Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Garrison Fewell was born on October 14, 1953 in Charlottesville, Virginia but was raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He started playing the stride guitar when he was 11 years old and becoming interested in acoustic blues, he turned to the music of Reverend Gary Davis, Fred McDowell, and Mississippi John Hurt. During the early ’70s, Fewell embarked on a tour that took him to Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, and Afghanistan. Three years later he returned to the States, became a jazz student of Pat Martino and Lenny Breau, earned a degree from Berklee College of Music and by 1977 was teaching at his alma mater.
As part of a new exchange program set up between Berklee and Holland’s Rotterdam Conservatory in 1988, Garrison also taught in Rotterdam, worked with Dutch musicians and performed at the North Sea Jazz Festival. The guitarist settled in Paris the following year, playing jazz and teaching at the American School of Modern Music and played the Umbria Jazz Festival. For the next several years he taught and performed around Europe gaining more and more popularity.
In 1993 his relative obscurity at home changed with the recording of his album A Blue Deeper Than the Blue, bringing him to the attention of jazz lovers. It also bestowed upon him a number of honors with inclusion into the Coda Magazine and United Press International lists of the year’s ten best and the Boston Music Awards named the debut Best Jazz Album of the Year. Guitarist Garrison Fewell continues to perform, record, teach and tour.
Dose A Day – Blues Away
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Raymond Matthews Brown was born on October 13, 1926 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and started piano lessons at age eight. By high school he noticed a proliferation of pianists, unable to afford his first choice of trombone, took the upright bass vacancy in the high school jazz orchestra.
Influenced early by bassist Jimmy Blanton, the young Brown started making a name for himself around Pittsburgh playing with Jimmy Hinlsey and Snookum Russell. After graduating from high school he bought a one-way ticket to New York, met up with hank Jones, met Dizzy Gillespie who hired him on the spot and started working alongside Art Tatum and Charlie Parker.
During his five-year tenure with Gillespie he met and married Ella Fitzgerald, then worked with Jazz At The Philharmonic, recorded with Blossom Dearie on her first five albums between ‘57 and ‘59, joined Oscar Peterson in 1951 becoming a mainstay for the next 15 years.
In 1966 Ray moved to Los Angeles where he was in high demand by several television show orchestras, worked with Frank Sinatra, Billy Eckstine, Tony Bennett, Sarah Vaughan and Nancy Wilson. Becoming a manager and promoter as well as a performer, Brown managed the Modern Jazz Quartet and a young Quincy Jones, produced shows at the Hollywood Bowl, wrote jazz bass instruction books and developed a jazz cello.
Over the course of his career he has recorded prolifically with a luminary list of musicians, was award a Grammy for his composition Gravy Waltz, reunited with the legendary Oscar Peterson Trio and subsequent albums earned no less than four Grammys. He continued to tour and perform up until the time of his death. Double bassist Ray Brown passed away in his sleep on July 2, 2002 after having played a round of golf in Indianapolis, Indiana. The following year he was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame.
Inspire A Young Mind
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Melvin Rhyne was born on October 12, 1936 in Indianapolis, Indiana and started playing the piano shortly thereafter. By the time he turned 19 he was playing piano with then-unknown tenor saxophonist Rahsaan Roland Kirk but quickly switched to the Hammond B3 organ. His skills as a pianist fluidly translated to the organ fluently and he soon became a sideman for B.B. King and T-Bone Walker.
Melvin’s big break came in 1959 when he joined fellow Indianapolis jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery’s newly formed trio. Playing with Montgomery for five years, he recorded four sessions with the trio: Guitar on the Go, Round Midnight, Boss Guitar, and Portrait of Wes.
After the Montgomery years, Rhyne moved to Wisconsin and largely kept to himself for the next two decades. However, in 1991 Rhyne returned to the jazz scene in full force, playing on Herb Ellis’ album Roll Call, with Brian Lynch on At the Main Event, and his own comeback The Legend. Rhyne continued to be prolific in the years to come, releasing eight more solo albums for the Criss Cross jazz label.
In 2008 Rhyne teamed up with Rob Dixon forming the Dixon-Rhyne Project, a boundary-pushing jazz quartet and released Reinvention for Owl Studios in 2008. Melvin continues to perform live and record with his trio consisting of drummer Kenny Washington and guitarist Peter Bernstein. On March 5, 2013 hard bop organist, bandleader and composer Melvin Rhyne passed away in his hometown of Indianapolis at age 76.
Give A Gift Of Jazz – Share
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Lester Bowie was born on October 11, 1941 in the historic village of Bartonsville in Frederick, Maryland however he grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. At the age of five he started studying the trumpet with his father, a professional musician and grew up playing with Little Milton, Albert King, Solomon Burke, Joe Tex and Rufus Thomas. In 1965, he became Fontella Bass’s musical director and husband and co-founded the Black Artists Group (BAG) in St Louis.
In 1966, Bowie moved to Chicago, worked as a studio musician, meeting Muhal Richard Abrams and Roscoe Mitchell became a member of the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians). In 1968, he founded the Art Ensemble of Chicago and was a member of Jack DeJohnette’s New Directions Quartet. Lester lived and worked in Jamaica and Africa, recording with Fela Kuti.
In 1984, he formed Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy, a nonet demonstrating jazz’s links to other forms of popular music, covering songs by Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson Marilyn Manson and the Spice Girls along with more serious material. His New York Organ Ensemble featured James Carter and Amina Claudia Myers.
Although seen as part of the avant-garde, Bowie embraced techniques from the whole history of jazz trumpet, filling his music with humorous smears, blats, growls, half-valve effects, and so on. He had an affinity for reggae and ska, appeared on the Stolen Moments: Red, Hot + Cool compilation in support of the Aids epidemic in the African American community that Time Magazine named Album of the Year.
Throughout his career trumpeter Lester Bowie took an adventurous and humorous approach to music. He passed away of liver cancer on November 8, 1999 and was posthumously inducted into the Down Beat Hall Of Fame in 2000. The following year the Art Ensemble of Chicago recorded Tribute To Lester.
Jazz Is Global – Share
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Harry “Sweets” Edison was born on October 10, 1915 in Columbus, Ohio but spent his early childhood in Kentucky, getting his first introduction to music by his uncle. Moving back to Columbus at age 12, he started playing trumpet with local bands.
In 1933, he became a member of the Jeter-Pillars Orchestra in Cleveland, went on to play with the Mills Blue Rhythm Band followed by Lucky Millinder. In 1937 he moved to New York joining Count Basie’s Orchestra playing alongside Buck Clayton, Lester Young (who named him Sweets), Buddy Tate and Jo Jones among others.
Edison came to prominence in the Basie band as a soloist and as a composer and arranger for the band. He spent 13 years with Basie until the band was temporarily disbanded in 1950. He then pursued a varied career as leader of his own groups, freelancing with other orchestras and traveling with Jazz At The Philharmonic.
In the early 1950s, he settled on the West Coast and became a highly sought-after studio musician, making important contributions to recordings by such artists as Billy Holiday, Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. In 1956 he recorded the first of three albums with tenor great Ben Webster.
Through the 60s and 70s Harry worked in many orchestras on TV shows, including Hollywood Palace and The Leslie Uggams Show, specials with Sinatra; prominently featured on the sound track and album of Lady Sings The Blues, was musical director for Redd Foxx, toured Europe and Japan.
Jazz trumpeter Harry “Sweets” Edison, the first tribute Honoree from the Los Angeles Jazz Institute, and twice Los Angeles Jazz Society’s tribute Honoree in 1983 and 1992, passed away on July 27, 1999.
Put A Dose In Your Pocket
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