Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Steve Marcus was born September 18, 1939 in The Bronx, New York, and studied at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts between 1959 and 1961. He gained experience playing in the bands of Stan Kenton, Herbie Mann and Larry Coryell from 1963 to 1973.

His debut album as a leader included an arrangement of the Beatles’ song, Tomorrow Never Knows, which also was the album’s title. He worked with jazz drummer Buddy Rich for the last twelve years of the drummer’s life. After Rich died, Marcus led the band and renamed it Buddy’s Buddies.

Saxophonist Steve Marcus transitioned on September 25, 2005 in New Hope, Pennsylvania. He was 66.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Joseph Jarman was born on September 14, 1937 in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and grew up in Chicago, Illinois. At DuSable High School, he studied drums with Walter Dyett, switching to saxophone and clarinet when he joined the United States Army after graduation. During his time there, he was part of the 11th Airborne Division Band for a year.

After his discharge in 1958, Jarman attended Wilson Junior College, where he met bassist Malachi Favors Maghostut and saxophonists Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill, and Anthony Braxton. These men would often perform long jam sessions at the suggestion of their professor, Richard Wang. Mitchell introduced Jarman to pianist Muhal Richard Abrams, and Jarman, Mitchell, and Maghostut joined Abrams’ Experimental Band, a private, non-performing ensemble, when that group was founded in 1961. The same group of musicians along with Fred Anderson and Phil Cohran went on to found the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in 1965,.

His solo recording career began at this time, putting together a sextet, however, Jarman disbanded the group in 1969 after the passing of two members. He had joined Mitchell, Maghostut and Lester Bowie in the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble which would eventually become known as the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The group was known for being costumed on stage for different reasons.

The group moved to Paris in 1969, and lived there for many years in a commune that included Steve McCall, the drummer who went on to form the jazz trio Air. Moving back to Chicago in the 1970s, Joseph  lived in a musicians’ building in Hyde Park, with Malachi Favors as his roommate. In 1983, he moved to Brooklyn, New York.

Jarman left the Ensemble until 1993 to focus on his spiritual practice, and didn’t return to music until 1996, releasing two albums and then joining a trio with Myra Melford in Chicago, which would eventually be called Equal Interest.

Along with the saxophone and clarinet, Jarman also played (and recorded on) nearly every member of the woodwind family, as well as a wide variety of percussion instruments. Aside from his work with relatively traditional jazz line-ups, he also composed for larger orchestras and created multimedia pieces for musicians and dancers.

Saxophonist, composer, and poet Joseph Jarman transitioned from respiratory failure at the Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, New Jersey on January 9, 2019. He was 81.

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Three Wishes

Nica’s curiosity never got the best of her mission to discover the wishes of her guests and when she asked Albert “Tootie” Heath of his three wishes he responded with:

1. “Being in more than one place at once.”
2. “Being able to do anything I want to do on my instrument.”
3. “Happiness.”

*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…

Herman Davis Burrell was born September 10, 1940 in Middletown, Ohio and grew fond of jazz at a young age after meeting Herb Jeffries. He studied piano and music at the University of Hawaii from 1958 to 1960, then starting in 1961 he attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. 1965 saw him walking across the stage to receive  degrees in composition/arranging and performance. While in Boston, he played with Tony Williams and Sam Rivers.

After graduation Dave moved to New York City, where he worked and recorded with Grachan Moncur III, Marion Brown, and Pharoah Sanders. He also started the Untraditional Jazz Improvisational Team with saxophonist Byard Lancaster, bassist Sirone, and drummer Bobby Kapp. Three years later he co-founded The 360 Degree Music Experience with Moncur and Beaver Harris, recording two albums with the group. The following year, Burrell began an association with Archie Shepp, with whom he would play the 1969 Pan-African Festival in Algiers, Algeria. They would go on to record nearly twenty albums.

Burrell’s debut as a leader was an album titled High Won-High Two that was released in 1968.  This was followed by Echo and La Vie de Bohème recorded in Paris in 1969, and Round Midnight for Nippon Columbia.

In 1978, with Swedish poet and lyricist Monika Larsson he composed a jazz opera entitled Windward Passages, with an album of the same name, based on the opera, released in 1979. Their touring and recording collaborations resulted in four more albums. He would later appear on seven David Murray albus recorded between 1988 and 1993.

Burrell tours and performs as a soloist and as a leader of a duo, trio, and larger ensembles. His recordings have received high praise  from Down Beat, Village Voice, Jazz Times and others. Into the new millennium he has continued to perform, record and release several albums including a live recording in Italy. In 2022, pianist Dave Burrell donated his archive to the Center for American Music in the University of Pittsburgh Library System. He continues to be active in jazz.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Fred Stone was born on September 9, 1935 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and was the son of saxophonist Archie Stone. His initial musical studies were with his father. At the age of 14 he began studying the trumpet with Donald Reinhardt in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and spent every summer in that city from 1950–1955. At home he studied music theory and music composition with Gordon Delamont and John Weinzweig.

Commencing his performance career in 1951 at the age of 16 he played in Benny Louis’s big band. From 1955 to 1967 he was a trumpeter in various orchestras related to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, including the CBC Symphony Orchestra. During the late 1950s and 1960s he performed widely as a concert soloist with orchestras throughout North America. He was an active performer as a jazz musician, playing regularly with Ron Collier , Phil Nimmons , the Boss Brass, and Lighthouse and he toured North America and Europe with the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

Returning to Toronto in 1971, Stone became highly involved with his work as a teacher, and operated his own private studio where he taught improvisational theory and music composition. His performance career virtually ceased for the remainder of the decade, although he remained active as a composer. Between 1971 and 1983 he mainly focused on his work as a composer and teacher, making only periodic public performances, and often with ensembles composed largely of his students.

In 1984 he formed Freddie’s Band, a jazz ensemble in residence at The Music Gallery in Toronto. Flugelhornist, trumpeter, pianist, composer, writer, and music educator Fred Stone recorded eleven albums as a sideman before he transitioned on December 10, 1986.

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