VIENNA (Reuters) - Keyboardist Joe
Zawinul, who played with Miles Davis and helped shape jazz fusion with
his band Weather Report, died in his native city of Vienna on Tuesday,
aged 75.
Zawinul, voted best keyboarder 30 times by music magazine Down Beat's
critics' poll, including this year, had sought medical attention last
month after a tour. He died of a rare form of skin cancer, local news
agency APA reported.
"Joe Zawinul was born on July 7, 1932 in earth time, and on September
11, 2007 in eternal time. He lives on," APA quoted his son Erich as
saying.
Growing up in Vienna's poor Erdberg district during Nazi rule, Zawinul
first showed his talent by playing the accordion with his family. He
later won a free place in the Vienna Conservatory. As a young man his
friends were the late former Austrian President Thomas Klestil and
pianist Friedrich Gulda.
In 1959, Zawinul won a piano scholarship at Boston's Berklee College of
Music, where many careers in contemporary music began, before joining
the bands of U.S. jazz stars Dinah Washington and later Cannonball
Adderly.
Miles Davis first approached the budding pianist in New York's Birdland
jazz club, wanting to hire him, Zawinul once told an interviewer.
Zawinul turned him down but said that when the time was right, they
would make history together.
And when the time was right, they did. Ten years later, Zawinul wrote
"In a Silent Way," the title cut for Davis' 1969 album regarded as one
of the trumpeter's first forays into jazz fusion, a genre drawing on
rock, R&B and other styles.
He played on and composed for Davis' "Bitches Brew" album in 1970, a
chart-topping record considered revolutionary for the day and marking
his crossover to a rock and pop audience.
Zawinul started Weather Report in 1970 with saxophonist Wayne Shorter.
The band did much to bring electric piano, synthesizers, and African and
Middle Eastern rhythms to mainstream audiences in a jazz setting.
Before its breakup in 1985, Weather Report released 17 albums. Its most
famous song, "Birdland," published on the "Heavy Weather" album in 1977,
won separate Grammy awards in three decades -- for the original version
as well as for covers by Quincy Jones and Manhattan Transfer.
Following the break-up of Weather Report, Zawinul had fronted the
Zawinul Syndicate for the past 20 years. After the group's tour this
summer, he sought medical attention and was admitted to the Wilhelmina
Clinic in his native city last month.
In 1963, Zawinul married Maxine, the first African-American Playboy
bunny, whom he met in the Birdland club too. They mainly lived in
Malibu, California. The couple had three children.
He also spent a lot of time in Vienna and started his own club there,
also called Birdland. He had planned to give a concert in Vienna's
concert hall on September 29.
Vienna Mayor Michael Haeupl said the musician would be buried in a grave
of honor in Vienna.
(Additional reporting by Mark Heinrich)
-----------------------------------------
Max Roach, Master of Modern Jazz, Dies
Max Roach, a
founder of modern jazz who rewrote the rules of drumming in the
1940s and spent the rest of his career breaking musical barriers and
defying listeners’ expectations, died early yesterday in Manhattan.
He was 83.
Ozier Muhammed/The
New York Times
Max Roach at
the Bell Atlantic Jazz Festival at Columbia University
in 2000.
His death, at an undisclosed
hospital, was announced by a spokesman for Blue Note Records, Mr.
Roach’s last label. No cause was given. Mr. Roach, who had lived on
the Upper West Side for many years, had been known to be in poor
health for some time.
Mr. Roach’s death closes a
chapter in American musical history. He was the last surviving
member of a small circle of adventurous musicians — among them
Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and a handful of
others — whose innovations brought about wholesale changes in jazz
during World War II and immediately afterward.
Their music, which came to be
known as bebop, had its roots in the jazz tradition, but it was
different enough to scandalize many listeners and even many of their
fellow musicians. Its rhythms were more jagged and unpredictable;
its harmonies were more advanced, at times dissonant; its technical
demands could be daunting. Despite the skepticism and hostility they
initially inspired, the beboppers established the template for how
jazz was played for decades to come.
Mr. Roach, a percussion
virtuoso capable of playing at the most brutal tempos with subtlety
as well as power, was an important architect of this musical
revolution. He remained adventurous, and modern, to the end.
Mr. Roach challenged both his
audiences and himself by working not just with standard jazz
instrumentation but in contexts well beyond the confines of jazz as
it is generally understood.
He led a “double quartet,”
consisting of his working group of trumpet, saxophone, bass and
drums plus a string quartet. He led an ensemble consisting entirely
of percussionists. He played duets with avant-gardists like the
pianist Cecil Taylor and the saxophonist Anthony Braxton. He
performed unaccompanied. He wrote music for plays by
Sam Shepard
and dance pieces by Alvin Ailey. He collaborated with video artists,
gospel choirs and hip-hop performers.
Mr. Roach explained his
philosophy to The New York Times in 1990: “You can’t write the same
book twice. Though I’ve been in historic musical situations, I can’t
go back and do that again. And though I run into artistic crises,
they keep my life interesting.”
He was in historic situations
from the beginning of his career. He was still in his teens when he
played drums with the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, a pioneer of
modern jazz, at a Harlem after-hours club in 1942. Within a few
years, Mr. Roach was himself recognized as a pioneer.
He was not the first drummer
to play bebop — Kenny Clarke, 10 years his senior, is generally
credited with that distinction — but he quickly established himself
as both the most imaginative percussionist in modern jazz and the
most influential.
In Mr. Roach’s hands, the drum
kit became much more than a means of keeping time. He saw himself
not just as a supporting player but as a full-fledged member of the
front line.
Layering rhythms on top of
rhythms, he paid as much attention to a song’s melody as to its
beat. He developed, as the jazz critic Burt Korall put it, “a highly
responsive, contrapuntal style,” engaging his fellow musicians in an
open-ended conversation while maintaining a rock-solid pulse. His
approach “initially mystified and thoroughly challenged other
drummers,” Mr. Korall wrote, but it quickly earned the respect of
his peers and established a new standard for the instrument.
Mr. Roach was an innovator in
other ways. In the late 1950s, he led a group that was among the
first in jazz to perform pieces in waltz time and other unusual
meters in addition to the conventional 4/4. In the early 1960s, he
was among the first to use jazz to address racial and political
issues, with works like the album-length “We Insist! Max Roach’s
Freedom Now Suite.”
In 1972, he became one of the
first jazz musicians to teach full time at the college level when he
was hired as a professor at the
University of Massachusetts
at Amherst. And in 1988, he became the first jazz musician to
receive a so-called genius grant from the
MacArthur Foundation.
Maxwell Roach was born on Jan.
10, 1924, in the small town of New Land, N.C., and grew up in the
Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. He began studying piano at a
neighborhood Baptist church when he was 8 and took up the drums a
few years later.
Even before he graduated from
Boys High School in 1942, savvy New York jazz musicians knew his
name. As a teenager he worked briefly with
Duke Ellington’s
orchestra at the Paramount Theater and with Charlie Parker at
Monroe’s Uptown House in Harlem, where he took part in jam sessions
that helped lay the groundwork for bebop.
By the middle 1940s, he had
become a ubiquitous presence on the New York jazz scene, working in
the 52nd Street nightclubs with Parker, the trumpeter Dizzy
Gillespie and other leading modernists. Within a few years he had
also become ubiquitous on record, participating in such seminal
recordings as
Miles Davis’s
“Birth of the Cool” sessions in 1949 and 1950.
He also found time to study
composition at the
Manhattan School of Music.
He had planned to major in percussion, he later recalled in an
interview, but changed his mind after a teacher told him his
technique was incorrect. “The way he wanted me to play would have
been fine if I’d been after a career in a symphony orchestra,” he
said, “but it wouldn’t have worked on 52nd Street.”
Mr. Roach made the transition
from sideman to leader in 1954, when he and the young trumpet
virtuoso Clifford Brown formed a quintet. That group, which
specialized in a muscular and stripped-down version of bebop that
came to be called hard bop, took the jazz world by storm. But it was
short-lived.
In June 1956, at the height of
the Brown-Roach quintet’s success, Brown was killed in an automobile
accident, along with Richie Powell, the group’s pianist, and
Powell’s wife. The sudden loss of his friend and co-leader, Mr.
Roach later recalled, plunged him into depression and heavy drinking
from which it took him years to emerge.
Nonetheless, he kept working.
He honored his existing nightclub bookings with the two surviving
members of his group, the saxophonist Sonny Rollins and the bassist
George Morrow, before briefly taking time off and putting together a
new quartet. By the end of the ’50s, seemingly recovered from his
depression, he was recording prolifically, mostly as a leader but
occasionally as a sideman with Mr. Rollins and others.
The personnel of Mr. Roach’s
working group changed frequently over the next decade, but the level
of artistry and innovation remained high. His sidemen included such
important musicians as the saxophonists Eric Dolphy, Stanley
Turrentine and George Coleman and the trumpet players Donald Byrd,
Kenny Dorham and Booker Little. Few of his groups had a pianist,
making for a distinctively open ensemble sound in which Mr. Roach’s
drums were prominent.
Always among the most
politically active of jazz musicians, Mr. Roach helped the bassist
Charles Mingus establish one of the first musician-run record
companies, Debut, in 1952. Eight years later, the two organized a
so-called rebel festival in Newport, R.I., to protest the Newport
Jazz Festival’s treatment of performers. That same year, Mr. Roach
collaborated with the lyricist Oscar Brown Jr. on “We Insist!
Freedom Now Suite,” which played variations on the theme of black
people’s struggle for equality in the United States and Africa.
The album, which featured
vocals by Abbey Lincoln (Mr. Roach’s frequent collaborator and, from
1962 to 1970, his wife), received mixed reviews: many critics
praised its ambition, but some attacked it as overly polemical. Mr.
Roach was undeterred.
“I will never again play
anything that does not have social significance,” he told Down Beat
magazine after the album’s release. “We American jazz musicians of
African descent have proved beyond all doubt that we’re master
musicians of our instruments. Now what we have to do is employ our
skill to tell the dramatic story of our people and what we’ve been
through.”
“We Insist!” was not a
commercial success, but it emboldened Mr. Roach to broaden his scope
as a composer. Soon he was collaborating with choreographers,
filmmakers and Off Broadway playwrights on a variety of projects,
including a stage version of “We Insist!”
As his range of activities
expanded, his career as a bandleader became less of a priority. At
the same time, the market for his uncompromising brand of
small-group jazz began to dry up. By the time he joined the faculty
of the University of Massachusetts in 1972, teaching had come to
seem an attractive alternative to the demands of the musician’s
life.
Joining the academy did not
mean turning his back entirely on performing. In the early ’70s, Mr.
Roach and seven other drummers formed M’Boom, an ensemble that
achieved tonal and coloristic variety through the use of xylophones,
chimes, steel drums and other percussion instruments. Later in the
decade he formed a new quartet, two of whose members — the
saxophonist Odean Pope and the trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater — would
perform and record with him off and on for more than two decades.
He also participated in a
number of unusual experiments. He appeared in concert in 1983 with a
rapper, two disc jockeys and a team of breakdancers. A year later,
he composed music for an Off Broadway production of three Sam
Shepard plays, for which he won an Obie award. In 1985, he took part
in a multimedia collaboration with the video artist Kit Fitzgerald
and the stage director George Ferencz.
Perhaps his most ambitious
experiment in those years was the Max Roach Double Quartet, a
combination of his quartet and the Uptown String Quartet. Jazz
musicians had performed with string accompaniment before, but rarely
if ever in a setting like this, in which the string players were an
equal part of the ensemble and were given the opportunity to
improvise. Reviewing a Double Quartet album in The Times in 1985,
Robert Palmer wrote, “For the first time in the history of jazz
recording, strings swing as persuasively as any saxophonist or
drummer.”
This endeavor had personal as
well as musical significance for Mr. Roach: the Uptown String
Quartet’s founder and viola player was his daughter Maxine, who
survives him. Mr. Roach, who was married three times, is also
survived by two other daughters, Ayo and Dara, and two sons, Raoul
and Daryl.
By the early ’90s, Mr. Roach
had reduced his teaching load and was again based in New York
year-round. He was still touring with his quartet as recently as
2000, and he remained active as a composer.
For all his accomplishments,
Mr. Roach often said that he was proudest of the role he played in
raising the profile of his instrument. “I always resented the role
of a drummer as nothing more than a subservient figure,” he said in
a 1988 interview with the writer Mike Zwerin. “The people who really
got me off were dealing with the musical potential of the
instrument.”
Tenor saxophonist Michael Brecker dies at
age 57 in NYC
By NAHAL TOOSI
Associated Press Writer
January 13, 2007, 6:26 PM EST
NEW YORK -- Michael Brecker, a versatile and highly influential tenor
saxophonist who won 11 Grammys over a career that spanned more than three
decades, died Saturday at age 57.
Brecker died in a hospital in New York City of leukemia, according to his
longtime friend and manager, Darryl Pitt.
In recent years, the saxophonist had struggled with myelodysplastic syndrome, a
cancer in which the bone marrow stops producing enough healthy blood cells. The
disease, known as MDS, often progresses to leukemia.
Throughout his career, Brecker recorded and performed with numerous jazz and pop
music leaders, including Herbie Hancock, James Taylor, Paul Simon and Joni
Mitchell, according to his Web site. His most recently released recording, Wide
Angles, appeared on many top jazz lists and won two Grammys in 2004.
His technique on the saxophone was widely emulated, and his style was
much-studied in music schools throughout the world. Jazziz magazine recently
called him "inarguably the most influential tenor stylist of the last 25 years,"
according to a press release from his family.
Though very sick, Brecker managed to record a final album, as yet untitled, that
was completed just two weeks ago. Pitt said the musician was very enthusiastic
about the final work.
"In addition to the love of his family and friends, his work on this project
helped keep him alive and will be another jewel in his legacy," Pitt said.
Brecker, who had a home in Westchester County's Hastings-on-Hudson, was born in
1949 in Philadelphia to a musically inclined family. His father would take his
sons to performances of jazz legends such as Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and
Duke Ellington.
Brecker, who first studied clarinet and alto saxophone, decided to pursue the
tenor saxophone in high school after being inspired by the work of John
Coltrane, according to his Web site. He followed his brother, Randy, a trumpet
player, to Indiana University, but he left after a year for New York.
In 1970, he helped found the jazz-rock group Dreams. He later joined his brother
in pianist and composer Horace Silver's quintet. Michael and Randy also started
the successful jazz-rock fusion group the Brecker Brothers. The two also owned
the now-defunct downtown jazz club Seventh Avenue South.
His solo career began in 1987, when his self-titled debut was voted "Jazz Album
of the Year" in both Down Beat and Jazziz magazines.
His struggle with the blood disease led him and his family to publicly encourage
people to enroll in bone marrow donor programs. His own search for a donor led
to an experimental blood stem cell transplant that "did not work as hoped,"
according to a May 2006 entry on his Web site.
His illness silenced his music at times, but raising awareness of bone marrow
drives gave him a new focus.
"It's something that doesn't come naturally. ... I obviously miss playing and
writing music," Brecker told The Associated Press in 2005. "On the other hand,
this whole experience has allowed me to be a conduit to attract attention for a
cause that's much larger than me ... for people to go get tested (for the marrow
donor program) because I know a lot of lives will be saved."
Brecker's survivors include his wife, Susan; his children, Jessica and Sam; his
brother, Randy; and his sister, Emily Brecker Greenberg. Memorial services are
being planned.
___
Alice Coltrane, Jazz Artist and Spiritual
Leader, Dies at 69
By BEN RATLIFF for New York Times
Published: January 15, 2007
Alice Coltrane, widow of the jazz saxophonist John Coltrane and the pianist in
his later bands, who extended her musical searches into a vocation as a
spiritual leader, died on Friday in Los Angeles. She was 69.
The cause was respiratory failure, said Marilyn McLeod, her sister and
assistant.
Ms. Coltrane lived in the Woodland Hills section of Los Angeles near the Sai
Anantam ashram in Agoura Hills, which she had founded in 1983. Known as Swami
Turiyasangitananda, Sanskrit for “the highest song of God,” she was the guiding
presence of the 48-acre ashram, set among the Santa Monica mountains, where 25
to 30 full-time residents study the Vedic scriptures of ancient India, as well
as Buddhist and Islamic texts.
She was also the manager of Coltrane’s estate, as well as of his
music-publishing company, Jowcol Music, and the John Coltrane Foundation, which
has given out scholarships to music students since 2001.
As a pianist, her playing was dense with arpeggios that suggested the harp; the
instrument had an important place in her life. One of her childhood heroes was
the Detroit-based jazz harpist Dorothy Ashby, and she was later motivated to
study that instrument by Coltrane, who loved its sound.
Raised in a musical family in Detroit, Ms. Coltrane played piano and organ for
church choirs and Sunday school from age 7. As a young musician in Detroit, she
was studying classical music and playing piano in jazz clubs, in a group
including her half-brother, the bassist Ernie Farrow, and the trombonist George
Bohannon.
In her early 20s she lived briefly in Paris, where she studied informally with
the pianist Bud Powell, and was briefly married to the singer Kenny (Pancho)
Hagood, with whom she had a daughter, Michelle. She returned to Detroit, playing
in a band with her brother, and then moved to New York in 1962. A year later she
met John Coltrane.
She was playing vibraphone and Powell-inspired bebop piano in a group led by the
drummer Terry Gibbs at Birdland, on a double-bill with Coltrane’s quartet.
Coltrane was well established by the beginning of the 1960s, though she hadn’t
known about him for long before moving to New York; the first time she ever
heard him, she said, was on the 1961 album “Africa/Brass.”
They connected instantly; she moved in with him and traveled with the Coltrane
band. By the summer of 1964 they had relocated from New York City to a house in
Dix Hills, on Long Island. They married in 1965 in Juárez, Mexico, coinciding
with Coltrane’s divorce from his first wife, Naima Grubbs. By that time she and
Coltrane had already had two of their three children together — John Jr., who
died in 1982, and Ravi, who by his 30s had become an acclaimed jazz saxophonist.
Ms. Coltrane is survived by her sisters, Marilyn McLeod of Winnetka, Calif., and
Margaret Roberts of Detroit; her daughter, Michelle Carbonell-Coltrane of Los
Angeles; her sons Oran Coltrane of Los Angeles and Ravi, of Brooklyn; and five
grandchildren.
In 1966, as the Coltrane band’s music became wilder and more prolix, she became
its pianist. She replaced McCoy Tyner, who quit without rancor, largely because
he could no longer hear himself on the bandstand. Though she wasn’t Mr. Tyner’s
technical equal and lacked his percussive power, she fit with the group’s new
purpose; by the time of the recordings that would become the album “Stellar
Regions,” in February 1967, she was fluid and energetic within the group’s freer
new language.
She told an interviewer that Coltrane helped her to play “thoroughly and
completely.” This meant stretching the definitions of rhythm and harmony, but
she also meant something broader; Coltrane was talking about “universalizing”
his music, creating a nondenominational religious art that took cues from
ancient history and foreign scales. He helped her to sign a contract as a solo
artist with his label, Impulse. And he introduced her to Eastern philosophy and
religion, which became the main focus of her life.
After Coltrane’s death from liver cancer in 1967, Ms. Coltrane took a vow of
celibacy. And at first she made music closely related to his, often reflective,
minor and modal; on piano or harp she played flowing, harplike phrases over a
deep midtempo swing, and she worked with the bassist Jimmy Garrison and the
drummer Rashied Ali from John Coltrane’s band. On records like “A Monastic
Trio,” “Ptah, the El Daoud” and “Journey in Satchidananda,” she was able to
reconcile blues phrases and jazz rhythm with a kind of ancient, flowing sound.
Ms. Coltrane met her guru, Swami Satchidananda, in 1970, and in more recent
years became a devotee of Sathya Sai Baba. By the early 1970s she developed a
renewed interest in the organ, because it produced a continuous sound; she
wanted to make a meditative music that wouldn’t be interrupted by pauses for
breath. Her 1972 record, “Universal Consciousness,” with Ms. Coltrane on
Wurlitzer organ and string arrangements by Ornette Coleman, became a far-out
classic. In the mid-70s she switched to the Warner Brothers label and made four
more records, including orchestras and Hindu chants. Thereafter, until 2004, she
made records purely for religious purposes, distributing them privately.
After first establishing the Vedanta Center in San Francisco, she moved her
ashram to Agoura Hills, just northwest of Los Angeles, and expanded it. In the
past 10 years, she performed the occasional concert with Ravi, and in 2004 she
finally returned to recording jazz, making “Translinear Light,” produced by
Ravi, who reunited her with some old colleagues like Charlie Haden and Jack
DeJohnette, as well as a chorus of singers from her ashram.
Kansas City pianist, bandleader and songwriter Jay 'Hootie' McShann has died in
hospital today (Dec. 7) after a brief illness. He was 90 years old. He was the
last of the great Kansas City players, and the creator of a style that combined
swing and blues and changed the course of popular music. A piano player with a
unique and subtle touch, he was a bluesman at heart. His best known composition
'Confessin' The Blues' has been recorded by artists like The Rolling Stones, BB
King, Little Walter, Esther Phillips, and Jimmy 'Spoon' Witherspoon among many
many others. McShann was born in Muskogee, Oklahama in 1916
Settling in Kansas City in the mid-'30s, he soon formed a small group, but by
1940 had a large band which included a young alto sax player called Charlie
Parker. His links to Parker are widely known, but McShann's later role in
building the career of singers Walter Brown (who co-wrote Confessin' the Blues)
and Jimmy Witherspoon has been largely overlooked. Typecast as a blues band,
McShann's group recorded few of his more complex jazz arrangements, but they
helped build his reputation and he was able to move to New York in 1942 -
however, the second World War intervened, McShann was drafted, and moved to Los
Angeles after his discharge two years later. For many years, he languished in
relative obscurity, but emerged again in 1969, taking up a heavy touring
schedule that brought him international fame. Along the way he recorded for
numerous labels, including Decca, Mercury, Vee Jay, EmArcy and Atlantic.
Toronto was frequently on his tour schedules; jazz musician and Downtown Jazz
Festival artistic director Jim Galloway brought him to the now-vanished Bourbon
Street club in 1972 and he recorded close to a dozen albums in the city for the
Sackville label. His last four albums, including the Grammy-nominated 2003
release "Going to Kansas City", were recorded for the Edmonton-based Stony Plain
label; three of them were co-produced by guitarist Duke Robillard. Stony Plain's
owner, Holger Petersen, acting as tour manager, frequently accompanied McShann
to international jazz festivals in Montreal, Toronto, Monterey, and the North
Sea Jazz Festival in Holland. Said Petersen: "Jay had a great uplifting smile
and kind words for everyone. He was always a delight to travel with, and had a
very laidback, inquisitive and cheerful attitude. I'll miss his smile, and
hearing him and saying 'Everything's cool'."And Jim Galloway summed it up: "His
passing marks the end of a line. He will be missed." Jay McShann leaves his
companion of more than 30 years, Thelma Adams (known as Marianne McShann), and
three daughters - Linda McShann Gerber, Jayme McShann Lewis, and Pam McShann.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Dewey Redman, 75, Jazz Saxophonist, Diess
Jack
Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos
Dewey Redman in his last concert,
Aug. 27 at Tompkins Square Park.
v
By BEN RATLIFF
Published: September 4, 2006
Dewey Redman, an expansive and poetic tenor saxophonist and bandleader
who had been at the aesthetic frontiers of jazz since the 1960’s, died
on Saturday in Brooklyn. He was 75 and lived in Brooklyn.
The cause was liver failure, said Velibor Pedevski, his brother-in-law.
Walter Redman was born and grew up in Fort Worth. He started off on
clarinet at 13, playing in a church band. Not long after, he met Ornette
Coleman when they both played in the high school marching band. Their
friendship would become one of the crucial links in his life.
Typical of late-1950’s jazz tenor saxophone players, Mr. Redman was
informed by the sound and style of Dexter Gordon, John Coltrane and
Sonny Rollins. But he didn’t immerse himself in technique and harmonic
theory, as those musicians did, or lead a band until his mid-30’s. Until
then, he said, he was largely playing by ear.
Consequently his playing always kept a rawness, a willingness to play
outside tonality, a closeness to the blues and above all a powerful
sound: an expressive, dark-toned, vocalized expression that he could
apply in any situation. (This power could also come through his second
instrument — he played a double-reed instrument he called a musette.) He
has often been called a free-jazz musician, and he could indeed put a
logic and personality into music that had no chord changes. But that
designation doesn’t acknowledge how authoritatively Mr. Redman could
play a traditional ballad like “The Very Thought of You,” or how his
solos could become dramatic diversions in someone else’s written music,
as in parts of Tom Harrell’s 1998 album “The Art of Rhythm.”
After attending Prairie View A&M University in Texas, where he played
alto and tenor saxophone in the college band, and then a stint in the
Army, Mr. Redman taught fifth grade in Bastrop, Tex., near Austin. In
1959 he moved to Los Angeles and then San Francisco, playing with
Pharoah Sanders, Donald Rafael Garrett and others.
Mr. Redman missed the ascension of his old friend Ornette Coleman,
moving to New York to join the band only in 1967. His performances with
Mr. Coleman over the next seven years, on albums like “New York Is
Now!,” “Love Call” and “Science Fiction,” on which his tenor saxophone
meshes with Mr. Coleman’s alto, are good ways to understand some of the
great jazz of the period, intuitively finding a third way between
general conceptions of the jazz tradition and the avant-garde.
Mr. Redman also recorded with Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra
in 1969 and then, beginning in 1971, spent five years off and on with a
band known to historians as Keith Jarrett’s American quartet, which
included Mr. Jarrett, Mr. Haden and the drummer Paul Motian. Underrated
by the public and ever important to musicians, it played a music that
was more determined by harmonic structure than Mr. Coleman’s, but
equally challenging and prescient in its drive to make organic sense of
various schisms in jazz since post-bop.
Mr. Coleman then provided the impetus for the next phase of Mr. Redman’s
work, but in absentia. Old and New Dreams was a quartet of mainstays
from different Coleman bands: Mr. Redman, Mr. Haden, Don Cherry and Ed
Blackwell. They recorded and toured from 1976 to 1984, relying mostly on
Mr. Coleman’s repertory. Though he had stopped playing with Mr.
Coleman’s bands, he never stopped proclaiming his admiration for his old
friend’s work and performed brilliantly during Jazz at Lincoln Center’s
2004 concert of Coleman music, with Mr. Coleman in the audience.
From the mid-60’s on, Mr. Redman often led his own bands, usually
quartets with piano, bass and drums; he recorded twice with his son
Joshua Redman, the popular jazz saxophonist. Most recently his band
included the pianist Frank Kimbrough, the bassist John Menegon and the
drummer Matt Wilson. He played his final concert on Aug. 27 at the
Charlie Parker Jazz Festival in Tompkins Square Park on the Lower East
Side of Manhattan.
He is survived by his wife, Lidija Pedevska-Redman, and two sons Joshua,
of Berkeley, Calif., and Tarik.
Maynard Ferguson, whose
soaring trumpeting reached the instrument’s highest ranges and
propelled a musical career of more than 60 years, died Wednesday in
Ventura, Calif. He was 78.
Jack
Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos
Maynard Ferguson at the Blue Note in New York last
month.
The cause was kidney and liver
failure, said his personal manager, Steve Schankman.
Mr. Ferguson had a
stratospheric style all his own. He possessed “a tremendous breadth
of sound and an incomparable tone,” said Lew Soloff, a prominent
trumpeter who started out with Mr. Ferguson in the mid-1960’s. The
writer
Frank Conroy
once noted, “He soared above everything, past high C, into the next
octave and a half, where his tone and timbre became unique” —
sometimes reaching, as Mr. Schankman said, “notes so high that only
dogs could hear them.”
He pleased far more crowds
than critics. John S. Wilson, reviewing Mr. Ferguson’s big band at
the 1959 Newport Jazz Festival for The New York Times, called it
“screaming” and “strident.” Yet that same year the readers of Down
Beat magazine voted the band the world’s second-best, outranked only
by Count Basie’s.
Today, record collectors pay
hundreds of dollars for rare Fergusons. “Very few rock superstars
can command that kind of prices for used CD’s or records,” said John
Himes, who runs the Maynard Ferguson Album Emporium in Cypress,
Calif.
Mr. Ferguson’s bands toured
ceaselessly, across Asia, Europe and the United States, stopping
often at high schools and colleges, where he served as both
entertainer and educator. At his last stand — a six-night booking at
the Blue Note in New York, which ended July 23 — every show sold
out. The next week, he completed the last of his roughly 100
recordings; it is to be released this fall.
Walter Maynard Ferguson was
born on May 4, 1928, in Verdun, Canada, now part of the city of
Montreal. Both his parents were teachers and school administrators.
His mother, a former concert violinist, taught him to play at an
early age. His father stored school orchestra instruments in the
basement, and Mr. Ferguson schooled himself on woodwinds and brass.
By 15, he was out of school and into nightclubs, seven days a week.
He came to national attention
in 1950 with a four-minute televised cavalcade on “The
Ed Sullivan
Show,” backed by Stan Kenton’s big band. After three years with the
brass-heavy Kenton band, he did studio work and then, in 1956,
formed his own band, which he led for a decade.
After a trip or two to Timothy
Leary’s consciousness-altering community in Millbrook, N.Y., Mr.
Ferguson dissolved his band in 1967 and moved to India for a year.
He began a new band in London in 1969, fusing rock and pop into its
repertory. His stock with jazz purists fell as he played his
versions of hits by the
Beatles and
Stevie Wonder. But his popularity skyrocketed.
Mr. Ferguson’s performance of
Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci,” an operatic warhorse turned into a disco
anthem, was heard at the closing ceremony of the 1976 Olympic Games
in Montreal and seen by millions of television viewers. His version
of “Gonna Fly Now,” the indelible theme from the movie “Rocky,” was
nominated for a Grammy in 1977.
Mr. Ferguson won his
homeland’s highest civilian honor, the Order of Canada, in 2005. His
wife of 53 years, Flo Ferguson, died that year. He is survived by
four daughters, Kim, Lisa, Corby and Wilder, and two grandchildren.
Unlike many bandleaders, Mr.
Ferguson rode a bus from stage to stage with his musicians. His tour
manager, Ed Sargent, said that he preferred to travel in “a
million-dollar rock ’n’ roll coach” with his sidemen.
Mr. Schankman, his manager,
said that Mr. Ferguson had a cross-country tour set to begin in a
few weeks, and pleaded from his deathbed for the shows to go on.
By Matt Schudel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 19, 2006; Page B06
John Hicks, 64, a versatile jazz pianist who combined strength and
refinement while performing with many of the leading musicians of his
era, died May 10 of internal bleeding at a New York hospital. He was
scheduled to perform last weekend at Twins Lounge, a Washington jazz
club.
Mr. Hicks was adept at several forms of jazz, from standards and bebop
to the avant-garde. He appeared on hundreds of recordings as a leader or
sideman and was comfortable in small groups, in big bands or
accompanying singers.
Early in his career, he was a pianist for three demanding musical
leaders who helped sculpt his style and broaden his musical experience.
In 1964, soon after arriving in New York, Mr. Hicks joined the Jazz
Messengers, a hard-driving quintet led by drummer Art Blakey, a renowned
judge of talent. Two years later, Mr. Hicks became the pianist for
singer Betty Carter, another leader with uncompromising tastes. Finally,
from 1968 to 1970, he held the piano chair in the big band of Woody
Herman.
Since the 1970s, Mr. Hicks had led a series of small groups and appeared
with the Mingus Big Band, which performed the music of Charles Mingus.
Through the years, he worked with an all-star lineup of jazz greats,
including trumpeters Freddie Hubbard, Woody Shaw and Clark Terry;
saxophonists Sonny Rollins, Johnny Griffin, Joe Henderson and Pharoah
Sanders; and singers Jon Hendricks and Carmen McRae.
Mr. Hicks appeared at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and the Kennedy
Center and was a fixture at international music festivals. In recent
years, he often performed with trumpeter Eddie Henderson or with his
wife, flutist Elise Wood, and taught at New York University and the New
School in New York.
"He was a major, important player who was probably not as well
recognized as he should have been," said Rusty Hassan, a disc jockey
with WPFW (89.3 FM) who knew Mr. Hicks for more than 30 years.
Some of his finest performances came in the final years of his career,
when he recorded elegant tribute albums to singer Billie Holiday and
musicians Billy Strayhorn, Mary Lou Williams, Sonny Clark and Erroll
Garner.
"He brought musical excellence, a generous heart and great joy to
everything he did," said guitarist Larry Coryell, who tapped Mr. Hicks
for several record dates. "He was able to be a star in a supporting
role."
Like many other jazz musicians, John Josephus Hicks Jr. received his
early musical training in the church. He was born in Atlanta and moved
with his family to Los Angeles and later St. Louis.
"My father was a Methodist minister and my mom was my first piano
teacher," he told the Jerusalem Post in January. "I got great experience
playing piano in church. I started playing there as soon as I learned
how to read music."
While still in his teens, Mr. Hicks worked with blues artists Albert
King and Little Milton. He attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania
and the Berklee School of Music in Boston before becoming the pianist
for singer Della Reese. Soon after settling in New York, Mr. Hicks,
along with many other musicians of the era, fell under the captivating
spell of saxophonist John Coltrane.
"There's a whole generation -- maybe two -- of players who are
influenced by Trane," he said in 1997. "And it's on a spiritual level as
well as musical. Trane was our Charlie Parker, and his sense of
commitment to the music was awe-inspiring."
In 1999, Mr. Hicks performed on a recording led by Coryell, "Monk,
Trane, Miles and Me."
"The most touching moment for me was his solo on John Coltrane's 'Naima,'
" Coryell recalled this week. "It is absolutely, unbelievably beautiful.
When we finished that performance in the studio, I broke down in tears."
Three days before he died, Mr. Hicks gave his final concert at St.
Mark's United Methodist Church in Harlem, where his father was once the
pastor. The church was also the site of his first concert in New York in
1963.
His marriage to Olympia Hicks ended in divorce.
Survivors include Wood, his wife of five years, of New York; two
children from his first marriage; two stepchildren; one brother; two
sisters; and a granddaughter.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jackie McLean, Jazz Saxophonist and Mentor, Dies at 74
By PETER KEEPNEWS
Published: April 3, 2006 NYT
Jackie McLean, an acclaimed saxophonist
who took a midcareer detour to become a prominent jazz educator, died on
Friday at his home in Hartford. He was 74.
Jackie
McLean in July 2004.
His death was confirmed by a spokesman for the University of Hartford,
where Mr. McLean had taught since 1970. No cause was given.
Mr. McLean was one of many gifted young musicians who burst onto the New
York scene after World War II in the wake of the musical revolution
known as bebop. He worked with Bud Powell and Miles Davis before he was
out of his teens, and later he gained valuable seasoning in the bands of
Art Blakey and Charles Mingus before he began leading his own groups.
Also a prolific composer, Mr. McLean was one of the first alto
saxophonists to absorb the pervasive influence of Charlie Parker and
shape it into a distinctive personal style. While the influence was
clear, especially in his approach to harmony, Mr. McLean's astringent
tone and impassioned phrasing marked him as more than just another
Parker disciple.
His career had a second act as well. In the late 1960's he put
performing aside to concentrate on teaching.
On his arrival at the University of Hartford in 1970, he was a music
instructor at the Hartt School. Ten years later he was named director of
the university's newly formed African-American music program, one of the
first degree programs in the field. In 2000, a year before he received a
Jazz Masters grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the
university renamed the program the Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz.
For more than two decades he performed and recorded only occasionally.
He devoted most of his energy to teaching, both at the university and at
the Artists Collective, a community cultural center in Hartford that
offered classes in music, theater, dance and the visual arts to local
young people, which he founded and ran with his wife, Dollie. She
survives him, along with his son Rene, of New York, a saxophonist who
frequently performed with him; another son, Vernone, and a daughter,
Melonae, both of Hartford; and several grandchildren and
great-grandchildren.
In the early 1990's Mr. McLean shifted some of his focus back to
performing. "I've always wanted to be remembered for being more than a
saxophone player," he told Peter Watrous of The New York Times in 1990,
when he returned to New York to perform at the Village Vanguard. "It's
been important to put aside my horn and help people, act on what I
believe. But the building for Artists Collective will be going up in the
next two years, and the music department is now a full-degree program,
so it's time to get back to playing."
John Lenwood McLean was born in Harlem on May 17, 1931. (Many sources
give his year of birth as 1932, but The Grove Dictionary of Jazz and
other authoritative reference works say he was born a year earlier.) The
son of a jazz guitarist, he began studying saxophone at 14, starting on
soprano but switching to alto after a few months.
Bud Powell, a neighbor who was the leading pianist of the bebop movement
and a neighbor, took Mr. McLean under his wing. He also worked with the
tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, another neighbor, and soon caught the
attention of Miles Davis, who was just beginning his career as a
bandleader. Davis used both Mr. McLean and Mr. Rollins as sidemen on one
of his first recordings, in 1951.
Mr. McLean began recording his own albums in 1955. He also had a brief
but memorable stage and screen career, appearing in the 1959 Off
Broadway production of "The Connection," Jack Gelber's play about drug
addiction, and in the 1961 film version, directed by Shirley Clarke.
Mr. McLean was in a sense playing himself. His character was a member of
a jazz combo, which provided the music as well as taking part in the
action. His character was also a heroin addict — as, he later
acknowledged, was Mr. McLean himself. He eventually kicked the habit,
and when he became a teacher he often spoke to his students about the
dangers of drugs.
In his younger days Mr. McLean was identified with the aggressive,
rhythmically charged offshoot of bebop known as hard bop. But in the
early and middle 1960's he surprised his listeners (and alienated some
critics) by embracing the avant-garde movement then known simply as "the
new thing" and later called free jazz, on a series of daring albums for
Blue Note with names like "Destination Out" and "One Step Beyond." He
even enlisted Ornette Coleman, one of the fathers of the new music, as a
sideman on "New and Old Gospel." Although Mr. Coleman's main instrument,
like Mr. McLean's, was alto sax, he played trumpet on that album.
But Mr. McLean preferred not to talk about his music in terms of
categories. "I've grown out of being just a bebop saxophone player, or
being a free saxophone player," he told Jon Pareles of The Times in
1983. "I don't know where I am now. I guess I'm somewhere mixed up
between all the saxophonists who ever played."
FREE PRESS MUSIC WRITER
Roy Brooks, one of the greatest jazz musicians to emerge from Detroit
and in his heyday in the 1960s a ubiquitous presence in clubs and on
record with many of the biggest names in jazz, died Tuesday at Detroit
Receiving Hospital. He was 67 and suffered from heart, lung, arthritis
and circulation troubles, said his wife Hermine Brooks.
Brooks' clarified swing, gutsy attack, fiery momentum and distinctive
rhythmic snap made him one of the keynote hard bop drummers of his
generation. He made his name with pianist Horace Silver's Quintet from
1959-64 and later worked or recorded with Sonny Stitt, Yusef Lateef,
Dexter Gordon, Charles Mingus, James Moody and countless others.
Returning to Detroit in the 70s, Brooks became a godfather on the local
scene, working with groups such as his Aboriginal Percussion Choir,
playing the blues on the musical saw and mentoring future stars like
pianist Geri Allen.
Percy Heath, Bassist of
Modern Jazz Quartet, Dies at 81
Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos
The Heath Brothers, from left, Percy, Jimmy and Albert, in 1997.
By PETER KEEPNEWS
Published: April 29, 2005
Percy Heath, whose forceful and buoyant bass playing anchored the Modern
Jazz Quartet for its entire four-decade existence, died yesterday in
Southampton, N.Y. He was 81 and lived in Montauk, on Long Island.
The cause of death was bone cancer, his family said.
Mr. Heath recorded with most of the leading musicians in modern jazz,
including Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and
Ornette Coleman. But from the early 1950's through the middle 1970's, most
of his recording activity and all of his live performances were devoted to
the group known to its fans around the world as the M. J .Q.
He had been playing bass for only about four years when he became a
charter member of the quartet, whose musical director was the pianist and
composer John Lewis. "John told me, 'Percy, you don't know enough about
what we're going to do, so you better get yourself lessons,' " Mr. Heath
told the jazz critic Gary Giddins. "John's music was a challenge and I
appreciated it."
Mr. Heath proved to be a quick study, mastering Mr. Lewis's sophisticated
compositions and arrangements and adding an unpretentious, bluesy
sensibility of his own. He rarely took a solo, and his role in the quartet
by its very nature drew less attention than the work of Mr. Lewis and the
vibraphonist Milt Jackson. But his contributions were no less essential to
the group's distinctive sound, or to its remarkable longevity and success.
Percy Heath was born on April 30, 1923, in Wilmington, N.C., and grew up
in Philadelphia. His father was an amateur clarinetist and his mother sang
in a church choir. He and his two younger brothers all became interested
in music early in life.
All three Heath brothers went on to become professional musicians, and
eventually they worked together. Mr. Heath took up the bass relatively
late in life. His first instrument was the violin, which he studied as a
child.
During World War II he served with the Army Air Corps in Alabama, where he
trained as a pilot; he was a member of the Tuskegee Airmen.
Mr. Heath began playing bass as a student at the Granoff School of Music
in Philadelphia in 1946.
Within a few months he was performing with local jazz bands and working as
the house bassist at the Down Beat, a Philadelphia nightclub. He moved to
New York City in 1947 with his brother Jimmy, a saxophonist and composer,
and in 1950 they both joined Dizzy Gillespie's group.
Not long after that, Mr. Heath and three other former Gillespie sidemen -
Mr. Lewis, Mr. Jackson and the drummer Kenny Clarke - formed the Modern
Jazz Quartet.
The quartet stayed together from 1952 to 1974, with only one personnel
change: Kenny Clarke left in 1955 and was replaced by Connie Kay. After
the group disbanded temporarily, Mr. Heath began working with his brother
Jimmy and his youngest brother, Albert, a drummer.
The Heath Brothers specialized in a loose, freewheeling brand of jazz that
was very different from the more dignified and restrained work of the
Modern Jazz Quartet. Percy was also much more prominently in the
spotlight; he even played the melody line on several numbers, often on a
cello tuned like a bass, which he jokingly called a "baby bass."
The Heath Brothers remained together until the Modern Jazz Quartet
reunited in the early 1980's, and they continued to work together
occasionally over the next two decades during the quartet's hiatuses. The
group recorded albums for the Columbia, Concord, Antilles and Strata East
labels.
Percy Heath remained the backbone of the reunited Modern Jazz Quartet for
the rest of its existence. He was briefly joined there by his brother
Albert, who became the group's drummer after Kay died in 1994.
But Percy finally decided he had had enough of the grueling life of a
traveling musician. When he announced that he was through with touring,
rather than replace him, the other members of the group decided to shut it
down, quietly and without fanfare.
The Modern Jazz Quartet never performed again. Jackson died in 1999, Lewis
in 2001.
In recent years Mr. Heath continued to perform occasionally with his
brothers, but he spent most of his time at his house in Montauk, where he
devoted himself to fishing. He carried a rod when touring with the Modern
Jazz Quartet. "I made a living," he once said, "to go fishing."
Mr. Heath's survivors include his wife, June; his sons Percy III, Jason
and Stuart; and his two brothers.
More than half a century after he first entered a recording studio, Mr.
Heath - who by his own count had played on more than 300 records - did
something he had never done before. In 2004, shortly before his 81st
birthday, the small Daddy Jazz label released an album by Mr. Heath, "A
Love Song." It was his first recording as a leader.
Jazz Organist Jimmy Smith
Dies at 79
By Arthur Spiegelman, Reuters
LOS ANGELES (Feb. 9) - Organist
Jimmy Smith, who helped change the sound of jazz by almost single-handedly
introducing the soulful electric riffs of the Hammond B-3 organ, has died
at age 79 at his home in Scottsdale, Arizona, his record label said on
Wednesday.
A spokeswoman for the Concord record
label said Smith died of natural causes on Tuesday.
AP
Jazz great Jimmy Smith plays organ
at his studio in May 1993.
Born in Norristown, Pennsylvania, on
Dec. 8, 1925, Smith ruled the Hammond B-3 in the 1950s and 1960s and
blended jazz, blues, R&B, bebop and even gospel into an exciting stew that
became known as "soul jazz" -- an idiom that produced many imitators,
followers and fans.
"Anyone who plays the organ is a
direct descendant of Jimmy Smith. It's like Adam and Eve -- you always
remind someone of Jimmy Smith," jazz organist Joey DeFrancesco said in an
interview with Reuters last year.
"He was the big pioneer, not only of
the organ but musically. He was doing things that (John) Coltrane did in
the '60s, but he did them back in '56 and '57," he added.
Paired with jazz guitarist Wes
Montgomery in the 1960s, Smith first made his mark as a soloist on Blue
Note Records where, as one critic noted, he turned the Hammond B-3 organ
"into a down and dirty orchestra."
Among his best known albums on Blue
Note were "The Sermon!" "Back at the Chicken Shack," "Midnight Special,"
"Home Cookin'," and "Prayer Meetin'."
Critic Gene Seymour, writing in the
"Oxford Companion to Jazz," said, "Though he was not the first player to
bring the electric organ to jazz, Smith gave the instrument the expressive
power that Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker gave their respective
saxophones."
The pipe organ had been used in jazz
in the 1930s by such famous players as Fats Waller but it was obviously
too big and too heavy to be lugged into jazz clubs. Smith was able to take
his electric B-3 on the road and created a jazz trio of organ, drums and
either guitar or saxophone.
Smith himself provided the bass
lines by using the organ's foot pedals.
LEARNED PIANO AT HOME
Smith initially learned piano at
home and then went on to study bass at music schools in Philadelphia.
He began playing the Hammond organ
in 1951, and soon wound up playing in some of New York's most famous
clubs, including Cafe Bohemia and Birdland.
Smith's Blue Note sessions -- from
his 1956 "New Sounds on the Organ" to 1963 when he left the label --
included work with some of the major players of the day, including Kenny
Burrell, Lee Morgan, Lou Donaldson, Tina Brooks, Jackie McLean, Ike Quebec
and Stanley Turrentine.
On Verve from 1963 to 1972, he
played with Montgomery and in big bands conducted or arranged by Oliver
Nelson.
Blue Note co-founder Francis Wolff
once recalled the night he and his partner, Alfred Lion, first encountered
Smith:
"I first heard Jimmy at Small's
Paradise in January of 1956. It was his first gig in New York. He was a
stunning sight. A man in convulsions, face contorted, crouched over in
apparent agony, his fingers flying, his foot dancing over the pedals. The
air was filled with waves of sound I had never heard before. The noise was
shattering. A few people sat around, puzzled, but impressed.
"He came off the stand, smiling, the
sweat dripping all over him. 'So what do you think?' 'Yeah!' I said.
That's all I could say. Alfred Lion had already made up his mind. When he
heard a good thing -- that was enough."
02/09/05 20:15 EST
Illinois Jacquet, 81, Sax-Playing
Bandleader, Dies
By BEN RATLIFF
Published: July 23, 2004 NYT
Illinois Jacquet, the influential tenor-saxophone star who bridged swing
and rhythm and blues and persevered as a big band leader into his early
80's, died yesterday at his home in Queens. He was 81.
The cause was a heart attack, said
his companion of 23 years, Carol Scherick.
Only a handful of instrumental solos
in jazz have inspired anyone beyond a small coterie of musicians and rabid
fans to memorize them; one of them is "Flying Home," a lusty,
brick-throwing solo by the 19-year-old Mr. Jacquet (pronounced Ja-KETT,
but often rendered as JACK-et by his friends). Recorded on the first take
in 1942, with Lionel Hampton's orchestra, his 80-second solo on "Flying
Home" was carefully structured, building its energy precipitously and
cresting on a single note, repeated 12 times in a row. The tune became a
national hit, and was demanded of Mr. Jacquet night after night. He left
the band less than two years later, pleading physical exhaustion.
"Sometimes you have to quit to save
your life," he said in an interview much later with Texas Monthly
magazine. "I looked in the mirror and said, 'You're dying, and Hampton is
getting rich.' "
His replacement in the Hampton band,
Arnett Cobb, assumed his role, playing the solo note for note. The
Texas-tenor style, big-toned and earthy, came out of that solo, with Cobb
and Buddy Tate the primary descendants of Mr. Jacquet.
"Flying Home" established Mr.
Jacquet as a house-rocker, honking low notes and wailing in the highest,
or altissimo, register; he climbed two and a half octaves above the tenor
saxophone's normal range by using overtones. But this kind of playing
represented only one part of his art.
"He was so much more than that," the
saxophonist Benny Golson remembered in an interview yesterday. "He started
touring with Norman Granz and Jazz at the Philharmonic, and could assume
the role of entertainer, rather than artist, screeching for two or three
choruses. But he was a cutting-edge saxophone player. He knew that horn."
Mr. Jacquet's slow ballads,
especially, argued his breadth; he revealed a mastery of harmony through a
velvety tone.
Jean Baptiste Illinois Jacquet was
born in Broussard, La., to an American Indian mother and a French-Creole
father. He entered show business at 3, singing and dancing with his three
brothers. His father, Gilbert, a railroad mechanic, also led a big band
after the family moved to Houston, and young Illinois danced in front of
the band and also learned soprano and alto saxophone.
When he was 15, he took his first
regular job with the Milton Larkin Orchestra, playing around Houston, and
word of his talent began to spread.
Frustrated with segregation, he
moved to Los Angeles with his brother Russell in 1940. He met Nat King
Cole, who recommended him to Hampton, who in turn offered him a job
filling the tenor-saxophone chair.
Mr. Jacquet earned the nickname the
Beast because of intemperate playing, but also because he tended not to
suffer fools gladly. Though he remained a critic of his critics and a
stern bandleader into old age, those who met him socially in later years
found a much softer-tempered man. From 1947 to his death he lived in
Queens, in the Addisleigh Park neighborhood, near the homes of Count Basie
and Ella Fitzgerald.
Besides Ms. Scherick, he is survived
by a daughter, Pamela Jacquet Davis, of Scottsdale, Ariz., and a
granddaughter.
After the job with Hampton, Mr.
Jacquet toured for a year with Cab Calloway's band and then with Count
Basie; then he worked with Jazz at the Philharmonic, the touring jazz
extravaganza produced by Granz. In 1944, at a famous Jazz at the
Philharmonic concert, he recorded his second-most-famous solo, on the tune
"Blues (Part 2)," an elaboration of the altissimo-register style. He led
some small groups in the late 1940's, recording the hits "Robbins' Nest"
and "Port of Rico."
With the decline of big bands, Mr.
Jacquet worked constantly in all kinds of formats, including a popular
trio in the 1970's with the pianist Milt Buckner and the drummer Jo Jones.
It was not until 1983, when he was artist in residence at Harvard, that he
formed a big band, his first in 30 years, which included the veteran
saxophonists Eddie Barefield and Marshal Royal.
Mr. Jacquet's charisma and the
slugging intensity of the music made converts: his band had sold-out
engagements at the Village Vanguard in Manhattan, started touring Europe
regularly, and made a series of new albums, including the Grammy-nominated
"Jacquet's Got It!" originally released on Atlantic and recently
rereleased on CD by Label M.
Mr. Jacquet received an honorary
doctorate of musical arts from the Juilliard School of Music on May 21. He
played his final performance with his big band last Friday at Lincoln
Center, in the last concert of the "Midsummer Night Swing" series, which
he had closed for the last 16 years.
Pianist James Williams, died Tuesday July 20 of
complications from liver cancer at the age of 53. His
website has more information.
Written By: Russell Carlson
James
Williams, a pianist and onetime member of Art Blakey's Jazz
Messengers, died Tuesday, July 20 of complications from liver cancer.
He was 53.
Born in Memphis in 1951, Williams began
playing piano at 13 and concentrated on gospel music and R&B, early
influences that would remain a part of style throughout his career.
While studying music education at Memphis State University he became
interested in jazz. After graduating he landed a job teaching at
Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he took area gigs with Joe
Henderson, Woody Shaw, Milt Jackson, Clark Terry and others. He
eventually left Berklee to join drummer Art Blakey’s jazz Messengers,
a group he stayed with for four years, honing his chops both as a
player and a composer.
Williams began recording as a leader while
still with the Messengers; Flying Colors, his leader debut, was
released on Zim in 1977. After leaving the Messengers in 1981,
Williams continued to make albums under his own name, recording for
labels like Concord, EmArcy and DIW. In 1987 he formed the Magical
Trio, a recording group originally comprised of the pianist, bassist
Ray Brown and drummer Blakey. That band put out one album titled
Magical Trio 1. Two later incarnations of the group—one featuring
Brown and Elvin Jones, the other with Charnett Moffett and Jeff “Tain”
Watts—followed up on the first album’s success.
In the ’90s Williams co-founded the
Contemporary Piano Ensemble, which included fellow pianists Harold
Mabern, Mulgrew Miller, Donald Brown and Geoff Keezer, as well as ICU
(Intensive Care Unit) a group that saw him revisit his gospel and R&B
roots.
Williams was hospitalized in April.
James Williams, Pianist and Leading
Jazz Educator, Dies at 53
By BEN RATLIFF
Published: July 21, 2004
James Williams, a pianist formerly
in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and a leading jazz educator, died
yesterday in Manhattan. He was 53 and lived in Brooklyn. The cause was
liver cancer, said Jenise Grice, fiancée of the drummer Tony Reedus, Mr.
Williams's nephew.
Mr. Williams was born in Memphis,
and he grew up surrounded by musicians like Harold Mabern, George Coleman
and Jamil Nasser. Like them, he used elements of gospel and blues in his
sunny, swinging improvisations. But as a teacher and producer of jazz, he
was also a repository of standards in jazz, including the more modern
ones; he was especially interested in the pianist Phineas Newborn Jr., who
also came from Memphis.
After attending Memphis State
University, Mr. Williams moved to Boston, where he taught at Berklee
College of Music from 1972 to 1977; at that time he worked with groups led
by Joe Henderson, Woody Shaw and others. In 1977 he joined the Jazz
Messengers, playing over four years and 10 albums and alongside Wynton
Marsalis and Bobby Watson.
In 1984, Mr. Williams moved to New
York, where he became a bandleader and educator as well as a producer of
albums and concerts. He formed the Contemporary Piano Ensemble, a
four-pianist group; he also started a band called Intensive Care Unit,
which used a revolving cast of singers and worked at reconciling gospel
with jazz. He formed Finas Sound Productions, through which he produced
many albums and concerts.
He was named director of jazz
studies at William Paterson University in Wayne, N.J., in 1999 and taught
until he was hospitalized in April of this year.
Mr. Williams is survived by two
brothers, Hannibal Parkes and Ralph Parkes, both of Memphis; and a sister,
Barbara Williams, also of Memphis.f Memphis.
Elvin Jones, one of the greatest drummers in jazz history:
May 19, 2004
By PETER KEEPNEWS NYT
Elvin Jones, whose explosive
drumming powered the John Coltrane Quartet, the most influential and
controversial jazz ensemble of the 1960's, died yesterday in Englewood,
New Jersey.
He was 76 and lived in Manhattan and
Nagasaki, Japan.
Mr. Jones's death, which came after
several months of failing health, was announced by John DeChristopher,
director of artist relations for the Avedis Zildjian Company, maker of Mr.
Jones's cymbals. Mr. Jones continued to perform until a few weeks ago,
often taking an oxygen tank onto the bandstand.
Mr. Jones, a fixture of the Coltrane
group from late 1960 to early 1966 and for more than three decades the
leader of several noteworthy groups of his own, was the first great
post-bebop percussionist. Building on the innovations of the jazz
modernists Kenny Clarke and Max Roach, who liberated the drum kit from a
purely time-keeping function in the 1940's, he paved the way for a later
generation of drummers who dispensed with a steady rhythmic pulse
altogether in the interest of greater improvisational freedom. But he
never lost that pulse: the beat was always palpable when he played, even
as he embellished it with layer upon layer of interlocking polyrhythms.
The critic and historian Leonard
Feather explained Mr.
Jones's significance this way: "His
main achievement was the creation of what might be called a circle of
sound, a continuum in which no beat of the bar was necessarily indicated
by any specific accent, yet the overall feeling became a tremendously
dynamic and rhythmically important part of the whole group."
But if the self-taught Mr. Jones had
a profound influence on other drummers, not many of them directly emulated
his style, at least in part because few had the stamina for it.
None of the images that the critics
invoked to describe his playing - volcano, thunderstorm, perpetual-motion
machine - quite did justice to the strength of his attack, the complexity
of his ideas or the originality of his approach.
Elvin Ray Jones was born in Pontiac,
Mich., on Sept. 9, 1927. The youngest of 10 children, he was the third
Jones brother to become a professional musician, following Hank, a
respected jazz pianist who is still active, and Thad, a cornetist,
composer, arranger and bandleader, who died in 1986.
He began teaching himself to play
drums at 13, but he had lost his heart to the instrument long before then.
"I never wanted to play anything else since I was 2," he told one
interviewer. "I would get these wooden spoons from my mother and beat on
the pots and pans in the kitchen."
After spending three years in the
Army he joined his brothers as a fixture on the busy Detroit jazz scene of
the early 1950's. As the house drummer at a local nightclub, the Bluebird
Inn, he worked with local musicians like Tommy Flanagan and Kenny Burrell
as well as visiting jazz stars like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis.
In 1956 after briefly touring with
the bassist Charles Mingus and the pianist Bud Powell, Mr. Jones moved to
New York, where he was soon in great demand as an accompanist.
He occasionally sat in with Miles
Davis, and he later recalled that Coltrane, who was then Davis's
saxophonist, promised to hire Mr. Jones whenever he formed his own group.
In the fall of 1960 Coltrane made good on that promise.
Working with Coltrane, a relentless
musical explorer, emboldened Mr. Jones to expand the expressive range of
his instrument. "My experience with Coltrane," he told the writer James
Isaacs in 1973, "was that John was a catalyst in my finding the way that
drums could be played most musically." He in turn influenced Coltrane, Mr.
Jones's ferocious rhythms goading Coltrane to ecstatic heights in
performance and on recordings like "A Love Supreme" and "Ascension."
Coltrane's quartet helped redefine
the concept of the jazz combo. Mr. Jones and the other members of the
rhythm section, the pianist McCoy Tyner and the bassist Jimmy Garrison,
did not accompany Coltrane so much as engage him in an open-ended four-way
conversation. Audiences found the group's intensity galvanizing, and many
critics shared their enthusiasm.
But despite its popularity, the
group divided the jazz world. John Tynan of Down Beat magazine dismissed
its music as "anti-jazz," and others agreed. Mr. Jones's drumming, a
revelation to some listeners, was dismissed by others as overly busy and
distractingly loud.
Mr. Jones left the group in March
1966, shortly after Coltrane, as part of his constant quest for new
sounds, began adding musicians. Although he never publicly explained why
he left, he was widely believed to have been insulted by Coltrane's
decision to hire a second drummer.
Mr. Jones spent two weeks with Duke
Ellington's big band and briefly worked in Paris before returning to the
United States, where he formed a trio with Garrison, who had also recently
left Coltrane, and the saxophonist Joe Farrell.
That group was short-lived, but Mr.
Jones continued to lead small groups for the rest of his life. Over the
years many exceptional musicians passed in and out of the Elvin Jones Jazz
Machine, as the ensemble came to be known in all its various incarnations,
and the group performed regularly all over the world and recorded
prolifically.
Mr. Jones's survivors include his
wife, Keiko, who also managed his career and composed several of the
pieces in his band's repertory, and his brother Hank.
Mr. Jones came to see it as his
mission to offer training and experience to promising young musicians, and
in recent years he gave early exposure to budding jazz stars like the
saxophonist Joshua Redman, the trumpeter Nicholas Payton and the
trombonist Delfeayo Marsalis. A particularly noteworthy addition to the
Jazz Machine lineup in the 1990's was the saxophonist Ravi Coltrane,
John's son.
Mr. Jones was also a tireless
proselytizer for an instrument that he believed was too often maligned and
misunderstood. "I played a job in a bar once as a young man," he told his
fellow drummer Lewis Nash in a 1997 interview for Down Beat. "One of the
customers came up to me and said, `Hey, make some noise.' What he really
meant was that he wanted me to play a drum solo. So that is a general
perception, and that way of thinking still exists."
"People never understood," he
continued, "that the drum is a musical instrument."
-----------------------------
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Jazz great Benny
Carter, a master of melodic invention on the alto saxophone who also was a
renowned composer, instrumentalist, orchestra leader and arranger, has
died, friends said Sunday. He was 95.
Carter died Saturday, after being
hospitalized for about two weeks with bronchitis and other problems, said
family friend and publicist Virginia Wicks. ``A big, big person walked out
of the room yesterday,'' said friend and producer Quincy Jones. ``A great
human being.''
Known as a virtuoso alto saxophone
and trumpet player, critics praised Carter for his originality and
improvisation that helped launch the golden age of big band jazz in the
1930s.
His compositions, which include
``When Lights Are Low'' (1936) and ``Blues in My Heart'' (1931), became
jazz and big band standards, and many saxophone and trumpet players
continue to measure their work against his solos. But it was his work arranging and
composing - and receiving credit - for movies and later for television
that opened doors for many black musicians and composers. Carter was largely self-taught as a
musician, playing both saxophone and trumpet before becoming a bandleader
in the late 1920s. In a career that spanned more than
six decades, he performed with or wrote music for nearly all of jazz's
early greats, including Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and
Dizzy Gillespie.
St. Louis-based trumpeter Clark
Terry, another early jazz pioneer, said Carter was truly revered by other
musicians. ``We always called him the king
because he was probably the most highly respected musician of the whole
lot of us,'' Terry said. Though he is perhaps best remembered
as a saxophonist, Jones said Carter's greatest contributions to the form
were his compositions and arrangements. Carter was a member of a generation
of early jazz musicians responsible for changing public attitudes about
the style, which grew out of blues and spiritual music and was largely
performed by black musicians, Jones said.
``They came out of this thing that
was supposed to be the wicked music, and they brought it to life, and it
turned into one of our greatest art forms,'' Jones said.
Born Bennett Lester Carter on Aug.
8, 1907, in New York City, he attended an integrated elementary school. He
took piano lessons from his mother when he was 10 years old, and later
studied with a private teacher for a year.
Carter picked up the trumpet at age
14. But after failing to master it in a week, he traded it for a
saxophone, he once told reporters. Carter mastered the trumpet a year
later. By age 15, he was a regular at Harlem night clubs.
In 1928, Carter made his recording
and arranging debut as a member of Charlie Johnson's Orchestra. With no
formal music education, Carter taught himself to arrange music on two of
the orchestra's recordings, ``Charleston Is the Best Dance After All'' and
``Easy Money.'' Later that year, he joined Fletcher Henderson's orchestra
and assumed arrangement duties.
Carter expanded his duties to
include composing and in 1932 put together his own orchestra, but the band
struggled financially and disbanded in 1934.
But his reputation as an arranger
had grown. ``You got Duke Ellington, Count
Basie, and my man, the Earl of Hines, right? Well, Benny's right up there
with all them cats. Everybody that knows who he is calls him `King.' He is
a king,'' Louis Armstrong once said.
In 1942, Carter reorganized his
band, which included bebop pioneers Gillespie and Kenny Clarke and later
modernist Miles Davis. He disbanded it in 1946 in part because of his
growing Hollywood career.
In the 1943, Carter arranged music
for ``Stormy Weather,'' an all black musical. In 1944, Carter appeared in
MGM's ``Thousands Cheer'' with Lena Horne. He went on to arrange music for
``An American in Paris,'' (1951) ``The Guns of Navarone'' (1961) and Busby
Berkeley's ``The Gang's All Here'' (1943).
He later composed and arranged music
for 20 television series, including ``M Squad,'' (1957-60) ``Ironside,''
(1967-75) ``The Name of the Game'' (1968-71) and ``It Takes a Thief''
(1968-70).
His success as one of the first
black musicians to break into the lucrative film scoring market and,
eventually to be credited for his work, opened the door for others. He
also succeeded in using his influence to push successfully to desegregate
the Musicians' Union's white and black locals.
While Carter continued to arrange
and compose music, he stopped touring in the 1950s and 1960s and began to
fade in the jazz scene. In 1969, approached by a sociologist who felt
Carter was not receiving recognition as one of the great contributors to
jazz, Carter began lecturing at colleges.
In 1976, he returned to performing
live at Michael's Pub in New York and later that year recorded ``The
King,'' which featured duets with Gillespie.
``I don't look back at the good old
days. The good old days are here and now,'' he once said.
Carter was awarded the Grammy
Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987 and the congressional designation as a
National Treasure of Jazz in 1988. In 2000, he was presented with the
National Medal of Arts by President Clinton.
Jones said he felt after visiting
Carter in the hospital that ``the king'' had simply decided it was time to
go. ``He said he had lived, for 95
years, the greatest life he could ask for, and he wanted to leave us like
he lived with us, which was in such dignity,'' Jones said.
JIMMY KNEPPER
James "Jimmy" Minter Knepper, trombonist: born Los Angeles, 22 November
1927; married (one son deceased, one daughter); died Triadelphia, West
Virginia 15 June 2003.
A gentle and likeable man who seemed to slip in and out of bands
practically unnoticed, Jimmy Knepper was yet one of the most eloquent and
original of jazz trombonists. His career was irrevocably modified on 12
October 1962 by a punch in the mouth from the unpredictable and often
violent genius of jazz, bass player and composer Charlie Mingus.
Mingus had been preparing for weeks for a concert of his music at New
York Town Hall. Knepper had been copying scores and doing additional work
on Mingus's writing. The two men were in Mingus's apartment when Knepper
refused to take on more work.
The punch that followed broke one of Knepper's teeth, ruined his
embouchure and resulted in the permanent loss of the top octave of his
range on the trombone. Mingus alleged that his mild and affable trombone
player had called him a nigger.
The concert was a disaster, but Knepper wasn't there. He was at the
dentist having the stump of his tooth removed. He took out a civil action
against Mingus.
By January 1963 Knepper was able to play again after a fashion and was
hired by Peggy Lee to back her at the Basin Street East in New York.
Knepper returned home from the job one morning at six. The postman rang
with a delivery that required his signature, and he answered the door in
his pajamas. As he signed two men appeared from his garden. They were
treasury agents who had had been tipped off by phone about the delivery.
It was a small packet that contained about five dollars' worth of heroin
and Knepper was taken to the agents' headquarters. Knepper was sure that
Mingus had set him up. Eventually the agents agreed with him and released
him.
Mingus came to court on 6 February charged with assaulting Knepper. Some
of the bassist's friends testified that he would never hurt anyone. Mingus
said that Knepper had come to his apartment drunk and fallen over,
injuring himself. He said again that Knepper had called him a nigger. The
black judge glared at him and said 'That's got nothing to do with it.'
Mingus was given a suspended sentence.
Knepper's trombone solos and ensemble playing had been a vital part of
Mingus's bands for five or six years until then. He was a vital figure in
much of the composer's best work, including the albums "The Clown",
"Tonight At Noon", "Mingus Oh Yeah", "Blues and Roots" "Mingus Ah Um" and
the unique "Tijuana Moods" suite of 1957. During this time he had also
graced bands of similar moment led by Gil Evans, with whom he recorded in
1960 his unforgettable classic feature on "Where Flamingos Fly", surely
one of the most beautiful and moving performances ever recorded on the
instrument.
Although his trombone playing was most intricate, full of flying triplets
and unusual intervals, Knepper always made it sound easy and he became the
idol of other trombonists during the Sixties and Seventies. Unlike some of
the brilliant technicians of today, Knepper kept a high emotional content
in his work and involved his international audiences, who responded
enthusiastically.
This
was the apex of Knepper's career. He first took up the alto horn when he
was six years old and in military school. He played in the school's
marching bands and when he left, because his mother wanted him to play in
marching bands and orchestrally, changed to the trombone. He finished his
music studies in Los Angeles, and joined the Freddie Slack band, recording
with Slack in 1947. Bebop had arrived and the big band era was coming to
a close. The result was that Knepper's playing reflected the swing style
of trombonists Dickie Wells and Lawrence Brown and absorbed the
revolutionary alto sax style of Charlie Parker. His tone on the instrument
avoided the brassy and concentrated on a fleet dexterity to express his
original ideas.
But his years as a soloist still lay ahead. In the late Forties and early
Fifties he followed the hectic sideman's path through the tail end of the
big bands, working for Gene Roland, Charlie Spivak, Charlie Barnet and
Woody Herman. He briefly formed a quintet with Dean Benedetti, a
saxophonist obsessed with the work of Charlie Parker. Knepper helped
Benedetti in his mission to record unofficially as many of Parker's solos
as he could – their efforts survive in a much-coveted seven CD set.
Knepper joined the Claude Thornhill band in 1956 for its tour of American
bases in Germany, France and North Africa. In February 1957 he made the
fateful move to the Charlie Mingus group, where he replaced one of his
friends, another white trombone player of similar talents, Willie Dennis.
"It's hard for a jazz musician to live a rational life," said Knepper,
"unless he has an independent income or a busy maximum of work. When I was
with Mingus, we didn't work very much. Most of the jobs were either
recordings or concerts, and in all it only came to ten or 15 weeks a
year."
Although he had by then left Mingus for Tony Scott's group, Knepper was
delighted to be named "New Star" on the trombone by Down Beat magazine in
1959 for his work with Mingus. He was sure more work would follow as a
result.
"I didn't work for three months, and I panicked. Then Gene Roland got me
into the Stan Kenton band. We made a cross-country tour. Kenton was one of
the nicest leaders I ever worked with. A real gentleman." Knepper had to
leave the band because of his wife's illness. "After I left the band
immediately went into a New York studio and recorded all the things that I
had soloed on."
Frequent returns to work with Mingus in New York were peppered with trips
abroad. He toured in Africa with Herbie Mann in 1960 and was in the Benny
Goodman band for the disastrous tour of the Soviet Union in 1962. The
members of the band got on well with the Russians, but Goodman's behavior
towards his musicians made them vow never to work for him again.
Knepper worked as a member of the Gil Evans Orchestra whenever he could
between 1960 and 1967, interspersing his jazz work with jobs in Broadway
pit bands - he was in the band for "Funny Girl" on Broadway between 1964
and 1966.
This left him time to play on Monday nights for the trombonist Tom
Mackintosh in the rehearsal band that played on Monday nights at the
Village Vanguard. This eventually emerged as the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Jazz
Orchestra, and Knepper became a cornerstone of it from 1968 to 1974. By
now much in demand, he worked and recorded with the National Jazz
Ensemble, and, in Japan, with the Akiyoshi-Tabackin Band, He wrote scores
for and played in the Lee Konitz Nonet from 1975 to 1981 and even braced
himself to return to work for Mingus in 1977.
When Mingus died in 1979 Knepper became a key player in Mingus Dynasty, a
band dedicated to playing the composer's music. He travelled to Europe to
work and record with George Gruntz's Concert Band between 1976 and 1982
and made a successful trip to Britain to play with a group including
saxophonist Bobby Wellins and bassist Dave Green for three weeks in 1980.
From the late 1980s until the early 1990s he played with the American Jazz
Orchestra, recording with it with Benny Carter in 1987. He split his time
in New York between that group and two big bands led by Buck Clayton and
Loren Schonberg, but by now frequently returned to Europe to work.
Health problems made him cut down his playing during the Nineties and
Parkinson's Disease ended his career.
Steve Voce The Independent
Nina Simone,
70, Soulful Diva and Voice of Civil Rights, Dies
April 22, 2003
By PETER
KEEPNEWS for NYT
Nina Simone, a
singer whose distinctively emotional style blended elements of jazz,
gospel, blues, European art song and other influences, died yesterday at
her home in Carry-le-Rouet, France, near Marseille. She was 70. Her
manager, Clifton Henderson, said she had been ill for some time, but he
released no cause of death. Ms. Simone had only one Top 20 hit in her long
career - her very first single, "I Loves You, Porgy," released in 1959 -
but her following was large and loyal and her impact deep and lasting.
Aretha Franklin, Roberta Flack and Laura Nyro were among the singers who
were influenced by her. In recent years her songs resurfaced and won new
fans on television commercials and in dance-club remixes.
Although she
was most often characterized as a jazz singer, Ms. Simone, who usually
performed with a rhythm section and always accompanied herself on piano,
was almost impossible to classify. "If I had to be called
something," she wrote in 1991 in her autobiography, "I Put a Spell on
You," "it should have been a folk singer because there was more folk and
blues than jazz in my playing."
But her piano
playing also revealed her classical training more clearly than most jazz
pianists', and her singing - at times rough and raw, at other times sweet
and pure - owed an unmistakable debt to black gospel music. Her repertory
was similarly eclectic: it ranged from blues to Broadway, from Jacques
Brel to Screamin' Jay Hawkins to the Bee Gees.
Ms. Simone was
as famous for her social consciousness as she was for her music. In the
1960's no musical performer was more closely identified with the civil
rights movement. Though she was best known as an interpreter of other
people's music, she eloquently expressed her feelings about racism and
black pride in those years in a number of memorable songs she wrote
herself.
"Mississippi
Goddam" was an angry response to the killing of the civil rights advocate
Medgar Evers. "Young, Gifted and Black," written with the keyboardist
Weldon Irvine Jr., became something of an anthem, recorded by Aretha
Franklin and many others. "Four Women" painted a subtle but stinging
picture of the suffering and the strength of African-American women.
She was born
Eunice Waymon on Feb. 21, 1933, in Tryon, N.C., and grew up singing in a
church choir and studying piano. She received a scholarship to the
Juilliard School of Music in 1950, although she had to work as an
accompanist for singers and as a piano teacher to help support herself.
She eventually ran out of money, left Juilliard and moved back in with her
family, at that time living in Philadelphia.
In 1954 she
got a job playing piano at a bar and grill in Atlantic City, where she
assumed her stage name - because, she later explained, she did not want
her mother to find out what she was doing. After her first night on the
job, she was told that she had to sing as well as play, so she began
emulating Billie Holiday and other singers she admired. She later said
that she kept herself from getting frustrated with the often indifferent
crowds by playing the piano in a manner "as close to classical music as
possible." This unusual mixture of approaches produced what the music
writer Ashley Kahn has called "an impassioned, impromptu approach that
became her signature."
Ms. Simone
soon began to work in better venues and develop a devoted following. In
1958 she signed with Bethlehem Records; a few months later, she was on the
pop charts. One of her best-remembered hits was "My Baby Just Cares for
Me." Her subsequent recordings for the Colpix, Philips and RCA
Victor labels established her as a potent attraction on the cabaret,
concert and festival circuits. Unafraid to speak her mind, she frequently
clashed with promoters and occasionally berated her audiences for not
paying attention, but her temperament did nothing to diminish her appeal.
Her survivors
include three brothers, a sister and a daughter, Lisa, a singer and
actress known professionally as Simone who is currently appearing on
Broadway in "Aida."
In the 1970's
her music fell out of fashion in the United States; she divorced her
husband and manager, Andy Stroud, and beset by financial problems she left
the country in 1973, living in Liberia and Barbados before settling in
France. In a 1998 interview, she said she had left the United States
because of a racial situation she called "worse than ever."
In recent
years, as her health began to fail, Ms. Simone performed less and less,
although she continued to draw enthusiastic crowds wherever she appeared.
Al Schackman, who played guitar in her backup group for four decades, said
she had recently canceled a tour of Britain but had been planning a United
States tour for this spring.
Mongo
Santamaria; fused Latin, jazz music
By Los Angeles Times,
2/5/2003
LOS ANGELES -- Mongo
Santamaria, the pioneering Cuban percussionist who was among the most
acclaimed exponents of Latin jazz and whose 1963 hit ''Watermelon
Man'' stands as a precursor of pop crossover in Latin music, died of a
stroke Saturday at a Miami-area hospital. He was 80. The Havana-born
grandson of a former slave, Mr. Santamaria spent more than a
half-century exploring the nexus between the polyrhythmic music of his
native country and various forms of American popular music, especially
jazz and rhythm and blues. In a remarkably enduring career, he worked
with leading figures from both worlds, including trumpeter Dizzy
Gillespie, vibraphonist Cal Tjader, and fellow drummers/band leaders
Tito Puente and Perez Prado.
Mr. Santamaria's bands,
which also featured such jazz musicians as Chick Corea and Hubert
Laws, ''were in large part responsible for the gradual absorption of
Latin rhythms into black music,'' states the New Grove Dictionary of
Jazz. Although he once admitted to allowing record label pressures to
define his repertoire on some of his albums**, Mr. Santamaria remained
true to the genuine spirit of Afro-Cuban drumming, including its
religious roots. His style, studied for its simultaneous power and
lyricism, influenced a generation of percussionists.
Jackie
McLean in July 2004. 
James
Williams, a pianist and onetime member of Art Blakey's Jazz
Messengers, died Tuesday, July 20 of complications from liver cancer.
He was 53.