Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Uri Caine was born June 8, 1956 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and began playing piano at seven, studying with French jazz pianist Bernard Peiffer at 12. He later studied at the University of Pennsylvania and gained great familiarity with classical music and worked in clubs around the city.
His professional career started in 1981 and a mere four years later saw his debut with the Rochester-Gerald Veasley band recording session. During the decade he moved to New York City, appeared on a klemzer album with Mickey Katz and played with Don Byron and Dave Douglas.
Caine has recorded 16 albums and is celebrated for his eclectic and inventive interpretations of the classical repertoire. His 1997 jazz tribute to Gustav Mahler received an award from the German Mahler Society, while outraging some jury members. Caine has also reworked Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, Schumann and Mozart.
In 2001 he teamed up with drummer Zach Danziger to conceive an original project fusing live jungle and drum ‘n’ bass beats with fusion jazz called “Uri Caine Bedrock 3” and he worked with Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson of The Roots, Christian McBride, Pat Martino and Jon Swana.
Jazz pianist and composer Uri Caine has been named Composer-in-Residence of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, has received a nomination for a Grammy, been named U.S. Artists Fellow, has recorded twenty-eight albums as a leader and continues to perform and tour.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Tina Brooks was born Harold Floyd Brooks on June 7, 1932 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, the brother of tenor saxophonist David “Bubba” Brooks. He initially studied the C-melody saxophone, which he began playing in 1944 shortly after his family relocated to New York.
His first professional work came in 1951 with rhythm and blues pianist Sonny Thompson and Lionel Hampton four years later. His friendship with trumpeter and composer Little Benny Harris led to his first recording as a leader. Harris played a key role in Brooks’ acquiring a contract with Blue Note Records in 1958.
Best known for his work for Blue Note Records, between 1958 and 1961, Tina led four recording sessions and worked as a sideman on record sessions with Kenny Burrell, Freddie Hubbard, Jackie McLean, Freddie Redd and Jimmy Smith. Appearing on Brooks’ albums, McLean and Brooks’ also gave highly regarded performances of the music composed by Redd in Jack Gelber’s play “The Connection”, from which came a recording of the music from the play.
Declining health problems due to heroin dependency, his recording career ceased after 1961. Tina Brooks, the hard bop tenor saxophonist and composer whose strong, smooth tone and amazing flow of fresh ideas are indelibly imprinted on seventeen sessions in the Blue Note catalogue, died at age 42 of liver failure on August 13, 1974.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Monty Alexander was born Montgomery Bernard Alexander on June 6, 1944 in Kingston, Jamaica. Discovering the piano at the age of 4, Alexander began taking classical music lessons at 6 and became interested in jazz at the age of 14. He started playing in clubs, and on recording sessions by Clue J & His Blues Blasters, deputizing for Aubrey Adams. Two years later, he directed his dance orchestra Monty and the Cyclones and played in the local clubs. Performances at the Carib Theater in Jamaica by Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole left a strong impression on the young pianist.
In 1961 Alexander and his family moved to Miami, Florida, he went to New York in 1962 and started to play at the jazz club Jilly’s. In addition to performing with Frank Sinatra there, he also met and became friends with bassist Ray Brown and vibist Milt Jackson. In 1964, he went to California and recorded his first album “Alexander the Great” for Pacific Jazz at the age of 20.
He has recorded with Milt Jackson, Ernest Ranglin and Ed Thigpen, toured with Ernestine Anderson, steel pan player Othello Molineaux, Mary Stallings, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Golson, and Frank Morgan among others. In some of successive trios he has collaborated with Oscar Peterson, Herb Ellis, Ray Brown, Mads Vinding, and Niels-Henning Orsted Pederson.
Alexander married the late great jazz guitarist Emily Remler in 1981, a union that would last only three years. In the 90s, Alexander formed a reggae band featuring all Jamaican musicians, releasing several reggae albums, including “Yard Movement” and “Stir It Up”, a collection of Bob Marley songs. Monty Alexander, pianist and melodica player, influenced by Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson, Wynton Kelly and Ahmad Jamal and the strong Caribbean influence and swinging feeling is consistently representative in his 67 albums as a leader and his numerous sideman collaborations as he continues to record, perform and tour.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Jerry Gonzalez was born in the Bronx, New York City on June 5, 1949. Of Latin heritage, he grew up with jazz and Afro-Cuban music that left a deep impact on his musical appreciation. Listening to his father’s jazz collection he was influenced by Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong along with gleaning inspiration from Tito Puente, Eddie Palmieri and Mongo Santamaria.
Studying music in junior high school, Gonzalez took up the trumpet and later the congas, continuing he formal training at New York College of Music and New York University. He began his professional career in 1963 playing with Lewellyn Mathews in New York State World’s Fair. In 1970 playing with Dizzy Gillespie, under whose tutelage he fused African based rhythms onto jazz elements seamlessly without detracting from either.
After playing with Manny Oquendo and Eddie Palmieri, Jerry created the Fort Apache Band with Andy Gonzalez (his brother), Larry Willis and Steve Berrios. A later reconfiguration and naming, Jerry Gonzalez & the Fort Apache Band became much more successful performing at European jazz festivals and subsequent recordings. Three albums later, “Rumba Para Monk” released in 1989, topped a readers’ poll in Down Beat magazine and was named the “Jazz Album Of The Year” in France by the Academie du Jazz. In 1998 they won both the industry and journalist polls in the New York Jazz Awards Latin Jazz category.
Gonzalez has played and/or collaborated with Tito Puente, McCoy Tyner, Jaco Pastorious, Chet Baker, Woody Shaw, Tony Williams, Larry Young, Freddie Hubbard, Chico O’Farill, Papo Vasquez, Ray Barretto, The Beach Boys, Chico Freeman and Paquito D’Rivera among others but his most noteworthy contribution is to Afro-Cuban jazz and a resurgence in Latin jazz in the 80s and 90s. With seventeen albums as a leader under his belt and a host of recording sessions as a sideman, since 2000, trumpeter Jerry Gonzalez has lived and played in and around jazz clubs in Madrid.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Oliver Edward Nelson was born on June 4, 1932 in St. Louis, Missouri. His brother played sax with Cootie Williams and his sister sang and played piano. He began playing the piano when he was six, the saxophone by eleven and by age 15 he was playing in territory bands around St. Louis. In 1950 he joined Louis Jordan’s big band, playing alto saxophone and arranging.
After military service Nelson returned to Missouri to study music composition and theory at Washington and Lincoln University graduating in 1958. He married, had a son, divorced, moved to New York City, and began playing with Erskine Hawkins and Wild Bill Davis, and arranged for the ApolloTheatre. In 1959 he briefly worked the West coast with Louie Bellson’s big band and played tenor for Quincy Jones.
After six albums as leader between 1959 and 1961 for Prestige with Kenny Dorham, Johnny Hammond Smith, Eric Dolphy, Roy Haynes and others. Oliver’s big break came with his Impulse album The Blues and The Abstract Truth featuring his now classic standard “Stolen Moments”. Propelling him into prominence as a composer and arranger, it opened up opportunities to arrange for Cannonball Adderley, Irene Reid, Sonny Rollins, Billy Taylor, Wes Montgomery, Johnny Hodges and many others.
Moving to Los Angeles in 1967 Nelson spent a great deal of time composing for television shows like Colombo, Ironside, Bionic Woman and films like Death of a Gunfighter and Last Tango In Paris. He produced for Nancy Wilson, James Brown, the Temptations and Diana Ross.
Less well-known is the fact that Nelson composed several symphonic works, and was also deeply involved in jazz education, returning to his alma mater, Washington University, in the summer of 1969 to lead a five-week long clinic that also featured such performers as Phil Woods, Mel Lewis, Thad Jones, Sir Roland Hanna, and Ron Carter.
Oliver Nelson, saxophonist, clarinetist, pianist, arranger and composer died of a heart attack on October 28, 1975, aged 43.