Mario Schneeberger and Benny Bailey, 1976.
Photo: Foto Hug
Swiss alto saxophonist and dear fellow jazz researcher Mario Schneeberger has send me a pdf containing a discography of his own recordings. This discography is basically extracted from Arild Widerøe’s Swiss Jazz Disko, but Mario has added a few things. You can find the discography here.
Mario, though he could never live from making music alone, is surely Switzerland’s finest bop altoist and has been that for more than fifty years now. Besides leading his own quintet for about twenty years and being part of several swiss band projects he also often had the chance to jam with luminaries from the US scene like Benny Bailey, Bross Townsend, Richard Williams, Milt Buckner … All of these and more mentioned in the discography.
And here is some music to go along wit the dry data:
First here’s the Mario Schneeberger Quintett featuring Benny Bailey playing Horace Silver’s “Strollin'” live at the Schützenhaus in Glarus on November 27, 1976. Besides Schneeberger and trumpeter Bailey the band consists of Tutilo Odermatt at the piano, bassist Peter Frei and drummer Kurt Schaufelberger. Bailey has the first solo, Mario comes after that.
“Strollin'” comes from Mario’s rare self produced LP DS 81, “Chasin The Bird”, which was released in 1981 – thus it’s number.
From the Crown Propeller collection
As a second example of Mario Schneeberger’s art, here is a wonderful rendition of “Body and Soul” in a trio recording with Mario Schneeberger on alto sax, pianist Joachim Stein and bassist Charles Sammons. This was recorded at the Restaurant Nerly in Erfurt Germany on June 20, 2008.
This beautiful track was released in 2015 on “Cheer Ears” as DS 15, a “Very Limited Edition” 2CD set, that Mario burned on CD-Rs to give away to his relatives and friends.
In Erfurt, where Mario can often be seen these days, he is regularly invited as guest soloist by the Nerly Bigband which since its formation is the resident band of the club. In 2015 the Nerly Bigband released “That’s Earl, Brother”, a CD that features Mario in front of the band on all tracks. Unfortunately you can only get this CD at different places in Erfurt, you might want to try the band’s homepage though. What you are looking for looks like this:
And it’s definitely worth looking out for!
Enjoy!
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