"Sweet" Sue Terry

--Fantastically Cool Jazz...from Great Musicians...--
Reviewer: Larry Geiger

"I am not a professional reviewer, just a person who loves jazz. When I received this cd from CD Baby, I listened to it on a long drive, and kept going over and over each of the songs again! Sweet Sue's alto sax just oozes cool, no matter what the material. Her vocals are fantastic, as are the other musicians on this cd. You won't go wrong with this one if you like jazz, buy it."


--Brava, Encore--
Reviewer: Gertud Raemisch-Schumm

"All my life, my background has been Classical music which I love. 'Sweet' Sue Terry's musical performance has opened a whole new world to me. Her high standard, her virtuosity, imagination and sensitivity have me ask for more. Thank you!"

--Hot, Haunting, Sultry and Cool!--
Reviewer: J. H. Hannen

"This amazing sax virtuoso hits her stride in this showcase of styles. Evocative vocals and sax solos that pay tribute to past masters and assure 'Sweet' Sue Terry a special place among their ranks. The material and choice of collaborators is perfect! 'Gilly's Caper' will be on my CD carousel for a long time to come and will be played long into the coolest and hottest nights."



--An Instant Classic--
Reviewer: John Leporati

" 'Sweet' Sue Terry is that rarest of jazz performers: an artist whose technical accomplishment is so ingrained that it becomes the white canvas upon which she paints vivid and varied works. And what a gallery! In her latest, "Gilly's Caper," Terry's sax work is at its best. From the rapid, intricate chord changes of "Terra Incognita" and "Toothless Soothsayer," to the sultry exotically haunting "Desert Moon," the arrangements are challenging without being distancing, making it an album you'll want to play again and again. Terry's vocal turns on "New Year" and "The Feel of the Blues," invite comparisons to Astrud Gilberto, yet are edged with an even subtler emotional complexity. Few can keep up with the range and power of Terry's sax (consider the title track in this regard) but she has chosen her fellow musicians well. An incredible selection of players rounds out this instant classic. All in all, the jazz album of the year."
--John Leporati
- from Amazon.com

“She plays like Charlie Parker reincarnated! She smokes!”
Jazz Central Station

" I don't believe there is anyone playing better alto saxophone today than Sue Terry."
--Bob Bernotas, host of "Just Jazz", WNTI FM


“Terry is one of the very few female horn players to achieve acceptance on the tough New York hard bop scene in the '80s.”
Russ Musto, All About Jazz--New York

”This incredible artist wails out her soul to any and all who would hear -- as in, you know, really listen. This is playing where the music breathes as alive with breath as any vocalist can give you, even the best of them.”
Michael Redmond

“. . . Sue Terry was the crowd pleaser with a fiery expressiveness that got the crowd cheering and urging her on. Her style had some of the angular inventiveness of Wayne Shorter, undercut by a bluesy edge that kept things down to earth.”
Michael Hotter, Greenville Press

“. . . has a pure, burnished sound on each instrument . . .Technically, nothing seems beyond her reach, and her improvisations are consistently sharp and persuasive. . .”
Jack Bowers, All About Jazz

“Sue Terry’s ‘The Troubadours,’ a polyrhythmic feast for the ears, is the most ambitious and impressive tune of the set.”
David R. Adler, All Music Guide

“Terry performed in the contemporary, progressive role that the new woman in jazz is demanding.”
Amsterdam News, New York

“Sue Terry’s work on the Billie Holiday medley ‘Strange Crazy Heartache’ suggests that she has a formidable musical intelligence; her solo statement catches something of Lady’s voice.”
Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD

“Sue Terry possesses a truly individual voice . . . she is especially compelling.”
Cadence Magazine

“Sue Terry . . . Superwoman of Jazz”
Hartford Courant

“The roaring Charli Persip Superband . . . closed the weekend with highlight after highlight, including the debut of superb alto saxophonist Sue Terry’s suite on Billie Holiday tunes.”
Len Dobbin, Montreal Gazette

“The most eloquent and elegant solo of the double-header, though, was played by Sue Terry. . .her chorus on a Jordan composition filled the park with a remarkably big, billowing, bitter-sweet tone poem that was the emotional high point of the night.”
Owen McNally, Hartford Courant

“Sue Terry, who crafted the stunning arrangement, offers a statement on alto that reaches into one’s soul.”
W. Royal Stokes, JazzTimes

“I’m presenting some very talented young musicians who in my estimation are budding superstars, especially Sue.”
Charli Persip in JazzTimes

“. . .nor can too much be said about the youngish and loving way in which Sweet Sue Terry saluted Charlie Parker, playing with the passion that sent some of the band’s reed players back to the shed when they realized they would have to work next to someone so intent on firing from the heart every chance she got.”
Stanley Crouch

“Sue nailed it!”
Paquito D’Rivera

“She’s been compared to the great alto players like Charlie Parker and Phil Woods. . .Sue Terry exemplifies excellence with a commanding sense of swing and a burnished tone.”
National Public Radio
- VARIOUS

Pink Slimy Worm
Sweet Sue Terry | Qi Note

Personnel: 'Sweet' Sue Terry - alto sax, soprano sax

"The solo saxophone recital has seldom been the medium of choice for mainstream players, but then again Sue Terry has never been your typical jazz saxophonist. A protege of Jackie McLean who was subsequently mentored by the late great tenor sax giants Clifford Jordan and Junior Cook and living legend Barry Harris, Terry is one of the very few female horn players to achieve acceptance on the tough New York hard bop scene in the '80s. Sweet Sue, as she's been dubbed by her mentors, does bring a certain special sensibility to her instrument, but is more attributable to her philosophy of life than her gender. A practitioner of the ancient arts of Qigong and Taiji Quan, Terry's adherence to the Taoist principles of life so permeates her holistic approach to creating music that her solo performances can be heard more as duets between her horn and the sounds of silence.
Pink Slimy Worm (the title comes from a famous classical composer's derogatory description of the saxophone) combines composed and improvised pieces for alto and soprano that manage to be musical in a variety of ways, at times recalling the solo works of Lee Konitz, Oliver Lake, Bobby Watson and Paul Horn. Terry's tone, personal and classic at the same time, is at the heart of the date's attractiveness; her broad sound can be both smooth and sweet or dark and gritty and she fluidly modulates her tonality, often in call and response patterns, to avoid monotony. Drawing from a wealth of experience--jazz, classical, new age, avant garde, rhythm and blues, Eastern, Afro-Cuban and new music--the date's fifteen tracks, variably programmatic and impressionistic, come together as a thoroughly honest vision of the world she lives in--one in which music exists as a powerful healing force, from the ancient to the future." - ALL ABOUT JAZZ-NEW YORK

ABOUT PINK SLIMY WORM/Compositions and Improvisations for Solo Saxophone
Sweet Sue Terry/ 2003 Qi Note Records 8726

"Listen, if you're ready for 63 minutes of solo saxophone, you're not going to find any CD better than this. Sue Terry does everything with the solo sax (alto and soprano) that can be done, and then some. This incredible artist wails out her soul to any and all who would hear -- as in, you know, really listen. This is playing where the music breathes as alive with breath as any vocalist can give you, even the best of them. And you get the privilege of writing the lyrics for yourself.
OK, so Sue Terry is one of the best sax players on earth. What's likewise drop-dead impressive is that Terry is the composer of all this music, so rich and wild, yet built like a truck, and just as formidable. You could call this CD the prelude and fugue of sax.
Dues paid. Send in the agents."

- Independent reviewer--former award winning reviewer for the Star- Ledger and Newhouse News Service

"Sue Terry's music is a unique blend of clear, elegant, lyrical feminity; delivered with the one-two punch of a heavyweight prize fighter. "

--KEN BICHEL, pianist & composer

"I've always been blown away by Sue's sax playing. Her sound just lifts me into the air and rocks me. Now after listening to this cd, I am equally moved by her compositional ability. I just love it! These pieces are original, spirited, moving, and just thoroughly enjoyable in every way. Sue Terry is a monster of the jazz saxophone and a treasure in the world of music."

--MARGOT LEVERETT, clarinetist & bandleader

"Listening to Sue Terry's sounds, one has to stop and beginning to guess: who is this player?
I've been at gigs and in concerts given by this talented, original and creative sax player and always leave the places singing her last tune with a rose in my heart! Her new CD Gilly's Caper is one of the finest works I have lately heard. "

--THIAGO DE MELLO, composer & bandleader



"When the saxophone was invented, many scoffed at the instrument. Little did they know that one day Sue Terry would grace the instrument with her consummate musicianship and finest tone this author has ever heard emanate from a saxophone. I have heard her many times. Her approach is truly innovative."

--WAYNE V. SMITH, pianist & composer

"It's extremely difficult to hold a listener captive as the only player on an entire CD. Sue did that for me."

--JOE MOSELLO, trumpeter

"I listened to Pink Slimy Worm on the way home last night--it is great! You rock! And I laughed out loud at the redheaded kid story--that was so hilarious and so perfect! Perfectly written, and perfect delivery. Gonna give Pink Slimy to my husband to listen to now."

--ERIN HILL, Gridley Records

"I listenend to your CD last night. . .it was fantastic! Very coherent and thoughtful. It reminded me of Charlie Haden--who is one of my favorites. I'm thinking of the way his solo work--and yours--is so tonal and melodic and very grounded and compelling. No wasted notes--every note is thought through and careful."

--MIKAEL ELSILA, pianist & composer

"Your playing is great, and the compositions are intriguing and very enjoyable. I'm also very impressed by an entire CD of solo horn playing. Only someone whose musical resources flow as deep as yours could carry that off!"

--ERICK STORKMAN, trombonist & arranger

"I've always felt doing a completely solo album was venturing into dangerous territory and not for the faint of heart. I must admit that I was questioning your sanity! Well, I guess you showed me. This is wonderful . . . I want to thank you for your creation. It is a sonic treat. "

--SAL SPICOLA, saxophonist

"Beautiful. And a serious lesson for anyone who plays the saxophone."

--TIM METZ, bassist

"Your CD is great! It reminds me of why I like your playing. The tunes are really creative as is your playing. Your use of cool melodies, interesting intervals, tonalities, harmonics.....very creative!!!"

--MARK FRIEDMAN, saxophonist

"Sue's solo CD is pensive, clear, and directed towards a larger horizon. It sounds like a melody line for a big band with muscular rhythm abundant throughout. There is a disciplined freedom that avoids chaos and disorder and stimulates the listener into a creative partnership. I really enjoy the CD. Sue manages to share a wider aspect of her immense talent with this offering."

--BERTHA HOPE, pianist & composer

"Well balanced playing with a lot of poise."

--ANDREW STERMAN, saxophonist & flutist

"I am really enjoying it ... the playing and the comp and improv."

--MARK FELDMAN, violinist & composer

"Beautiful tone, really unparalleled, only approached by very very few -- like Weidoff, Getz, Desmond. A clear center, full metallic roundness (bell like ringing), resonance, clarity and strength.Seldom used and mastered by others, the low register is used beautifully and also the extreme high register. The tone is consistent throughout, and you could have the best low register in saxophone. Lovely compositions with feeling, line and intellectual structure. Always interesting. I love the "Water Wheel" A beautifully consistent CD, one can play it when in the appropriate mood and not be jarred into different emotions. A peaceful, sometimes meditative experience."

--DERWYN HOLDER, composer & pianist

"Your CD is really excellent. The alto and soprano sound great, and the material really keeps me interested-- something that's hard to do on a solo CD!"

--CRAIG YAREMKO, saxophonist

"I really like it! I like the melodic approach you took; it works well in the solo context. And I thought the production was great, too."

--SAM NEWSOME, saxophonist & bandleader

"Your Worm is beyond words--I am stunned."

--TIM PRICE, saxophonist, bandleader & author

For more reviews by listeners, log onto CDBABY.com/sweetsueterry. - VARIOUS

"Terry's musical talents were already much in evidence when she became the first recipient of a jazz degree at the University of Hartford. . . Judging by Friday's performance, she's now playing--and composing--better than ever. Beginning with the title track from her latest recording, "Gilly's Caper," Terry painted vivid alto sax colors across a swirling sonic canvas."--Chuck Obuchowski, Hartford Courant 10/22/06

- Hartford Courant

Versatile Sue Terry Promises Sweet Night Of Jazz

By OWEN McNALLY
Special To The Courant

October 19 2006

"Sweet" Sue Terry, the noted, New York-based saxophonist, singer, composer, lyricist and band leader with deep ties to Hartford, returns to her old stomping grounds with her quintet Friday night at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.

Presented by the Hartford Jazz Society, the 1981 Hartt School graduate and protégé of Hartford jazz great Jackie McLean is making her first appearance in the capital city as a band leader in seven years. As a young player, she honed her skills by jamming regularly in clubs on the heated Hartford jazz scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

As the next installment of the society's prestigious "Jazz at the Atheneum" series, Terry leads her working band featuring guitarist Saul Rubin, bassist Leon Lee Dorsey, drummer Vincent Ector and percussionist T. Ice.

Terry, a Wilton native, has been enjoying a solid year, thanks especially to the release of her two new albums, "Gilly's Caper" and "The Blue.Seum Project. "

The two radically different yet equally distinguished releases add to her discography of more than 30 albums as leader, co-leader and side player. Her playing and writing have been featured on recordings by Charli Persip, Bobby Sanabria, Jaki Byard, Fred Ho and Diva, an all-woman jazz band. The nickname Sweet Sue was bestowed upon her by her famous mentors, McLean, Barry Harris, Clifford Jordan and Junior Cook.

Terry's two latest discs are excellent showcases for her all-embracing taste. Her ecumenical range makes her much at home with jazz, classical and the multiple types of ethnic music she has been playing regularly for two decades in New York City.

"Gilly's Caper," which features the same quintet she's bringing to Hartford, was the product of six months' labor, a meticulously planned, polished project. The bright solos on "Gilly's Caper" are, of course, improvised. But everything else - including even the CD's offbeat, highly original liner notes - was carefully planned, yet retains a crisp sense of freshness, immediacy and instant accessibility

In dramatic contrast, "The Blue.Seum Project" is a spontaneous work laced with pure, on-the-spot, risk-taking adventures in improvisation. Terry and fellow multi-instrumentalist Tim Price play an array of woodwinds before an audience in an intimate art-gallery setting in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood.

For "Gilly's Caper," Terry, who's a lyricist and a witty, amusing blogger on her website (www.sueterry.net), wrote the liner notes as a short adventure story - a kind of film noir mini-script - about a heroic character named Gilly ("loosely based" on her husband, writer/philosopher Gilbert Barretto.)

Phrases such as "Terra Incognita," "Toothless Soothsayer" and "Seal of Solomon" pop up in the story line and later show up on the CD as its song titles.

With cinematic impact, the 10 pieces - all written and arranged by Terry - sweep across a wide variety of moods from the magical, mystery tour of "Waterwheel" to the celebratory title tune, "Gilly's Caper," an up-tempo caprice.

Besides Terry's solid playing on alto and soprano saxophones, she sings on a couple of tracks in a silken, breathy voice, to especially good effect on her own composition, "The Feel of the Blues."

Stylistically, the CD's repertoire ranges over rhythmic pieces, hybrid mixes that Terry describes as "world jazz," mainstream ventures and even a contemporary jazz selection. For all their variety, the pieces flow coherently and collectively into a natural sounding suite form.

Terry explains that she composed the music for "Gilly's Caper" as "a soundtrack" for the waggish tale she wrote about her Dashiell Hammett-like anti-hero, Gilly, and his last dangerous mission. Gilly's caper comes complete with a pulp fiction femme fatale, a snub-nosed .38, a gun-running Toothless Soothsayer, a Maltese Falcon-like Seal of Solomon and a late night den of iniquity called Terra Incognita.

"I'm a big fan of people really listening to music and kind of seeing pictures in their mind and having the music take them somewhere," Terry says by phone from her apartment in Brooklyn.

"So I try to compose and play in a way that will suggest images and ideas to a listener because I think that's what music does. Music takes you somewhere because it's an art form that unfolds in time," she says.

While Terry thrives on the discipline of composing and arranging and has mastered a worldwide range of styles - everything from Caribbean to African rhythms and harmonies - she also loves the challenge of playing completely free. That means starting with no set chord changes - utterly without even the familiar "I Got Rhythm" and blues changes - and without modal scales or anything whatsoever to hang your hat on harmonically, melodically or rhythmically.

Totally free improvisers create on the razor's edge, a hazardous, even frequently lethal starting point. Open-ended freedom is, at best, a dicey venture that only true masters of their instruments, like Terry, can transform into an art form.

Terry and Price, her collaborator on "Blue.Seum," are old friends who had been talking for years about recording a totally free-form collaboration. Kindred spirits aesthetically and with a common musical background, each started out under the tutelage of a master jazz saxophonist. Price, who came up in Philadelphia, began with the great Charlie Mariano. Terry, while at Hartt, studied with McLean, who was not only a master saxophonist/composer but also an influential, empathetic jazz educator.

Terry, who was named Hartt School's Alumna of the Year in 2001, was the first graduate of the jazz studies program that McLean founded at Hartt. Today the program is known as the Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz.

Price and Terry, both of whom are from white, middle-class backgrounds, also share a similar multicultural experience, since, from their teens, they have worked extensively with racially diverse bands. And both share a heightened awareness of and passion for ethnic music from around the world, knowledge they've honed by playing prolifically in bands of every ethnic style.

As a wunderkind alto player, Terry quickly became a featured regular on the bustling music circuit in Haiti, a country she loves and where she has performed innumerable times.

Jamming in Haiti, while absorbing its music and culture, was merely a first step in Terry's worldwide travels and absorption of virtually everything she saw and heard. Her globetrotting experiences have not only broadened her open-ended view of music, but also, in a deep, philosophical sense, taught her much about how people of different colors, diverse beliefs and cultural backgrounds relate to one another.

Her career has taken her from appearances at leading jazz clubs and festivals from Tokyo and London to Berlin and Bern, and to plum stateside gigs at such prestigious venues as the Kennedy Center in Washington and Lincoln Center in New York City.

Besides making music, Terry loves to write lyrics and short stories; has written popular instructional, "how to play" manuals; and has a lifelong fascination with art, including drawing, printmaking and mixed-media works. Like her late, good friend and fellow Connecticut native, Thomas Chapin, the brilliant, cutting-edge saxophonist/composer from Manchester, Terry has long been interested in the creative process, not just for musicians but also for painters and writers as well.

All of which puts her very much in tune with her dual alliance with Price on their free-form woodwind ventures on "Blue.Seum"

Graced with a tight, empathetic sense of interplay and inspired by the New York art gallery's creative ambience, the album's 10 "spontaneous compositions" light up with shifting tonal colors, kaleidoscopic moods and flowing lines and shapes drenched in blues and the abstract truth.

Before each number, whether it's an extemporaneous homage to Igor Stravinsky or blues-drenched, free-form expressionism, neither musician even knows beforehand which instrument he or she will even start with. Price comes armed with tenor saxophone, bass clarinet, B-flat clarinet, stone flute and bassoon. Terry's arsenal includes alto saxophone, B-flat clarinet, flute, ceramic flute, harmonica and an exotic sounding, odd-looking bean-pod percussion instrument she picked up in Port Au Prince.

"We start in the silence and see where the moment leads us," Terry says. "Each moment engenders the next moment. You feel freedom to create not limited by a given song structure that you have to adhere to."

Tickets for the concert: $30 in advance, $35 at the door; $25 in advance for society members, $30 at the door. Students: $5. Obtain tickets at the society office, 116 Cottage Grove Road, Bloomfield, or call 860-242-6688. A cash bar runs the night of the concert from 6 to 10 in the museum's Aetna Theater lobby, where there will be seating at tables.

Copyright 2006, Hartford Courant
- Hartford Courant