Charlie Mariano, 2007 June 18
Saxophonist, composer, arranger, and intermittent Berklee faculty member Charlie Mariano discusses his almost seventy-year music career playing and recording with various musicians and bands including Jaki Byard, Charles Mingus, and Stan Kenton; his studies under Joe Viola at the Schillinger House (later Berklee College of Music); and notable students that he taught at Berklee. He also describes his experience of West Coast jazz versus East Coast jazz, his interest in Asian music including Japanese and Indian music, and studying to play the nadhaswaram.
Jazz saxophonist Charlie Mariano (1923-2009) was born in Boston, Massachusetts as Carmine Ugo Mariano. Having studied piano from age eleven and saxophone from age seventeen, he began playing at Izzy Ort’s Bar at age eighteen. In 1943 Mariano was drafted into the armed forces, where he performed in entertainment ensembles at officers’ clubs. Post-World War II, He eventually returned to Boston, where he attended Schillinger House (later Berklee College of Music) on the GI Bill, graduating in 1950. During the 1950s, Mariano helped found the Jazz Workshop in Boston, played in Stan Kenton’s band and Shelly Manne’s quintet, spent five years in Los Angeles, and then returned to Boston in 1958; he taught two semesters at Berklee before leaving to start the Toshiko Mariano Quartet with jazz pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi, to whom he was married from 1959 to 1967. Mariano performed and recorded in Japan and New York until the mid-sixties, when he returned to Boston. Between 1965 to 1971, Mariano taught intermittently at Berklee, spending several months in Malaysia under a State Department grant coaching the Malaysia TV Studio Orchestra, through which he learned to play the nadhaswaram. Mariano alternated between Europe and the United States throughout the 1970s and 80s, returning briefly to Berklee in 1975 to teach one final semester, and eventually settled in Cologne, Germany.
