Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Didier Lockwood was born on February 11, 1956 in Calais, France and began studying classical violin and composition at the Calais Conservatory at six years old. But thanks to his brother Francis, Didier’s world was opened to other forms of music and he quit his studies in 1972. Entranced by the improvisation of Jean-Luc Ponty’s playing he took up the amplified violin. He credits being influenced by Polish violinist Zbigniew Siefert and fellow Frenchman Stephane Grappelli with whom he toured. By 1975 he joined progressive rock group Magma followed by fusion group Uzeb.
During the 70’s he played in Paris with Aldo Romano and Daniel Humair among others, led a fusion group called Surya and recorded with Tony Williams. The 80’s saw Didier performing at the Montreux Jazz Festival teamed with guitarist Allan Holdsworth, bassist/vocalist Jack Bruce, drummer Billy Cobham and keyboardist David Sancious, playing in the U.S. and recording with violin colleagues John Blake and Michal Urbaniak.
Lockwood’s career has been diverse ranging from fusion to swing to advanced hard bop but he first gained fame for exploring new musical landscapes and performing various sound imitations such as seagulls and trains. Although slated as the heir apparent to the line of great French violinists behind Grappelli and Ponty, by the nineties he maintained a very low profile. He established a string instrument improvisation school in 2001 called Centre des Musiques Didier Lockwood, has been touring with jazz guitarist Martin Taylor since 2006 and written several film scores.
More Posts: violin
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Rufus Reid was born on February 10, 1944 in Atlanta, Georgia but was raised in Sacramento, California where he played the trumpet through junior high and high school. Shortly after graduation he entered the Air Force and it was there that he became seriously interested in the bass.
Following his honorable discharge from the military, Reid moved to Seattle to begin studies with James Harnett of the symphony. Then continued at Northwestern University graduating with a music degree as a performance major on double bass.
His professional career began in Chicago playing with Sonny Stitt, James Moody, Milt Jackson, Curtis Fuller and Dizzy Gillespie, recording with Kenny Dorham, Dexter Gordon, Lee Konitz and Howard McGhee, and touring internationally with the Hutcherson-Land quintet, Freddie Hubbard, Nancy Wilson, Eddie Harris and Dexter Gordon in the ‘70s. Moving to New York in 1976 he began playing and recording with Thad Jones & Mel Lewis who are just the few colleagues among the hundreds of world’s greatest musicians.
A prolific bassist, Reid has spanned generations of jazz appearing on countless hard bop, bebop, swing and pop sessions with his restrained yet emphatic tone, time, harmonic sensibility and has made him one of the most sought after bassists in the industry. He has co-led a group with Akira Tana called TanaReid since the late eighties.
Rufus Reid began teaching at William Patterson College in 1979 and the bassist, educator and composer continues to record and perform around the world.
More Posts: bass
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Barbara Donald was born February 9, 1942 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. At 9 she was playing the cornet, listening to Dixieland, Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman and showed physical abilities unusual for a woman. She soon switched to the trumpet, receiving a good musical education on various reed instruments and vocals.
In 1955 her parents moved to California where she was denied access to the high school big band, so she formed her own groups. By age 19, she was sharing bandstands with Dexter Gordon, Stanley Cowell and Bert Wilson, a daringly unusual position for a white woman. Ironically, she faced the same denial with jazz big bands refusing to audition women. Therefore she paid her dues to rhythm & blues, rock and roll and dance bands.
A brief stay in New York City strengthened her determination and upon her return to Los Angeles, Barbara started hanging out with jazz musicians and studying the art of playing bebop with “Little” Benny Harris, who co-wrote “Ornithology” with Charlie Parker. Settling in San Diego in 1964 she met mentor Sonny Simmons and taught her structure with hard keys and hard chords. Simmons’ own innovation stressed playing the melody and staying on top of the beat.
From 1964 to 1972, Barbara and Sonny lived, performed and struggled together. Their career, if too often chaotic with irregular engagements and recordings, remained underground, producing brilliant and singular music. However, Barbara’s presence balanced her husband’s revolutionary moods at a time when Sonny was prone to radical sojourns between tradition and modernity.
Her voluble and powerful, somehowunadorned playing, indicating a perfect control of the bop idiom, characteristic of the immediate post-Trane free expression, was the perfect supporting structure of Simmons’ angular themes and improvisations.
Barbara Donald parted from Sonny, moved to Washington in the early 80’s, formed Unity and began to expose and refine her own concept. In 1984, Barbara presented Unity at the Kool Jazz Festival with then rising star Charnett Moffett on bass. By 1992, Barbara Donald’s health was failing and one of the top female jazz trumpeters, after experiencing a series of strokes that rendered her unable to actively play live, Donald had been living in an assisted care facility in Olympia, Washington, from 1998 until her death on March 23, 2013.
More Posts: trumpet
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Bill Mays was born William Allen Mays on February 5, 1944 in Sacramento, California. Coming from a musical family he learned to play piano and at sixteen he became interested in jazz after attending an Earl Hines concert.
From 1969 to the early 1980s Bill worked Frank Sinatra, Al Jarreau, Dionne Warwick, Anita O’Day, Mark Murphy and accompanied other vocalists in Los Angeles with Sarah Vaughan, while also working sessions with such luminary musicians as Art Pepper, Shelly Manne, Bud Shank, Red Mitchell, and Bobby Shew to name a few from an esteemed list of luminaries.
In 1984, Mays moved to New York and became best known as a sideman or accompanist, but starting in the 1990s he began to do more work as a bandleader, composer, and arranger. As far back as the 70’s on, he recorded over two-dozen albums under his own name, in different configurations, and has been heard as a sideman on many more. He continues to perform, record and tour.
More Posts: piano
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
John Stubblefield was born on February 4, 1945 in Little Rock, Arkansas. He first studied the piano and then moved to saxophone as a teen absorbing the music of the itinerant blues and gospel performers moving in and out of his strictly segregated Black neighborhood.
At 17 Stubblefield made his recording debut with local R&B combo York Wilburn & the Thrillers, spent a year on the road with soul legend Solomon Burke, then studied music at A&M College in Pine Bluff while concurrently leading his own modern jazz quintet. In 1967 after graduation he settled in Chicago and signed on with the pioneering avant-garde jazz collective the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. During this period he studied under Muhal Richard Abrams and appeared on Joseph Jarman’s landmark 1968 set As If It Were The Seasons.
Relocating to New York, John joined the Collective Black Artists playing with Mary Lou Williams, Tito Puente, and the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra. By 1972 he joined Charles Mingus adding alto saxophone, oboe, flute, and bass clarinet to his arsenal. Suffering a falling-out with Mingus that effectively left Stubblefield blacklisted throughout much of the New York jazz community, he finally landed with Nat Adderley’s quintet. He briefly played behind Miles Davis in 1973 and during the mid-’70s served as an instructor with the famed Jazzmobile program.
He cut his first album Midnight Sun in 1976 followed by a few more projects in the eighties for the Enja and Soulmate labels. After the death Of Charles Mingus, his widow Sue formed the Mingus Big Band in 1992 and Stubblefield held the lead tenor chair and was an occasional director. Diagnosed with cancer in 2004 he remained a guiding force conducting much of the I Am Three album from his wheelchair.
Tenor saxophonist John Stubblefield collaborated with a who’s who list of modern jazz and avant-garde giants includes Charles Mingus, passed away on July 4, 2005. His contribution ranks him among the most powerful and innovative soloists of the post-Coltrane generation.
More Posts: saxophone