Daily Dose Of Jazz…
William Parker was born January 10, 1952 in the Bronx, New York. He was not formally trained as a classical player, though he did study with Jimmy Garrison, Richard Davis, and Wilbur Ware and learned the tradition and is one of few jazz bassists who frequently plays arco.
Active on the free jazz scene since the early Seventies, Parker first came to public attention with pianist Cecil Taylor. The 1990s saw Parker’s prominence and public profile grow as an influential bassist in the New York City experimental jazz scene.
He has long been a member of saxophonist David S. Ware’s quartet, in Peter Brötzmann’s groups and has also played with various other groups that included Paul Murphy. He is a member of the cooperative Other Dimensions In Music and together with his wife, Patricia Nicholson Parker, organizes the annual Vision Festival in New York City.
His Sound Unity album has been listed in the Top 10o and his Double Sunrise over Neptune made the Top 10 album pick list by Amazon, and his Petit Oiseau has been chosen as one of the best jazz disks of 2008 by The Wall Street Journal, the BBC’s Radio Three, The Village Voice and PopMatters.
In 2006, Parker was awarded the Resounding Vision Award from Nameless Sound. His first book, Who Owns Music?, assembles his political thoughts, poems, and musicological essays In June 2011, while his second book, Conversations, is a collection of interviews with notable free jazz musicians and forward thinkers, mainly from the African-American community.
Free jazz bassist William Parker continues to record and perform regularly at music festivals around the world.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Edward Bertram Garland was born January 9, 1895 in New Orleans, Louisiana. By 1910 he was playing bass drum with brass bands including Frankie Duson’s Eagle Band. He then took up tuba and string bass, doubling on the two instruments which filled similar roles in different types of bands.
He played with the Excelsior Brass Band, Manuel Perez’s Imperial Orchestra and then joined other early New Orleans bands playing in Chicago, Illinois and California, such as Lawrence Duhé and Freddie Keppard. In 1916 Garland joined King Oliver and went to California and during the Depression he led his own One-Eleven Jazz Band.
1944 saw Ed gaining notoriety as a member of a traditional New Orleans band that was a leader of the West Coast revival, put together for the CBS Radio series The Orson Welles Almanac. The all-star band also included Mutt Carey, Jimmie Noone (succeeded by Barney Bigard), Kid Ory, Bud Scott, Zutty Singleton and Buster Wilson. Renamed Kid Ory’s Creole Jazz Band, the group then made a significant series of recordings on the Crescent Records label.
Garland appeared in the 1959 film Imitation of Life, performing with Andrew Blakeney, Teddy Buckner, George Orendorf and Joe Darensbourg in the funeral sequence Trouble of the World featuring Mahalia Jackson.
String bassist Ed Garland, sometimes known as Montudie Garland, a nickname he much disliked, passed away in London, England on January 22, 1980.
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Atlanta Jazz Festival… 1989
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Wendell Philips Culley was born on January 8, 1906 in Worcester, Massachusetts. He performed locally in Boston, then moved to New York City in 1931 and found early work playing with Horace Henderson and Cab Calloway.
He then spent eleven years in the employ of Noble Sissle, recording with him extensively. Following this he played with Lionel Hampton from 1944 to 1949, and then briefly worked again with Sissle.
In 1951 he joined the Count Basie Orchestra and until 1959 he recorded twenty albums with the man and toured the world. After his tenure with Basie, he retired from music and pursued a career in insurance. Trumpeter Wendell Culley, who never led a session of his own, passed away on May 8, 1983 in Los Angeles, California. He was seventy-seven years old.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Kenny Davern was born John Kenneth Davern on January 7, 1935 in Huntington, Long Island, New York of Austrian-Irish ancestry. After hearing Pee Wee Russell the first time, he was convinced that he wanted to be a jazz musician and at the age of 16 he joined the musician’s union, first as a baritone saxophone player. In 1954 he joined Jack Teagarden’s band, and after only a few days with the band he made his first jazz recordings.
He would later work with bands led by Phil Napoleon and Pee Wee Erwin before joining the Dukes of Dixieland in 1962. The late 1960s found him free-lancing with, among others, Red Allen, Ralph Sutton, Yank Lawson and his lifelong friend Dick Wellstood.
Davern had taken up the soprano saxophone, and when a spontaneous coupling with fellow reedman Bob Wilber at Dick Gibson’s Colorado Jazz Party turned out be a huge success, one of the most important jazz groups of the 1970s, Soprano Summit, was born. The two co-led the group switching between the clarinet and various saxophones, and over the next five years Soprano Summit enjoyed a very successful string of record dates and concerts. When the group disbanded in 1979, he devoted himself to solely playing clarinet, preferring trio formats with piano and drums.
He revived his collaboration with Bob Wilber in 1991 and the new group was called Summit Reunion. Leading quartets since the 1990s, Kenny preferred the guitar to the piano in his rhythm section, employing guitarists Bucky Pizzarelli, Howard Alden and James Chirillo. He appeared numerous times at the Colorado Springs Invitational Jazz Party; in 1997 he was inducted into the Jazz Hall of Fame at Rutgers University, and in 2001 he received an honorary doctorate of music at Hamilton College, Clinton, New York.
Mainly playing in traditional jazz and swing settings, he ventured into the free-jazz genre collaborating in 1978 with avant-garde players Steve Lacy, Steve Swallow and Paul Motian that produced the album titled Unexpected. He also held an ardour and knowledge of classical music. Clarinetist Kenny Davern passed away of a heart attack at his Sandia Park, New Mexico home on December 12, 2006.
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