Berg had long earned the right to be included in the small select group of acknowledged tenor saxophone jazz masters, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Ben Webster, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane. Born in 1951, Berg was the one of the few players of his generation who can be said to have joined them. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he started listening to jazz from around the age of thirteen. At eighteen he dropped out of the High School of Performing Arts and enlisted at Juilliard for a year on a special non–academic, totally music curriculum. By this time he was playing both tenor and soprano saxophones and was already being greatly influenced by John Coltrane. After Juilliard he became deeply involved in the free jazz experiments of this period, but became quickly disillusioned by them. Thoroughly sick of everything to do with free jazz, he went back and began to study the modern jazz classics, such as the Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Charlie Parker output of the 1950s. Indeed—he became vocal in his condemnation, not only of free jazz as a whole, but also of the jazz/rock fusion that followed. Throughout the 1970s he concentrated determinedly on playing acoustic bebop: such as typified by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, and earlier by the groups pioneered by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker in the mid–1940s. This led up to the period 1974 to 1976 when he played with Horace Silver, and between 1976 and 1981 with the Cedar Walton Quartet. Bob Berg was a phenomenal player of the tenor saxophone. His music was a flexible reinterpretation of hard bop, fast and dazzling. He was a natural swinger. Berg displayed a flawless technical command of his instrument through its every register at even the fastest tempo; melodically as well as harmonically sure, with the ability of being able to negotiate exceedingly difficult chord sequences with apparent ease, together with a big sound that owed much to the influence of Sonny Rollins and Coleman Hawkins, rather than that of Lester Young.
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