Bio

 

Jack Furlong is a baritone saxophonist who was born in Princeton, NJ, and resides in Pennington, NJ.  He’s been playing music professionally since 2001, and in such time has shared the stage with many notable jazz musicians, including Mulgrew Miller, Skip Wilkins, Mark Vinci, Phil Burlin, Jim Pugh, Arturo O’Farrill, Moreno Fruzzetti, Mark Gallagher, Ken Brader, Conrad Herwig, and Gene Perla, to name a few.  He’s also worked personally with other jazz greats such as Jim McNeely, Dave Demsey, and Rich DeRosa.

Jack started playing saxophone when he was 10, beginning on alto and eventually moving to tenor.  By the time he was 17, he was on baritone full time and never looked back.  He received his BA in Music from Lafayette College and received his MM in Composing and Arranging from William Paterson University in 2010.  His musical work spans many aspects, including performing, composing, arranging, and teaching, all on a full time basis.

Jack is employed by Lafayette College as the Assistant Director to the college Jazz Ensemble (directed by Ken Brader), the Director of the Pep Band, and as the Music Director for the Newman Association for Catholics on campus.  He has performed in orchestras for shows such as Damn Yankees, City of Angels, Crazy For You, The IT Girl, Slabtown District Convention, The Goodbye Girl,  Johnny Guitar, Curtains, Cinderella, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying.

Jack draws most of his musical inspiration from the late Gerry Mulligan, known as one of the pioneers of jazz baritone saxophone.  His cool style, melodic phrasing, and interesting harmonization helped mold Jack’s approach to music.  Jack also subscribes to the stylings of Miles Davis and Count Basie and taps into their simple approach to music.  It is in this easy going musical dialogue that allows Jack to create music without complexity and grow into different forms of tension and release.

Jack is also quite fond of programmatic music and does a lot of work incorporating jazz into this style of music.  He works with music from film, television, video games, and other media and instills those ideas into his solos and compositions.  This is especially evident in his ongoing series of arrangements of James Bond theme songs, including “From Russia With Love,” “You Only Live Twice,” and “The Man With The Golden Gun.”  He takes pride in the fact that the song that admitted him to WPUNJ was his arrangement of “Super Mario Bros.”

In his spare time and personal life, Jack is a huge fan of the James Bond franchise and the Star Wars saga as well as the New York Yankees.  As a former baseball player, Jack spends plenty of time giving back to the community as a baseball umpire and coach.