Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Marzette Watts was born March 9, 1938 in Montgomery, Alabama. Early in his life he played piano but did not play regularly in his teens. While studying at Alabama State College he became a founding member of SNCC, however, this association led to his being forced to leave the state at the behest of the governor.
He moved to New York, where he lived in a loft building on Cooper Square where Leroi Jones aka Amiri Barak lived and with whom he participated in the Organization of Young Men.. Watts returned to college in New York, completing his studies in 1962; and then moved to Paris to study painting at the Sorbonne and began playing saxophone for extra money.
Returning to New York in 1963, Marzette studied under Don Cherry, played in his loft and around the city with Juini Booth, Henry Grimes, J.C. Moses, and others. He also continued painting, producing work strongly influenced by Willem de Kooning. His loft attracted many established and up-and-coming musicians who would hang out there and play at parties, including Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry, Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders.
By 1965 he devoted himself to music more fully, moved to Denmark for further study. Moving back and forth between Europe and New York City, while in New York he recorded an album for ESP-Disk and another for Savoy Records, and aught briefly at Wesleyan University.
He wrote film scores and did production work for his own films, eventually abandoning music to work in film and record production. Late in his life he moved to Santa Cruz, California but free jazz tenor and soprano saxophonist, bass clarinetist and sound engineer Marzette Watts passed away in Nashville, Tennessee of heart failure on March 2, 1998.
Dose A Day-Blues Away