Daily Dose Of Jazz..
Randal Edward Brecker was born November 27, 1945 in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania suburb of Cheltenham to a musical family. Choosing the trumpet over the clarinet at school when he was eight, it was an easy selection after hearing Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Clifford Brown and Chet Baker at home. He attended Cheltenham High School and then Indiana University from 1963 to 1966 studying with Bill Adam, David Baker and Jerry Coker. He later moved to New York and performed with Clark Terry’s Big Bad Band, the Duke Pearson and the The Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestras.
By 1967 Randy ventured into jazz-rock with the band Blood, Sweat & Tears, on their first album Child Is Father To The Man, but left to join the Horace Silver Quintet. He recorded his first solo album Score in 1968 and featured his brother Michael. Leaving Silver, he then joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers before teaming up with brother Michael, Barry Rogers, Billy Cobham and John Abercrombie to form the fusion group Dreams. They recorded two albums for Columbia Records before disbanding in 1971. In the early Seventies Randy performed live with The Eleventh House, Stevie Wonder and Billy Cobham and recorded several albums with his brother under pianist and composer Hal Galper.
By 1975, Randy and Michael formed the Brecker Brothers band, releasing six albums for Arista and garnered seven Grammy nominations between 1975 and 1981. After the Brecker Brothers disbanded in 1982, he recorded and toured as a member of Jaco Pastorius’ Word of Mouth big band. It was soon thereafter that he met and later married Brazilian jazz pianist Eliane Elias, formed their own band, toured the world several times and recorded one album named after their daughter together, Amanda on Passport Records.
The 1990s would see Randy and Michael reunited for a world tour and a triple-Grammy nomination for the GRP recording The Return of the Brecker Brothers. Their 1994 follow-up album Out of the Loop won two Grammy Awards and he went on to record an album with Polish composer Włodek Pawlik. His first Grammy as a solo artists came from his project Into the Sun and this was followed by a series of recordings over the next decade and winning his third Grammy for Best Contemporary Jazz Album with 34th N Lex. He toured Europe, performed and recorded live and won a fourth Grammy with the WDR Big Band, and released a two CD set of live recordings with the Randy Brecker Band featuring Dave Kikoski, Victor Bailey, Steve Smith, Rodney Holmes and Hiram Bullock. He would go on to win a fifth Grammy with his album Randy in Brazil, and a sixth with Night in Calisia, a collaboration between Brecker, the Wlodek Pawlik Trio, the Kalisz Philharmonic Orchestra and Adam Klocek
Throughout the years he has performed and recorded with David Sanborn, Mike Stern, Bill Lee, Dave Weckl, Ada Rovatti, Stanley Turrentine, Billy Cobham, Larry Coryell, Bruce Springsteen, Lou Reed, Sandip Burman, Charles Mingus, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Horace Silver, Frank Zappa, Parliament-Funkadelic, Chris Parker, Dire Straits, Todd Rundgren, Blue Öyster Cult, Richard Barone, Spyro Gyra, Barbara Dennerlein Aerosmith Arkadia Jazz All Stars, Patti Austin, Gato Barbieri, George Benson, Carla Bley, Ron Carter, Robin Eubanks, Johnny Hodges, Jaroslav Jakubovič, Hubert Laws, Yusef Lateef, Arif Mardin, Brother Jack McDuff, Alphonse Mouzon, Idris Muhammad, Duke Pearson, Don Sebesky, Stanley Turrentine, Miroslav Vitous, Roseanna Vitro, Kenny Werner, Jack Wilkins, Charles Williams among others.
Trumpeter and flugelhornist Randy Brecker continues to compose, record, perform and tour.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Jean-Paul Bourelly was born November 23, 1960 in Chicago, Illinois to American and Haitian parents. He sang at the Lyric Opera when he was ten years old and learned piano and drums, picking up guitar by age 14. When he was nineteen he moved to New York City and began his career playing with Muhal Richard Abrams, Roy Haynes, McCoy Tyner, and Elvin Jones.
In 1984 Jean-Paul landed a role in the Francis Ford Coppola film The Cotton Club, three years later released his debut solo album, and played with Miles Davis in 1988. Not limited to jazz he has branched out into rock music, catching the attention of the Black Rock Coalition, founded by Vernon Reid of Living Colour. He has spent time playing with Buddy Miles, Robin Trower, Jack Bruce, Terry Bozzio, and Matalex.
Bourelly has performed and recorded with Cassandra Wilson on several of her albums, as well as with Mike Ellis, Charles & Eddie, and Craig Harris among others, and is a member of the Stone Raiders and Blackstone Riders bands. He has released a dozen albums that have found their most success in Japan. Jazz fusion and blues rock guitarist Jean-Paul Bourelly continues to perform, record and tour.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Meredith Jane Monk was born November 20, 1942 in New York City and her mother was a professional singer in the popular and classical genres. Known primarily known for her avant-garde vocal innovations with a wide range of extended techniques, she first developed them during her solo performances prior to forming her own ensemble.
By the end of 1961 she was solo dancing on Off Broadway in the Actor’s Playhouse production of Scrooge, graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1964 and four years later founded The House, a company dedicated to an interdisciplinary approach to performance. 1978 saw her forming Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble to explore new and wider vocal textures and forms, which often were contrasted with minimal instrumental textures.
Monk began a long-standing relationship with the Walker Art Center of Minneapolis, Minnesota, as well as with the ECM record label that released her debut album in 1981. She has written and directed two films, Ellis Island and Book of Days, composed an opera called Atlas, has written pieces for instrumental ensembles and symphony orchestras, and composed Stringsongs for string quartet, commissioned by the Kronos Quartet. She has worked with Björk, Terry Riley, DJ Spooky, Ursula Oppens, Bruce Brubaker, John Zorn, Alarm Will Sound, Bang On A Can All-Stars and the Pacific Mozart Ensemble.
Meredith has received a MacArthur Fellowship, the Creative Capital Award, honorary Doctor of Arts degrees from Bard College, the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, the Juilliard School, the San Francisco Art Institute and the Boston Conservatory.She received the Demetrio Stratos International Award for musical experimentation in Italy and U.S. President Barack Obama presented Monk with a National Medal of Arts, the highest honor in the United States specifically given for achievement in the arts.
Avant-garde vocalist, composer, performer, director, filmmaker and choreographer continues to record extensively and create multi-disciplinary works combining music, theatre and dance.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Donald Byron was born November 8, 1958 in The Bronx in New York City. His mother was a pianist and his father played bass in calypso bands. As well as listening to jazz recordings by Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and others, he was exposed to other styles through trips to the ballet and symphony concerts.
He studied clarinet with Joe Allard and studied music at the New England Conservatory in Boston with George Russell. While in Boston, Byron performed and recorded with the Klezmer Conservatory Band, founded by NEC faculty member Hankus Netsky.
A gifted performer on clarinet, bass clarinet and saxophone, but on many of his albums he subordinates his own playing to the exploration of a particular style. Don is representative of a new generation of conservatory-trained jazz musicians who explore and record in a rich array of styles. His debut album in 1992, Tuskegee Experiments, bring classical avant garde and jazz improvisation together, while his albums like Ivey Divey are a more straight-ahead exploration of the traditional jazz, for which he has been nominated for a Grammy Award for his bass clarinet solo on I Want To Be Happy.
A practicing jazz historian and educator Byron recreates in spirit forgotten moments in the history of popular music with albums like Plays the Music of Mickey Katz and Bug Music. He has held professorships at Metropolitan State University of Denver, The University at Albany and MIT teaching composition, improvisation, music history, clarinet, and saxophone.
In 2001, Byron performed for the Red Hot Organization’s compilation album Red Hot + Indigo tribute to Duke Ellington, was named a 2007 USA Prudential Fellow and won a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has won the Rome Prize Fellowship and his Seven Etudes for solo piano made him a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Musical Composition.
Byron is a member of the Black Rock Coalition, has recorded with Allen Toussaint, Marc Ribot, Vernon Reid, Bill Frisell, Joe Henry, Hamiet Bluiett, Craig Harris, Mandy Patinkin, Ralph Peterson, Reggie Workman, David Murray, Steve Coleman, Bobby Previs, Anthony Braxton, Marilyn Crispell, Cassandra Wilson, Uri Caine and many others.
Composer and multi-instrumentalist Don Byron, who plays primarily clarinet, bass clarinet and saxophones, continues to perform, tour, record and educate, while venturing outside his jazz roots and into klezmer music, German lieder, cartoon jazz, hard rock/metal and rap.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Lester William DeMerle was born on November 4, 1946 in Brooklyn , New York and studied drums and percussion from 1960 to 1965 with Bob Livngstone in New York, then music theory and harmony with Alf Clausen . At 16 he was jamming with Lionel Hampton and in 1966 he played with the Lee Castle led Dorsey band.
1967 found Les with Randy Brecker and Arnie Lawrence in the first band formation called Sound 67. By the late 1960s he joined with Joe Farrell and Lee Konitz in New York. By 1971 Les was moving to Los Angeles,California where he founded the band Transfusion, that became the house band at the Cellar Theatre. He also played with Michael Brecker, Eric Marienthal, David Benoit and Raul De Souza. In 1974 he joined Harry James at the Newport Jazz Festival and stayed for 12 years.
He recorded with the Heath Brothers on the album Smilin’ Billy Suite / A Day in the Life in 1976 on the Strata-East label, worked with Bunk Gardner and in the 1980s he worked on albums with his wife Bonnie Eisele. DeMerle has led big bands and made a series of albums on the Origin label including a tribute album to the classic Blue Note Records, Hittin’ the Blue Notes.
Les DeMerle is one of the few drummers who sings. He has accompanied Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Tony Bennett, Sarah Vaughan, Mel Tormé and Eddie Jefferson. He continues to perform, record and tour.
Dose A Day-Blues Away