Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Leroy Williams was born in Chicago, Illinois on February 3, 1939 and first began playing drums as a teenager in the 1950s. From 1959 to the middle of the 1960s he played with Judy Roberts, and following this stint he moved to New York City and played with Booker Ervin in 1967.
1968 found him playing with Sonny Rollins, Archie Shepp, and Clifford Jordan; in 1969 he first began playing and collaboration with Barry Harris. 1970 saw him playing with Hank Mobley, Wilbur Ware, and Thelonious Monk, the latter of which he went with on a tour of Japan.
Later in the 1970s he played and recorded with Hank Mobley, Yusef Lateef, Ray Bryant, Charles McPherson, Stan Getz, Andrew Hill, Sonny Stitt, Junior Cook, Al Cohn, Buddy Tate, Ted Dunbar, Slide Hampton, Red Rodney and Bob Wilber, among others.
In the 1980s Williams played with Talk Talk, Level 42, Art Davis, Barry Harris, Tommy Flanagan, Steve Turre, and recorded with Pepper Adams, Bill Hardman. In the 1990s he performed and recorded with Frank Morgan, with Anthony Braxton, Lee Konitz, Ralph Lalama, and Pete Malinverni. Most recently, he was a member of El Mollenium with Roni Ben-Hur, Bertha Hope, and Walter Booker.
He was a member of the cast in the music documentary Bird Now and played one of the Angels of Mercy in the Steve Martin film spoof Leap Of Faith about fake faith healers. At the turn of the decade, Williams was a member of the cooperative band el Mollenium, which also included guitarist Roni Ben-hur, pianist Bertha Hope, and bassist Walter Booker. The band is devoted largely to interpreting the music of the late pianist Elmo Hope. Drummer Leroy Williams continues to be active.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Jodie Christian was born on February 2, 1932 on 44th Street and Prairie Avenue in Chicago, Illinois. His grandfather sold his livestock and sent the family there once he realized the futility of raising a family as share-croppers. His mother was a church pianist, who helped him with music. The young Jodie attended Wendell Phillips High in Chicago. When his mother became director of the church choir, he took over on the piano; sometimes they played organ and piano duets in the church. His father sang and played the blues on the piano in speakeasies and rent parties, but ultimately stopped performing and followed his wife into the church.
Christian was one of the founders of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) with pianist Muhal Richard Abrams, drummer Steve McCall, and composer Phil Cohran. He and Abrams were also part of the Experimental Band. He worked at the Jazz Showcase club in Chicago and performed with Eddie Harris, Stan Getz, Dexter Gordon, Gene Ammons, Roscoe Mitchell, Buddy Montgomery, and John Klemmer.
He led his own group and recorded six albums, and another fifteen as a sideman with Von Freeman, Eric Alexander, Gene Amons, Lin Halliday, Les McCann, and Ira Sullivan to name a few. Pianist and bandleader Jodie Christian, noted for bebop and free jazz, passed away on February 13, 2012, aged 80, in Chicago.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
On January 31, 1928 Keshav Sathe was born in Bombay, India where he began his professional career in 1951, working with a local Indian vocalist by the name of Kelkar. He moved to the United Kingdom in 1956 and joined the Asian Music Circle, a pool of London-based Indian musicians run by former political activist Ayana Deva Angadi. He worked with visiting Indian sitarist Bhaskar Chandavarkar, and in 1961 they played together with the harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler. This was his initial contact with jazz.
In 1965 Sathe began his Indo Jazz Fusion performances and recordings with John Mayer and Joe Harriott, a musical relationship that lasted until 1970. In 1967 his trio was invited with Diwan Motihar on sitar, and Kasan Thakur playing the tamboura, to join the trio of jazz pianist Irène Schweizer together with Barney Willen, Mani Neumeier, Uli Trepte and Manfred Schoof. They appeared at the Donaueschingen Festival and Berlin Jazz Tage and recorded Jazz Meets India in Villingen, the Black Forest.
In the Seventies, he worked and toured with Julie Felix and Danny Thompson, joined the John Renbourn Group, toured the UK, Europe and the US, and produced records, including A Maid in Bedlam, Enchanted Garden and Live in America.
In the 1980s, Sathe formed a group with Tony Roberts which included the dancer Shobhana Jeyasingh, touring UK and Northern Ireland. With the singer Alisha Sufit and group, he made the record “Magic Carpet”. From 1965 to 1993 he regularly accompanied the late singer/dancer Surya Kumari in recitals and teaching workshops. He appears on Suns of Arqa’s live album Musical Revue which was recorded in Manchester in 1982.
Apart from these, Keshav has made numerous incidental recordings, worked for television, radio, and taught tabla until 2003. Indian tabla player Keshav Sathe, best known for his contributions to the Indo-jazz fusion genre passed away on January 18, 2012.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Bernie Leighton, born on January 30, 1921 in West Haven, Connecticut, first played piano professionally at the end of the 1930s. In the early Forties, he played with Bud Freeman, Leo Reisman, Raymond Scott and Benny Goodman before serving in the Army.
Following his discharge, he found work as a studio sideman through the Sixties with Dave Tough, Billie Holiday, Neal Hefti, Goodman again, Artie Shaw, John Serry, Sr., James Moody and Bob Wilber. He toured a year with Tony Bennett from 1972 to 1973.
While Leighton was best known as a sideman, he also recorded extensively as a leader, releasing albums on Keynote Records, Mercury Records, Columbia Records, Brunswick, Disneyland and Capitol. He also recorded a tribute to Duke Ellington released in 1974. He has a cameo role in the 1986 film Hannah and Her Sisters. Pianist Bernie Leighton passed away on September 16, 1994 in Coconut Creek, Florida.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Known professionally as Acker Bilk, Bernard Stanley Bilk MBE was born in Pensford, Somerset on January 28, 1929. He earned the nickname “Acker” from the Somerset slang for friend or mate. His parents tried to teach him the piano but, as a boy, he found it restricted his love of outdoor activities, including football. He lost two front teeth in a school fight and half a finger in a sledding accident, both of which he said affected his eventual clarinet style.
Leaving school Bilk worked at a cigarette factory in Bristol, then three years with the Royal Engineers in the Suez Canal Zone. While there he learned to play the clarinet after his sapper friend, John A. Britten, gave him one bought at a bazaar. He later borrowed a better instrument from the army and kept it after demobilization and played with friends on the Bristol jazz circuit and in 1951 moved to London to play with Ken Colyer’s band. Disliking London he returned west and formed his own band in Pensford called the Chew Valley Jazzmen, which was renamed the Bristol Paramount Jazz Band when they moved to London in 1951. Booked for a six-week gig in Düsseldorf, Germany, the band developed their distinctive style complete with striped-waistcoats and bowler hats.
His return from Germany, Acker based himself in Plaistow, London, and his band played the London jazz clubs. It was here he became part of the late 1950s trad jazz boom in the United Kingdom. They had an eleven chart hit singles in the Sixties, played the Royal Variety Performance, and became an internationally known musician in 1962 when he added a string ensemble on one of his albums that won him an audience outside the UK. His composition Stranger on the Shore was used in a British television series of the same name. He went on to record it as the title track of a new album and the single stayed on the charts for 55 weeks.
He appeared in two theatrical motion pictures, recorded a series of albums in Britain that were also released successfully in the United States on the Atlantic Records subsidiary Atco, however, his success tapered off when British rock and roll made its big international impact beginning in 1964. In the cabaret circuit, he had a couple of more hits, continued to tour, appointed MBE in 2001 and was awarded the BBC Jazz Awards’ Gold Award.
Clarinetist and vocalist Acker Bilk, known for his breathy, vibrato-rich, lower-register style, passed away in Bath, Somerset, on November 2, 2014, at the age of 85.
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