About

As a kid growing up in 1950s Seattle I was always interested in creating stuff.  I liked drawing pictures and molding clay more than social activities. I loved making things from wood rather than playing ball. At 10 or 11 I made my own go-cart, or “bug” from an old wooden ironing board, some wagon wheels, and a Briggs & Stratton 3-horse lawn-mower motor. The bug featured a hand-made wooden steering wheel on a spindle (my own design) which, when turned, caused a rope to be wound around the spindle, pulling the front wheels right or left. For a while (as I sailed at 20 mph around the concrete schoolyard across the street from our house)

I was the rage of the neighborhood.

When I started playing guitar at 13 I became totally consumed with music. Later, In college, I would teach guitar lessons to help pay my tuition costs, but I was an English major, and never studied musical composition. I was working in a band in Seattle as a guitarist at the time, and they needed someone to write parts for the horns. I became curious about how those instruments work, and I started asking people about transposition – how you convert sounds on a piano keyboard into saxophone notes, or trumpet notes.

From the beginning it was experimental, trial and error, finding out what worked and what didn’t.  Before I left Seattle to move to L.A. in 1970 I had written 50 or 60 charts for different-sized bands – mostly jazz/blues/rock and standards, and in the process I got to hear them played, giving me feedback about voicing and effective ranges for instruments in different combinations.

In the 70’s I studied orchestration with Dr. Albert Harris, the great British composer / arranger. He widened my horizons by exposing me to 20^th– century classical composers’ works.  I had already loved the music of J.S. Bach, but now I was fascinated with the works of Bartok, Ravel and Debussy.  All of it influenced my own writing.

From the time I started writing music in the early ‘60s up to the present I have written about 2,000 arrangements in various formats: charts of standards for singers, charts of originals

for different-sized groups,  charts for radio and T.V. commercials (some original), charts for industrial films (mostly original), feature films, T.V. themes (original), ghost writing for T.V. and film, arrangements for recording artists and shows, charts for my own groups (of different sizes).

Testimony by reviewers of Bruce Lofgren concerts

The jazz/rock band is the zebra of the musical zoo. Is it a jazz band with rock stripes or vice versa? Guitarist Bruce Lofgren’s 16-piece outfit, heard Sunday at the Pilgrimage, posed just such a question. The program, consisting entirely of his own compositions, left the impression that a battery of reviewers from the rock, jazz, and even the classical department should have been on hand on hand to concoct a review as well-rounded as the concert itself……the abiding impression was that of a composer ready to tackle any assignment in any territory. His composing/arranging credits to date include works for Airto, Loggins and Messina, the Osmond Brothers, and Buddy Rich. Next stop, maybe the Philharmonic?

Leonard Feather – Los Angeles Times

Lofgren is a colorist who speaks many tongues. His charts skip about, uninhibited by allegiance to any one idiom or consistent language.  Although many band leaders lament, “I don’t play jazz, rock or pop; I just play music,” Lofgren has come up with a legitimate musical Esperanto.

As he outs it, “The word ‘fusion’ has been so abused, I’m reluctant to use it, but my sound is definitely fusion.” His is a high-spirited group, constantly displaying a joie-de-jazz that deserves more of a commercial following. It is hard to believe that Lofgren has yet to score his first feature film.

Harvey Siders – Los Angeles Daily News 

HUNTINGTON BEACH – It seems that there are two types of big bands these days: those that work in the tradition of Count Basie, Woody Herman, et al, and those that work from that tradition, using it as a jumping-off point to explore new melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic territory, just as Herman, Ellington, et al did in their day. Bruce Lofgren’s Jazz Orchestra is in the second camp. Wednesday at El Matador, Lofgren led his 17-piece ensemble through a long first set of his original material that infused the big-band tradition with contemporary rhythms and modern melodic content while utilizing a palette’s worth of orchestral colors.

Bill Kohlhaase – Orange County Register

Lofgren is a first-rate arranger with a comfortable command of the many tonal possibilities of a large emsemble.  He has further expanded those possibilities by using a 6-piece rhythm section,

a sax section with expansive doubling potential, and a lower brass section including two French horns and two trombones.

            In a program consisting of such far-reaching material as Miles Davis’ “All Blues,” Lennon and McCartney’s “Michelle” and Vincent Youmans’ “Flying Down to Rio” as well as a collection of his own bright-spirited originals, Lofgren came up with consistently colorful tonal combinations.

Don Heckman – Los Angeles Times