Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Mel Martin was born on June 7, 1942 in Sacramento, California. Both parents were singers and early piano and clarinet lessons led him to Benny Goodman and Glen Church’s Jazz Rhythm & Blues radio program. The big bands of Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Woody Herman, Shelly Manne and His Men, and Cannonball Adderley, passing through town kept his interest high. Forming a small combo of clarinet, accordion and drums, his father got him his first gig, afterwards they played at Mel’s Drive-In for tips.
While still a teenager, Martin was good enough to sit in with Wes Montgomery and his brothers. Already jamming with Black musicians in the community, he’d hit the clubs to hear the Montgomery Brothers when they played, sometimes sitting in on flute.
At San Francisco State in 1962 while majoring in music he met fellow undergraduate John Handy and played with him in his Freedom Band. At the same time, Mel was learning how to play bop with the musicians who hung out at Bop City, Soulville, the Jazz Workshop, Shelton’s Blue Mirror, Jack’s on Sutter and later the Both/And.
In the late 1960s and early Seventies Martin played with progressive rock and Latin bands including The Loading Zone, Cold Blood, Azteca and Boz Scaggs, Doug Sahm’s Honky Blues Band, Wayne Talberty, Chuck Berry, Dr. John and others. Creating Listen in 1977 which became part of the early West Coast jazz fusion scene, he recorded three albums before the end of the decade.
He was the artistic director of Bebop and Beyond, a group he founded in 1983 and released four albums. Martin has received five National Endowment for the Arts grants, and was honored by the San Francisco Jewish Museum. As performer, composer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist he contributed music to television and film. He was a bandleader, contractor and sideman, he played in) big bands for McCoy Tyner and Dizzy Gillespie and played with the Freddie Hubbard Quintet and Charlie Haden’s Liberation Orchestra.
As an educator he taught the Stanford Jazz Workshop at Stanford University from 1984 to 1995, produced a series of Jazz Workshops for the Marin Jewish Community Center and regularly conducts workshops at his studio in Novato and in the Marin public schools.
Saxophonist, composer, arranger, and bandleader Mel Martin, who also played flute, clarinet and piccolo, died of a heart attack on November 17, 2017 at age 75.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Ronnie Foster was born in Buffalo, New York on May 12, 1950. Attracted to music at the age of four, he attended Public School 8, Woodlawn Jr. High for a year, McKinley Vocational High School for two years, and then spent his final year at Lafayette High School. The only formal musical instruction he received was a month of accordion lessons. Taking music more seriously from his early teens, he had his first professional gig aged fifteen, playing in a strip club.
He initially performed with other local musicians. Moving to New York City with his own band, he acquired a publishing company. Foster performed as a sideman with a wide range of musicians, frequently working with guitarist George Benson, including playing on the guitarist’s album Breezin’.
Ronnie has played organ with Grant Green, Grover Washington, Jr., Stanley Turrentine, Roberta Flack, Earl Klugh, Harvey Mason, Jimmy Smith, and Stevie Wonder.
He is also a record producer and his song Mystic Brew was sampled in Electric Relaxation by A Tribe Called Quest and in J. Cole’s song Forbidden Fruit, where it was reversed, pitched, and slowed down in the song Neighbors as well as the instrumental of Forbidden Fruit.
Funk and soul jazz organist Ronnie Foster continues to perform, record, tour and produce.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Ralph Humphrey was born on May 11, 1944 in Berkeley California. While still a student at California State College Northridge he recorded with the Don Ellis Big Band in 1968, and stayed with the band until 1973.
Leaving Don Ellis and jazz he joined Frank Zappa’s band in 1973 and his drumming can be heard on at least a dozen albums. Humphrey, never far from jazz, played drums for Wayne Shorter, Al Jarreau, and Manhattan Transfer, as well aas pop stars Barbra Streisand, José Feliciano, Bette Midler, Captain and Tenille, Richard Carpenter. His music has been heard in television series such as American Idol, Charmed, The Simpsons, Family Guy, and more.
As an educator he has taught the drum curriculum at the Los Angeles Music Academy. He and Joe Porcaro created the drum program for the Percussion Institute of Technology, a part of the Musicians Institute in Hollywood, California. Between 1980 and 1996 he taught the program and headed the department.
Drummer Ralph Humphrey, whose name has been spelled differently in some credits as Humphry or Humphries, continues to perform, record, tour and educate.
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Daily Does of Jazz…
Jerry Rusch was born on May 8, 1943 in St. Paul, Minnesota and studied at the University of Minnesota from 1962 to 1964, then played in an Army Reserve band before moving to Los Angeles, California in 1966.
Becoming a fixture in the city he played with Gerald Wilson from 1967, Ray Charles, Clifford Jordan, Joe Henderson, Willie Bobo, Louie Bellson, Teddy Edwards, Frank Foster, and Thad Jones/Mel Lewis. In Europe he played with Joe Haider’s Orchestra from 1982 to 1984.
As a sideman he recorded extensively among his credits are work with Charles Kynard, Benny Powell, Henry Franklin, Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson and Stan Kenton, as well as Gladys Knight, the Rolling Stones, Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross, the Temptations, and many others.
Trumpeter Jerry Rusch, who was also credited as Jerry Rush and performed in the hard bop and post bop genres, died of liver cancer in Las Vegas, Nevada on May 5, 2003 at the age of 59, three days shy of his 60th birthday.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Collin Walcott was born on April 24, 1945 in New York City, New York. He studied violin and tympani in his youth, and studied percussion at Indiana University School of Music. After graduating in 1966, he went to the University of California, Los Angeles, and studied sitar under Ravi Shankar and tabla under Alla Rakha.
Walcott moved to New York and blended bop and oriental music with Tony Scott in 1967–69. Around 1970 he joined the Paul Winter Consort and co-founded the band Oregon. These groups, along with the trio Codona, which was founded in 1978, combined jazz improvisation and instrumentation with elements of a wide range of classical and ethnic music.
He played with Miles Davis on his 1972 album On the Corner, had three releases under his own name on ECM Records. He taught at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
Sitar and tabla player Collin Walcott was killed in a bus crash in Magdeburg, East Germany on November 8, 1984 while on a tour with Oregon.
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