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Sax and the city: Jazzman Warner steeped in NYC scene

When Greg Warner plays the candlelit Blue Star Brasserie, he can sweep his listeners back to the days when the saxophone’s warm sounds were all the rage. Legendary players such as Stan Getz or Zoot Sims profoundly influenced Warner, who regularly performs at Blue Star on Thursday nights.

Warner, who lives in Melbourne, played with many great American jazzmen starting from a very young age. Warner recalls as a young boy growing up in the Bronx listening to guitarist Remo Palmieri play on Arthur Godfrey’s TV show, and himself beginning to learn to play guitar at 7. As a teen, Greg Warner resisted rock music in favor of the more sophisticated soloing and harmonies that came from the generation before his, the great standards and jazz compositions of the 1940s and ’50s.

Pursuing his jazz interests, he was fortunate to study with musician and music educator Arnie Berle, who has authored more than a dozen instructional guitar books. Enrolling in the Manhattan School of Music, Warner studied theory and harmony with Daniel Ricigliano, who chaired the school’s theory department.

“I was lucky to study with great guitarists in New York like Chuck Wayne, who was Tony Bennett’s musical director, and Joe Puma, a fellow Bronxer. They had a really hot duo in New York at the time and would play all over.”

When asked if he ever got to see them in action, Warner shouts with a laugh, “Every night!”

At first, his mother had to drive him because he was too young. But by 17 or 18, he would go alone to a number of hotspots: The Guitar on the West Side; Bradlee’s in the Village; Eddie Condon’s Jazz Club; or Stryker’s on West 86th, where trumpeter Chet Baker, who lived across the street, would come in and play, says Warner.

“The jazz scene was unbelievable then and a lot of the greats were still playing,” he says. “I learned so much from listening to them.”

His exposure to the New York City jazz scene in the late ’60s and ’70s afforded Warner a close-up view and insider take on how, when and where to play. It also provided him lifelong friendships with notable jazz musicians to whom most teenagers simply did not have access.

“Joe Puma lived right up the street from me and we would hang out all the time,” Warner recalls. “He took me under his wing. I’d go see him play whenever, wherever. He really became a surrogate father to me and I got involved in some of the greatest musical situations through him: Mabel Mercer, her incredible accompanist Jimmy Lyon, pianist Hank Jones, and jazz sax greats Zoot Sims and Al Cohn.”

After graduation, Warner found himself part of the active New York jazz scene. Although his guitar technique and performance was very good, he felt he wasn’t “getting at the music,” as he puts it. So he began teaching himself – on guitar – the soulful solos of sax great Lester Young. Young, who had played with the Count Basie Orchestra, had a cool, relaxed style of playing that “free-floated,” as Warner says. For him, it had a transformative effect; he fell in love with the sound. It wasn’t long before Warner sold one of his most prized and expensive guitars to purchase his first saxophone, a Selmer Mark VI, and began his professional career as a sax player.

In the 1980s, through his friendship with Ray Turner, Warner met pianist Danny Negri in New York. Negri, who had performed with famed sax players Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster and alternated with piano great Art Tatum, became a regular part of Warner’s gig schedule in New York.

Around the same time, though, the city’s jazz scene started to change. When Negri moved to Sarasota in search of new opportunities in Florida, Warner soon followed suit and settled into the buzzing musical landscape of Florida’s west coast.

Warner’s parents lived in Hollywood, where one of the city commissioners was pianist and current Vero Beach resident John Williams. It was a hot scene musically, with gigs running until 4 a.m. thanks to a city ordinance that mandated that at least two musicians had to be playing if a bar or restaurant wanted to stay open late – as late as 4 a.m.

Warner went from playing in Hollywood occasionally to playing regularly, often at several venues a night. “In South Florida, even if you weren’t working, there were places to sit in seven nights a week,” Warner recalls. “We would play a gig in Fort Lauderdale that would close at 2 a.m., head to Hollywood and play until 4 a.m., and then finish playing in Miami at 6 in the morning.”

His experiences led him to play with many of South Florida’s finest musicians, including Joe Roland, Ira Sullivan, Pete Minger, Dolph Castellano and Lew Berryman.

For New Year’s Eve, 2000 Warner traveled north to Melbourne, playing his last gig of the year at Austin’s Bistro on New Haven Avenue. The gig was good in more ways than one: Not only did Warner end up playing there as a resident musician for the next eight years, he also met his future wife Julia.

Today, Warner performs his solo sax with background music he himself sequenced, a skill he has perfected since 2004. That accompaniment added polish to his performances that eventually garnered the attention of large organizations like Pratt Whitney, Boeing and NASA, for whom he frequently plays.

Fusing the sequenced music with artfully crafted harmonies and orchestrations, he provides his audiences with an extensive repertoire.

“The music I was exposed to in New York was very diverse; I watched and learned from and played with some of the very best and from a variety of styles.”

Warner’s eclectic repertoire includes not only classic jazz standards but renditions of standards done with, say, a bossa nova beat.

“I try to share my love of the standards, but also the versatility of the different forms; to introduce standards that are less familiar, and play the songs people know, but maybe haven’t heard them done that way.” Warner is the featured performer at Cuizine in Satellite Beach on Friday nights, and at Blue Star Brasserie in Vero Beach every Thursday night. 

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