Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Bennie Maupin was born on August 29, 1940 in Detroit, Michigan and undertook extensive instrumental studies, both privately and at the Detroit Institute of Musical Art from age 14 until 1962. During this period his influences were Yusef Lateef, Wayne Shorter, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins. By 1966 he was working with Roy Haynes followed by a two-year tenure with Horace Silver in ’68.
Maupin joined Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi sextet and his Headhunters band, and then joined Miles Davis for the recording of Bitches Brew. He has also performed on several Meat Beat Manifesto albums.
Bennie is noted for having a harmonically advanced, “out” improvisation style, and as a composer, he has the ability to create brief melodies and song forms that create vast landscapes for improvisation.
Multireedist Bennie Maupin was also a member of the group “Almanac” with Cecil McBee, has recorded a half dozen albums as a leader and another two-dozen as a sideman. He has worked with the likes of Lee Morgan, Eddie Henderson, Marion Brown, John Beasley, Mike Clark, Jack DeJohnette, Darek Oles, Lonnie Smith, McCoy Tyner and Lenny White. He appears in the 2016 biopic I Called Him Morgan about trumpeter Lee Morgan and continues to pursue his career in music from jazz to rock to abstraction.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Larry Goldings was born on August 28, 1968 in Boston, Massachusetts and Larry studied classical piano until the age of twelve. While in high school he attended a program at the Eastman School of Music and during this period Errol Garner, Oscar Peterson, Dave McKenna, Red Garland and Bill Evans were prime influences. As a young teenager, Larry studied privately with Ran Blake and Keith Jarrett.
Goldings moved to New York in 1986 to attend The New School and while in college he studied piano with Jaki Byard and Fred Hersch. As a freshman he traveled to Copenhagen with Sir Roland Hanna and played piano with Sarah Vaughan, Harry Sweets Edison and Al Cohn. His later college years saw him touring worldwide with Jon Hendricks and subsequent collaboration with guitarist Jim Hall.
In 1988, Larry started developing his organ style while gigging at Augie’s (now Smoke) in New York City. His 1991 debut release was Intimacy Of The Blues and since then has performed and/or recorded with Charlie Haden, Jack Dejohnette, Carla Bley, Pat Metheny, Madeleine Peyroux, Michael Brecker, Luciana Souza, Steve Gadd, Melody Gardot, David Sanborn, Al Jarreau, Sia, John Scofield and India.Arie to name a few.
Pianist, organist, producer/arranger and composer Larry Goldings has 16 albums as a leader, eighty-four as a sideman, half dozen film and tv credits, has been nominated for a “Best Jazz Album of the Year” Grammy, has twice been a Jazz Journalist Association Winner “Best Organist/Keyboardist of the Year”, has won The New Yorker Magazine Best Jazz Albums for “Awareness” and “Big Stuff” and continues to compose, perform, tour and record.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Sonny Sharrock was born Warren Harding Sharrock on August 27, 1940 in Ossining, New York. He began his musical career singing doo-wop in his teen years. One of few guitarists in the first wave of free jazz in the 1960s, Sonny was known for his incisive, heavily chorded attack, his highly-amplified bursts of wild feedback, and for his use of saxophone-like lines played loudly on guitar.
He collaborated with Pharoah Sanders and Alexander Solla in the late 1960s, appearing first on Sanders’s 1966 effort, “Tauhid”, made several appearances with flautist Herbie Mann and also made an un-credited guest appearance on Miles Davis’s “A Tribute to Jack Johnson”, perhaps his most famous cameo.
Sharrock released three albums as a leader in the late ’60s through the mid-’70s: Black Woman, Monkey-Pockie-Boo and Paradise. Following the last release he went into semi-retirement for much of the 1970s until bassist and producer Bill Laswell coaxed him out to play on a 1981 effort, Memory Serves. He would go on to join punk/jazz band Last Exit, record and perform with the improvisational group Machine Gun and would record another seven albums under his own name, such as, a solo project Guitar, the metal-influenced Seize the Rainbow, and the well-received Ask The Ages featuring Pharoah Sanders and Elvin Jones.
Best known for composing the soundtrack to “Space Ghost: Coast To Coast for the Cartoon Network, with more than thirty-two albums to his credit as a leader and sideman, guitarist Sonny Sharrock passed away of a heart attack on May 26, 1994 at age 53.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Peter Appleyard was born August 26, 1928 in Lincolnshire, England and became apprenticed to a nautical instrument maker after being forced to leave school due to economical reasons related to the Second World War. At that time the popularity of American Big Band music was growing in England, due to recordings by jazz legends like Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington and Count Basie.
Strongly influencing young Appleyard, he decided to pursue a career as a jazz musician and in the early 1940s began his career playing in the Boys Brigade, a youth organization. He went on to perform as a drummer in several other British dance bands and played in RAF bands.
In 1949 Appleyard moved to Bermuda, spent his holidays in Canada and picked up his first set of vibes, eventually settling in Toronto. He worked as a room booking clerk and a salesman studying music and soon thereafter began playing the vibraphone in concerts with Billy O’Connor in the early 1950s.
From 1954-1956 he played with a band at the Park Plaza Hotel, made numerous appearances on CBC Radio, his own jazz ensemble in 1957 and performed and toured throughout North America, appeared on American television during the 1960s. He would go on to host radio and television programs, work with Benny Goodman’s sextet, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie Orchestra, and continue to perform in Toronto nightclubs and lounges while double as music director for several bands.
In 1982 Appleyard formed the All Star Swing Band that Swing Fever, earning a gold record and a nomination for a Juno Award for Instrumental Artist of the Year. Following Goodman’s death, he formed the Benny Goodman Tribute Band in 1985, leads the “Swing Fever Band”, has had several concert tours for NATO, and has performed for Canadian and American servicemen at the North Pole Christmas Show in Greenland.
With more than two-dozen albums under his belt, vibraphonist Peter Appleyard has received the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee award and regularly traveled, toured and performed around the world until his passing of natural causes on July 17, 2013 in Eden Mills, Ontario, Canada. He was 84 years old.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Carrie Smith was born Carrie Louise Smith on August 25, 1925 in Fort Gaines, Georgia and as a member of her church choir performed at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival.
She first won notice singing with Big Tiny Little in the early Seventies, but became internationally known in 1974 when she played Bessie Smith (no relation) in Dick Hyman’s “Satchmo Remembered” at Carnegie Hall. She then launched a solo career, performing into the 80s with the New York Jazz Repertory Orchestra, Tyree Glenn, Yank Lawson, and the World’s Greatest Jazz Band.
Carrie recorded a dozen albums as a soloist for several small labels, starred in the Broadway musical “Black and Blue” from 1989 to 1991 and though not well known in the United States, she had a cult following in Europe.
“Harlem on Parade 77” is an album credited to Smith, Buddy Tate, Doc Cheatham and Hank Jones, featuring Dick Vance, Budd Johnson, Eddie Barefield and Oliver Jackson. She was featured on Winard Harper’s Faith album, Dick Hyman’s Piano Players & Significant Others live recording, and Art Hode’s Authentic Rhythm Section. In 1995 she collaborated with Bross Townsend “I Love Jump Jazz”. Jazz singer Carrie Smith passed away on May 20, 2012.
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