Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Lester William DeMerle was born on November 4, 1946 in Brooklyn , New York and studied drums and percussion from 1960 to 1965 with Bob Livngstone in New York, then music theory and harmony with Alf Clausen . At 16 he was jamming with Lionel Hampton and in 1966 he played with the Lee Castle led Dorsey band.
1967 found Les with Randy Brecker and Arnie Lawrence in the first band formation called Sound 67. By the late 1960s he joined with Joe Farrell and Lee Konitz in New York. By 1971 Les was moving to Los Angeles,California where he founded the band Transfusion, that became the house band at the Cellar Theatre. He also played with Michael Brecker, Eric Marienthal, David Benoit and Raul De Souza. In 1974 he joined Harry James at the Newport Jazz Festival and stayed for 12 years.
He recorded with the Heath Brothers on the album Smilin’ Billy Suite / A Day in the Life in 1976 on the Strata-East label, worked with Bunk Gardner and in the 1980s he worked on albums with his wife Bonnie Eisele. DeMerle has led big bands and made a series of albums on the Origin label including a tribute album to the classic Blue Note Records, Hittin’ the Blue Notes.
Les DeMerle is one of the few drummers who sings. He has accompanied Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Tony Bennett, Sarah Vaughan, Mel Tormé and Eddie Jefferson. He continues to perform, record and tour.
Dose A Day-Blues Away
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Henry Grimes was born November 3, 1935 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and took up the violin at the age of 12, then began playing tuba, English horn, percussion, and finally the double bass in high school. He went on to study at Juilliard, establishing a reputation as a versatile bassist by the mid-1950s.
At a time when bassist Charles Mingus was experimenting with a second bass player in his band, Grimes was the person he selected for the job. At twenty-two he was captured on film in the Bert Stern documentary of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival’s Jazz on a Summer’s Day and as word spread among the musicians about his extraordinary playing, he ended up playing with six different groups in the festival that weekend: those of Benny Goodman, Lee Konitz, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Sonny Rollins, and Tony Scott.
Gradually growing interested in the burgeoning free jazz movement, Henry performed with most of the music’s important names, including Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry, Steve Lacy, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, and Albert Ayler. He released one album, The Call, as a trio leader on the ESP-Disk label in 1965 with clarinetist Perry Robinson and drummer Tom Price. By the late 1960s, he moved to California, his career came to a halt and after more than a decade of activity and performance, notably as a leading bassist in free jazz, completely disappeared from the music scene by 1970 and was often presumed dead.it was commonly assumed Grimes had died, having been listed as such in several jazz reference works.
Fortunately Henry was discovered him in 2002 alive but nearly destitute by Marshall Marrotte, a social worker and jazz fan. He was without a bass to play, renting a tiny apartment in Los Angeles, California, writing poetry and doing odd jobs to support himself. He had fallen so out of touch with the jazz world that he was unaware Albert Ayler had died in 1970.
Since his return in 2003 to a hero’s welcome at the free jazz Vision Festival, he has been performing at festivals, teaching lessons and workshops for bassists. William Parker donated a bass nicknamed “Olive Oil” for its distinctive greenish color and with David Gage’s help had it shipped from New York to Los Angeles, and others assisted with travel expenses and arranging performances.
Grimes has made up for lost time and over the course of his career, old and new, he has recorded over 90 sessions and performed with Anita O’Day, Mose Allison, Roy Burns, Andrew Cyrille, Paul Dunmall – Profound Sound Trio, , Walt Dickerson, Shafi Hadi, Roy Haynes, Rolf Kühn, Carmen Leggio, William Parker, Marc Ribot, Pharoah Sanders, Shirley Scott, Marilyn Crispell, Ted Curson, Archie Shepp, Billy Taylor, Cecil Taylor, Marshall Allen, Fred Anderson, Lennie Tristano, McCoy Tyner, Rashied Ali, Bill Dixon, Dave Douglas, Andrew Lamb, Joe Lovano, Roscoe Mitchell, William Parker, High Priest, Wadada Leo Smith, Cecil Taylor John Tchicai, and numerous others.
In the past few years, Grimes has also held a number of residencies and offered workshops and master classes at City College of New York, Berklee College of Music, Hamilton College, New England Conservatory, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the University of Gloucestershire at Cheltenham, Humber College, and more. He has released or played on a dozen new recordings, made his professional debut on a second instrument, the violin, at Cecil Taylor’s side at Lincoln Center at the age of 70, and has been creating illustrations to accompany his new recordings and publications. He has received many honors in recent years, including four Meet the Composer grants and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Arts for Art / Vision Festival.
Bassist, violinist, composer and poet Henry Grimes is now a resident of New York City and has a busy schedule of performances, clinics, and international tours.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Rudolph “Rudy” Van Gelder was born on November 2, 1924 in Jersey City, New Jersey. His interest in microphones and electronics can be traced to a youthful enthusiasm for amateur radio. Named for his uncle who had been the drummer in Ted Lewis’s band in the mid-1930s, he took trumpet lessons and trained as an optometrist at the Pennsylvania College of Optometry, in Philadelphia, thinking he could not earn a living as a recording engineer.
From 1943, after graduating, Van Gelder had an optometry practice in Teaneck, New Jersey, and moonlighted recording local musicians in the evenings who wanted 78-rpm recordings of their work. From 1946, Van Gelder recorded in his parents’ house in Hackensack, New Jersey, in which a control room was built adjacent to the living room, which served as the musicians’ performing area. The dry acoustics of this working space were partly responsible for Van Gelder’s inimitable recording aesthetic.
Interested in improving the quality of the playback equipment he acquired everything that could play back audio: speakers, turntables and amplifiers. One of Rudy’s friends, baritone saxophonist Gil Mellé, introduced him to Alfred Lion, a producer for Blue Note Records, in 1953. Within a few years he was in demand by many other independent labels based around New York City, such as Bob Weinstock, owner of Prestige Records. To accommodate each label – Blue Note, Prestige, Savoy, Impulse, Verve he assigned them to different days as Lion was more stringent with the sound of original music, Weinstock had essentially blowing sessions for some of the best musicians in jazz history.He also engineered and mastered for the classical label Vox Records in the Fifties.
Van Gelder worked during the day as an optometrist until the summer of 1959, when he moved his operations to a larger studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey and became a full-time recording engineer. The new studio’s design was inspired by the work of Frank Lloyd Wright had high ceilings and fine acoustics with “no food or drink and do not touch microphones” policy as he himself always wore gloves when handling equipment.
By 1967 the labels were beginning to utilize other engineers more regularly but Rudy remained active engineering nearly all of Creed Taylor’s CTI Records releases, a series of proto-smooth jazz albums that were financially successful, but not always well received by critics. He was not without his detractors. Despite his prominence in the industry, like Lion who didn’t care for the overuse of reverb, and Charles Mingus refused to work with him because he change the sound of his bass. He remastered the analog Blue Note recordings into 24-bit digital recordings in its RVG Edition series and also remasters of some of the Prestige albums, and was happy to see the LP go by the wayside because it was hard for him to get the sound the way he thought it should be.
He received awards and honors being named a fellow of the Audio Engineering Society (AES), received the society’s most prestigious award, the AES Gold Medal, named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts, received the Grammy Trustees Award, and Thelonious Monk composed and recorded a tribute to Van Gelder titled Hackensack.
Producer and recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder, who specialized in jazz and regarded as the most important recording engineer of jazz by some observers, passed away at home in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey on August 25, 2016. Among the several thousand jazz sessions he recorded are the acknowledged classics John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, Miles Davis’s Walkin’, Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage, Sonny Rollins’s Saxophone Colossus and Horace Silver’s Song for My Father.
Take A Dose On The Road
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Antonio Sánchez was born on November 1, 1971 in Mexico City, Mexico and started playing drums at the age of five. By his teen years he had begun playing professionally. Attaining a degree in classical piano from the National Conservatory in 1993, he moved to Boston, Massachusetts, to study at Berklee College of Music. After a Magna Cum Laude graduation in Jazz Studies, he obtained a scholarship for a Masters in Jazz Improvisation at Boston’s New England Conservatory.
While still at the Conservatory in 1997, his teacher, Danilo Pérez, recommended Sánchez to Paquito D’Rivera for the drum chair in Dizzy Gillespie’s United Nations Orchestra, leading him to him touring with the orchestra. In 1997 Perez invited him to be a part of his acoustic trio, extensive touring, and the recording of the Grammy-nominated album Motherland. Post tour he joined Pat Metheny Group as the drummer after a series of auditions.
The group recorded two albums with Antonio the 2003 Grammy Award winning Speaking of Now, for Best Contemporary Jazz Album and in 2005 The Way Up. The Pat Metheny Trio, he and Metheny are joined by bassist Christian McBride on the recording Day Trip in 2008 and in 2012 he was the drummer on Pat Metheny’s album Unity Band.
In 2007 he recorded his debut solo album as a leader, Migration, with Metheny, Chick Corea, Chris Potter, David Sanchez, and Scott Colley. With his sophomore release, Live in New York, in 2010 Sánchez recorde the double live album at the Jazz Standard in New York after a US tour of Antonio’s band which included Miguel Zenon on alto saxophone, David Sanchez on tenor and Scott Colley on acoustic bass.
In 2013 he release of his third album New Life, and in 2014 Sánchez composed the music for the film Birdman, garnering for the soundtrack a nomination for 2014 Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score, a nomination for the 2015 British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA), but was disqualified to compete in the Academy Award for Best Original Score, because the film also contained a significant amount of classical music.
Drummer Antonio Sanchez has performed and recorded with Avishai Cohen, Alexei Tsiganov, Misha Tsiganov, Michael Brecker, Gary Burton, Chick Corea, Bendik Hofseth, Enrico Pieranunzi, Dewa Budjana, David Binney, Donny McCaslin, John Escreet and Matt Brewer among others, and continues to perform, record, tour and compose.
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