Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Wessell “Warmdaddy” Anderson was born on November 27, 1966 in Brooklyn, New York and grew up in the tough Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights neighborhoods. By 14 he was deeply immersed in jazz at the urging of his father, who was a drummer. He played alto saxophone in local clubs from his early teenage years, and studied at the Jazzmobile workshops with Frank Wess, Charles Davis and Frank Foster. He met Branford Marsalis who convinced him to study with clarinetist Alvin Batiste at Southern University in Louisiana.

Anderson began touring with the Wynton Marsalis Septet, collaborating with Marsalis through the middle of the 1990s helping to make some of the most defining music. He continued to sit in the first alto chair with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. In 1994, he signed and released his debut album, “Warmdaddy In The Garden of Swing” with Atlantic Records followed by his sophomore release “The Ways of Warmdaddy” and then “Live at the Village Vanguard”.

Over the years he develop his sound combining New Orleans jazz with the sweeping blues style of Cannonball Adderley. He has played with contemporaries Eric Reed, Irvin Mayfield, Steve Kirby, Xavier Davis, Jaz Sawyer and Ben Wolfe among others while maintaining an East Lansing, Michigan restaurant called “Gumbo & Jazz”.

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