This is a print out of Stanley Sagov's Sonicbids EPK™ (Electronic Press Kit). For a complete EPK including audio, photos, and up-to-date calendar visit: http://www.sonicbids.com/StanleySagov Stanley Sagov Primary Genre: Jazz Secondary Genre: Jazz Contact Name: Stanley Sagov Email: sagov@mac.com Jazz,Jazz,Jazz-whimsical , sensitive , swinging NOT smooth going for something beautiful , elegaic , soulful and funky!! Artist Information Biography Post Bop music with a South African flavor for some pieces. Seasoned players who have stayed young and still in love with playing and listening to each other. Instrumentation Stanley Sagov Piano Stan Strickland Reeds Mike Peipman Brass John Lockwood Bass Bob Moses drums Discography "Looking Forward to Remembering the Future ",Twice Played Jazz and African Jazz Telepathy. I also have many tracks and three albums on itunes and digstation,cdBaby and other websites. Bob Moses , Stan Strickland , Tommy Lockett ,John Lockwood and Mike Peipman have numerous album credits and web based links. Press Reviews The doctor is in Boston Phoenix Stanley Sagov's jazz remedies, plus Saxophone Summit By JON GARELICK | October 8, 2008 That Stanley Sagov plays jazz at all is impressive. That he plays it at such a high level is stunning. Sagov � a Boston family physician whose band visit Scullers this Tuesday for a CD-release show � is from South Africa. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, he was born with Gordon's Syndrome, a genetic disorder that left him with two club feet. By the time he was 13, he'd endured 16 different surgeries in London, New York, and Boston. He spent much of his early years walking in iron leg braces. Yet through all the extensive medical care, he found himself bonding with the doctors who treated him. Inspired as well by family members in the medical profession, he decided that he too would become a doctor. But he was also drawn to music, and a variety of instruments. "I played guitar a lot and played in a band that did covers, R&B � Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis," he tells me when we get together at his Chestnut Hill home. When the piano player left the band for a time, Sagov was tapped for the job. "I must have driven my parents insane, trying to teach myself to play these boogie-woogie and R&B things over and over and over. Then the piano player came back, but I was hooked." Hanging with older musicians, getting into jazz, he acquired mentors. "Bob Tizard, a bassist and trombonist, decided he was going to teach me how to play 'Perdido' � a 32-bar song form � and he was going to make this rock-and-roll musician understand about playing more than three chords and how to remember the form. We played the song from midnight until six in the morning." By morning � "after around the 30th time" � Tizard had Sagov improvising. This was Cape Town, during the depth of apartheid, about which Sagov had his own epiphany. At about the age of nine, he recounts in his press biography, he was walking uphill, wearing his leg irons, from a violin lesson when he "suddenly understood the parallel between my being stigmatized for looking unusual and the terrible way that black people in South Africa were being treated by whites." Later, he tells me, he was among a group of "iconoclastic young South Africans" who experienced the music as a bridge across races. "We had this fantasy about America that the jazz community was an integrated community, white and black people demonstrating across the color bar that you could make great art together." In the meantime, as a medical doctor, he worked in the segregated townships. Fast-forward to Sagov moving to New York in the '60s and falling in with its vibrant jazz scene. By 1970, he was studying at New England Conservatory, having been recommended by the esteemed trumpeter Ted Curson and one of Sagov's heroes, the great pianist Bill Evans. Eventually Sagov had his own band, and they worked often, playing the clubs and opening concerts for acts like Gary Burton. But once he had a family, he had to make a choice, and working as a touring musician was not it. So he practiced medicine during the day and piano and composition at night in his home studio, maintaining his friendships from the NEC years with people like sax/flute man Stan Strickland and drummer Bob Moses, both of whom are on his new self-released double-disc, Looking Forward To Remembering the Future. The CD mixes every strain of Sagov's experience. There are standards like the Gershwins' "Our Love Is Here To Stay," Miles Davis's "Blue in Green," and Evans's "Nardis"; there are lesser-played jazz pieces like Gary McFarland's "Gary's Waltz." Sagov's arrangements reconfigure the familiar tunes � the melodies of "Blue in Green" and "Nardis" are merely passing shadows. You can hear the music of the South African townships in "Stanley's Kwela," his Jewish background in Middle Eastern�tinged pieces like "Chord Too Bad" and the traditional "Avinu Malkkkeinu." (His comment on the region's "fratricidal conflict: the music from both sides is the same!") The playing from Strickland, Moses, and veteran trumpeter Mike Peipman is, as you might expect, stellar, with strong support from electric-bassist Tommy Lockett and percussionist Sean Mannion. On Sagov's idiosyncratic "Blooz for Another Time," Strickland, who can blow with Coltrane-like complexity and ferocity, settles into a Ben Websterish fat-toned melody before doubling the time on top of Sagov's chords. Meanwhile, Sagov's writing and playing surprises everywhere. He stretches out the melody in his introduction to "Our Love Is Here To Stay," exposing inner voicings, wringing the song for emotion without sentimentality. His "Regular-Irregular" recalls one of the airy forms from the Miles Davis/Wayne Shorter book, with its rising horn fanfare, 12-tone-row middle section, and use of space. Sagov's solo here takes one unpredictable turn after another, sticking with the form but mixing up odd, varied patterns, quizzical and joyful. 1 | 2 | next >The doctor is in By JON GARELICK | October 8, 2008 Sagov says that even NEC couldn't get him to "unlearn" the bad habits of his early self-training. "I'm a jazz musician who learned how to play piano on the street. I never learned to play scales properly, I just scrabbled around in my own way." That rough technique might account for some of his individuality. "I don't consider myself a pianist in the way Keith Jarrett or Jacky Terrasson is. They're consummate players, well schooled. So I think of myself more as a composer who happens to use the piano as a means of expression." Although he hasn't toured, Sagov has played regularly over the years in Boston and New York. The new CD (he released one with some of the same musicians in 2006, and another has just been completed) represents a special bond with long-time friends and colleagues. "This is how it used to feel when I started playing in South Africa � music that combined head and heart and had rigor and sexiness to it, that's got formal elements. But what makes it come alive in the moment of playing is the immediacy of feeling other people being in the game with you." Topics * Stanley Sagov STANLEY SAGOV REMEMBERING THE FUTURE BAND | Scullers, DoubleTree Guest Suites Hotel, 400 Soldiers Field Rd, Boston | October 14 at 8 pm | $15 | 617.562.4111 or www.scullersjazz.com < prev 1 | 2 | Related: Practice,Practice Boston Globe The Boston Globe Practice, practice Even with an award-winning medical career, Stanley Sagov always makes time for his music As a jazz pianist, Stanley Sagov spends most of his time in his home studio; as a doctor, he meets with patients, like Brother Cleve. As a jazz pianist, Stanley Sagov spends most of his time in his home studio; as a doctor, he meets with patients, like Brother Cleve. (Josh reynolds for the boston globe (top); pat greenhouse/globe staff) By Tom Haines Globe Staff / October 11, 2008 Stanley Sagov, family doctor and jazz pianist, begins a beat on the kitchen table with his hand: Wham! Over a dinner of homemade curry, Sagov has just turned talk toward the urgent interplay between rhythm and harmony in jazz. "It's like what the rhythm says to the body is, 'Now! This is happening now!' " Sagov says. Wham! "You know?" Wham! "Not another time." Wham! "Right now." Wham! Sagov, 64, who by day practices family medicine in Arlington and teaches students, residents, and fellows from four Massachusetts medical schools, is in the midst of his own compelling "right now" musical moment. After years of self-chosen rhythmic solitude, he has assembled a band of prominent musicians that includes, among others, drummer Bob Moses and flutist, saxophonist, and singer Stan Strickland. They have recorded two albums - dynamic, largely unrehearsed improvisations of classics, Sagov originals, and South African songs - and will perform Tuesday at Scullers Jazz Club. For Sagov the jazz pianist, the collaboration is about the joy of jamming, to be sure, but also about expressing an optimism that transcends music. "It's saying, 'Here's this representation of how it could be,' across cultures in the case of jazz," Sagov says, "where we listen to each other and we end up with something more powerful, more synergistic, more moving, more sexy, more intriguing, than anything that could have been done if we stayed in our little boxes." On a recent weekday morning in Arlington, Sagov, the family doctor, leans against an examining table at Family Practice Group, which he founded more than 30 years ago, and he listens to a woman who has fought breast cancer and faces uncertain troubles from diabetes. They talk of past surgeries and current medication, and Sagov says, "The other thing is your mood. Chronic depression. The employment thing . . ." She nods. "I feel a little bit more energy," she tells Sagov. "I've been taking the dog to the park." Then it is on to a young man who arrived with a violin case - he plays mostly fiddle music these days, he says - and explains that a rash has spread. Sagov examines him, then, hands clasped, looks the young man in the eyes and explains that even with ointment the rash will take time to clear. He turns to a computer and types in hunt-and-peck fashion what he has found, then gently asks about the breakup of the patient's parents, whom Sagov also knows. "Do you want my two cents?" Sagov asks. He encourages the young man to open a dialogue. The son does not need to accept what he hears, or even believe it. But such a conversation, Sagov says, could lead to deeper un derstanding of a difficult situation.Continued... "I'm very optimistic that truth creates possibilities," Sagov tells him. Starting a musical, medical path When Sagov talks, whether about medicine or music or life, his voice is soft and sure, often delivering evolving sentences that occasionally end in a slight gasp, as though he has given all. His gray-bearded face is welcoming of the world. Yet, seen in profile, it stares sharply into it. There is something in this - an openness to engage, and a confidence to challenge - that seems to define Sagov and his medical and musical passions that have spanned a lifetime, yet thrive in the moment. It is like this over the dinner he cooked in his Chestnut Hill home, when conversation turns toward his native South Africa. Sagov was born in Cape Town to Jewish parents whose families had emigrated from Russia to the tip of a new continent. Though he suffered from Gordon syndrome, a skeletal condition that requires major surgeries through adolescence, as a teenager Sagov took up photography and began capturing vivid black-and-white portraits of joys and sorrows of life under apartheid: a black man holding a guitar on the side of an empty road; well-dressed whites passing before a palm tree; two barefoot children standing behind a chain-link gate, and two others hawking newspapers. Sagov started playing violin at age 6 and later, during a year recovering from surgery in London, learned guitar, which he played in a popular Cape Town band covering Little Richard songs and more. When Sagov was 16, the band pianist got sick, and so he sat in to play hits by Jerry Lee Lewis. Like that he was off for years wandering from Cape Town cafes to clubs in Johannesburg and in the black townships, along the way playing with the likes of pianist Dollar Brand (now known as Abdullah Ibrahim), singer Miriam Makeba, saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi, and many more. It was an individual adventure. "I'd wake up with broken glass under the piano and not sure how I got there, you know," Sagov says. "Drugs, sex, and jazz. It was wild." And it was a chance to challenge cultural conventions. Jazz "had this moral dimension to it, this political dimension to it, that was about integration," Sagov says. "It was about white and black coming together to do something that wasn't apartheid, that wasn't about oppression, that wasn't about pejorative distinctions between people on grounds of their color or anything else about them." Sagov simultaneously studied in medical school at the University of Cape Town. Then, as thousands were leaving South Africa in protest, to avoid persecution, or to find a better scene, Sagov in 1967 followed his dueling beats to New York's hospitals and jazz clubs. "I used to go to lectures and type my notes, and if I was working in hospitals, do my shift," Sagov says, "and then I would hang out almost exclusively with musicians and philosophers and poets and street people, and I needed . . . that other part of the human expressive range that is different than science and service and a particular kind of formal discipline." He moved to Boston, where he studied jazz piano and oboe at New England Conservatory, graduating in 1973. But a desire for family and a disdain for life on the road helped solidify a decision to join the emerging family practice program at Harvard Medical School. In the decades since, Sagov has treated families from across the state, including some who have moved away, yet return just for his care. In 2002 he was honored as Family Physician of the Year by the Massachusetts Academy of Family Physicians, and three years later was inducted into the academy's teaching hall of fame. Staying busy in the home studio On a Thursday evening, Sagov is home in Chestnut Hill after another day at the office and settled in a makeshift recording studio upstairs from the kitchen. It is cluttered and cramped. On the shelf are stacked manuals, including "Home Recording for Musicians." On one wall, a poster advertises a "Sagov" concert, in 1976, at the Boston Center for the Arts. On another wall, a copy of Cape Times Magazine, from 1966, features Sagov photographs: a woman brooding, boys eating sugar cane, people gathered for drinks at an outdoor bar. During the past two decades, Sagov has played the occasional wedding or bar mitzvah, for friends, and the annual staff party of Mount Auburn Hospital. But Sagov has made most of his music in the home studio, using electronic keyboards and computer programs to play everything from penny whistle to piano on dozens of self-produced solo albums. One five-song collection, dated Jan. 1, 2000, is titled "One for the Millennium: Monk, Miles, McFarland, Mingus and Me." (His record label: Try This at Home.) As Sagov turns to his computer, his wife, Elivia, and daughter, Sadye, settle in a room next door to watch political speeches. Sagov searches iTunes and plays "Country Cooking," by South African pianist and composer Chris McGregor. He clicks again and goes back to the 1950s with "Kwela Claude," by Spokes Mashiyane, a South African penny whistle player and master of kwela, the street music that Sagov heard as a child. The speakers pulse as notes trip and skip one upon another. Sagov's eyes squeeze shut, his head rocks, and his foot keeps a heavy beat. His cheeks crease and release, his lips purse then smile, and suddenly, on hearing a particular note, his eyes spring open and brows arch, as if to say, "cool, eh?" � Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Practice makes perfect for jazz-loving doc Boston Herald Dr. Stanley Sagov's patients should be relieved he doesn't like the traveling life. If he did, the jazz world's gain would have been their loss. "They're my village," the pianist and family doctor said from his home in Newton. "I love them, I care about them, so as a family person and a doctor, being on the road doesn't make it for me." Patients and fans won't have to travel far to hear the 64-year-old composer and multi-instrumentalist showcase his musical side when he leads a band featuring Bob Moses, Stan Strickland, John Lockwood and Mike Peipman on Tuesday at Scullers Jazz Club. In a rare concert appearance, he celebrates the release of two new CDs, "Looking Forward to Remembering the Future" and "African Jazz Telepathy." For decades, Sagov has quietly pursued his twin loves of music and medicine. Chief of family medicine at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge and head of his own practice in Arlington, Sagov follows a routine of spending evenings and weekends practicing and recording in his home studio. "I've always been compelled to do both things passionately," the Capetown, South Africa, native said. "I've been unable to give up either one." Sagov, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, understood at an early age the trials that life can bring and the joy that music can offer as an antidote. He was born with Gordon's syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that forced him to wear iron leg braces in his youth. He underwent 16 surgeries to deal with two club feet. Sagov also witnessed first-hand the ugliness of apartheid, a grim reality offset by the uplifting South African music surrounding him. Those sounds course through his piano playing and scores. "As I've gotten older," he said, "I feel like I'm returning to some of the things I heard on the streets and on the radio when I was growing up. Any South African musician listening to my music would hear that it wasn't exactly township jazz or Afrikaners music or the kwela that buskers played on the street. But it's got all those elements, plus American jazz, in it. I love the mixture." He also loves being able to mix it up with high-octane company on recordings and at Scullers. "What we're doing is as close to my idea of heaven on earth as I can engineer," he said. - bobcyoung@verizon.net Stanley Sagov and the Remembering the Future Band, Tuesday night at Scullers Jazz Club at 8 and 10. Tickets: $15; 617-562-4131. Credit: By BOB YOUNG Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission. Setlist Mostly originals with a sprinkling of standards and Jazz classics. Basic Requirements usual set up for a jazz quintet Calendar Date Time Venue City Mar 4, 2009 TBA RegattaBar Cambridge, MA Album promotion of African Jazz Telepathy Copyright © 2001-2008 Sonicbids Corp. All rights reserved.