Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Gianni Basso, born in Asti, Italy on May 24, 1931 studied music in the busy northern city of Turin, where his childhood friend Oscar Valdambrini was a homeboy. A fascination for American jazz, their meeting was a case of a tenor saxophone and trumpet finding each other. This led to all manner of musical possibilities, most notably the easy-to-maneuver-and-feed small combo.

He started his career shortly after World War II, first as a clarinetist, then switched to the saxophone in the Forties performing in Germany and Belgium in Raoul Falsan’s Big Band. By the beginning of the next decade, he was established as a commercial “GB” or “general business” player in Milan, but one with a steady presence at jazz events, including some of the early Italian attempts at post-fascist festivals.

From about 1954, a collaboration with trumpeter and composer Oscar Valdambrini began that resembled the relationship between Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. The partners’ group was without a doubt the most popular jazz band in Italy in the ’50s, accompanying many touring stars such as Billie Holiday, Lionel Hampton, Gerry Mulligan, Slide Hampton, and Chet Baker. His style became so developed that the Verve label signed him and Sarah Vaughan immediately recruited him for her 1984 album The Mystery of Man.

The late ’70s saw Basso founding the band Saxes Machine and fronting the Gianni Basso Big Band. In his senior years he settled into the comfort of the Rome studio scene, still playing in clubs and enjoying his growing historical stature on the European jazz scene that included free jazz fans.

Tenor saxophonist Gianni Basso, whose playing was influenced by Stan Getz and Sonny Rollins,  passed away on August 17, 2009.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Daniel Humair was born May 23, 1938 in Geneva, Switzerland and played clarinet and drums from the age of seven and won a competition for jazz performance in his teens. By the time he was twenty he was in Paris, France accompanying visiting musicians with his most celebrated season with tenor saxophonist Lucky Thompson at a club called Le Chat Qui Pèche.

Humair became the drummer American musicians would ask to work with, despite a gig with the Swingle Singers in the early 60s. In 1967 he played on violinist Jean-Luc Ponty’s debut Sunday Walk, also contributing the title track. When alto saxophonist Phil Woods emigrated to Paris in 1968 it was natural that Humair should be the drummer in what Woods called the European Rhythm Machine.

In 1969 he won the Downbeat critics’ poll as Talent Deserving Wider Recognition. Humair was so in demand that his job-sheet reads like a list of the pre-eminent names in jazz, Herbie Mann , Roy Eldridge, Stéphane Grappelli, Chet Baker, Michel Portal, Martial Solal, Dexter Gordon, and Anthony Braxton all availed themselves of his graceful, incisive drums. He played with Gato Barbieri on the soundtrack to Last Tango In Paris in 1972.

In 1986, Daniel’s record Welcome on Soul Note, a record which listed all members of the quartet as leaders, was a perfect demonstration of his warmth and responsiveness as a drummer and continued to top drum polls in France well into the 90s. In 1991, Surrounded documented a selection of his work from 1964-87, including tracks with legends such as Eric Dolphy, Gerry Mulligan and Johnny Griffin – a neat way of giving Humair centre-stage and celebrating the breadth of his involvement with jazz history.

To date he has recorded more than four-dozen albums as a leader, became a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1986 and Officier in 1992. A talented painter, he describes his own work as figurative abstract. Drummer Daniel Humair continues to perform and record.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Giuseppi Logan was born on May 22, 1935 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who taught himself to play piano and drums before switching to reeds at the age of 12. At the age of 15 he began playing with Earl Bostic and later studied at the New England Conservatory. In 1964 he relocated to New York and became active in the free jazz scene.

Giuseppi played alto and tenor saxophone, bass clarinet, flute, piano and oboe. He collaborated with Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders and Bill Dixon before forming his own quartet made up of pianist Don Pullen, bassist Eddie Gómez and percussionist Milford Graves. After Pullen’s departure, pianist Dave Burrell joined the group. A member of Byard Lancaster’s band, he also toured with and appeared on recordings by Patty Waters. He recorded two albums for the ESP-Disk record label and later appeared on an album by Roswell Rudd on the Impulse! label.

Beset with personal problems, Logan vanished from the music scene in the early 1970s and for over three decades his whereabouts were unknown. In 2008 he was filmed by a Christian mission group just after he had returned to New York City after years in and out of institutions in the Carolinas. Around this same time filmmaker Suzannah Troy made the first of many short films of Logan practicing in his preferred hangout, Tompkins Square Park. Subsequently, he was the subject of a major piece by Pete Gershon in the spring 2009 edition of Signal to Noise Magazine, which detailed the events surrounding Logan’s “comeback” gig at the Bowery Poetry Club in 2009.

The same year he performed with a group in NYC as part of the RUCMA performance series. Later in the year he appeared in the short documentary film Water in the Boat by David Gutiérrez Camps, where his music improvisations formed the soundtrack of the film. In 2010 Giuseppi began recording again and released an album announcing his return to music on Tompkins Square Records with Matt Lavelle, Dave Burrell, Warren Smith and Francois Grillot. This group performed a concert in Philadelphia with Dave Miller playing for Warren Smith at the Ars Nova Workshop. He went on to record six songs with a group of younger experimental musicians.

Around 2011 he was shot and ended up in a home in Far Rockaway, Queens. Still living in New York and performing as a street musician, reedist Giuseppi Logan passed on April 17, 2020 at a nursing facility in Far Rockaway, Queens from COVID-19.

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Three Wishes

Art Farmer had but one response to Pannonica’s inquiry of three wishes:

1. 1. “There is only one: to like myself.”

*Excerpt from Three Wishes: An Intimate Look at Jazz Greats ~ Compiled and Photographed by Pannonica de Koenigswarter

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Bobby Bryant was born on May 19, 1934 in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and played saxophone in his youth before moving on to the trumpet and then the flugelhorn. A move to Chicago, Illinois in 1952, where he studied at the Cosmopolitan School of Music until 1957. Remaining until 1960, he played with Red Saunders, Billy Williams, and other ensembles.

He relocated to New York City in 1960 and then Los Angeles, California in 1961, and became a fixture on the West Coast jazz scene. Leading his own groups, in addition, Bobby played with Vic Damone, Charles Mingus, Oliver Nelson, Gerald Wilson, Frank Capp/Nat Pierce, and the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra. He also worked as a studio musician and a music educator.

His most famous solo was in the song “L.O.V.E” recorded with Nat King Cole in 1964. He recorded five albums as a leader, arranged two albums for Peggy Lee in 1969 and Gene Ammons in 1971, and more than two-dozen with Brass Fever, Earth, Wind & Fire, Clare Fischer, Benny Golson, Eddie Harris Richard “Groove” Holmes, Quincy Jones, Stan Kenton, B. B. King, Blue Mitchell, Oliver Nelson, Lalo Schifrin, Horace Silver, The Three Sounds, Gerald Wilson, and Jimmy Witherspoon.

Having sustained health problems which reduced his activity to part-time, trumpeter and flugelhornist Bobby Bryant passed away in Los Angeles of a heart attack at the age of 64 on June 10, 1998.

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