Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Sergio Lara was born on May 21, 1959 in Mexico City, Mexico and started playing guitar at age nine. Very early he discovered and began studying several musical styles with his greatest influences being John McLaughlin, Jorge Strunz, Paco de Lucia, Tony Rice, Norman Blake, Sam Bush and David Grisman, among others.
Lara appeared on the international music scene in 1983 with the release of his first solo album titled Sergiology. During the following years he formed his own band, New Acoustic Unit, in Nashville, Tennessee and San Antonio, Texas. In 1994 he released a sophomore album Guitarras Hermanas, the first one for Higher Octave Music. This album of all original music, also included a new instrumental version of the very popular and romantic song Sabor a Mi.
1996 saw Sergio releasing his next product titled Two Guitars-One Passion, which received worldwide attention because of its original combination of different musical styles. Throughout the balance of the 1990s he recorded two more albums with instrumental versions of classic songs and his original compositions.
Omn the new millennium he continued to record albums for his new independent label Fusion Acustica Music. With a career that covers many years and more than ten albums under his name, he has shared the stage with Al Di Meola, Larry Carlton, Bireli Lagrene, Dr. John, Craig Chaquico, Joe Sample, Strunz & Farah, Bela Fleck, Sam Bush, Paquito D’Rivera, Julio Iglesias and Ray Charles.
Guitarist Sergio Lara continues to explore new possibilities inside the world of contemporary instrumental music and sharing improvisation.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Hanna Richardson was born on May 16,1956 in Alexandria, Virginia and as the daughter of a foreign service officer, much of her childhood was spent overseas. At the age of seven, while living in South America, she began piano lessons and also sang at home with the family. 1965 saw her father retiring to Geneva, New York where she met bass player Phil Flanigan while in high school.
College saw her singing professionally, first rock and folk music, then hearing an Ella Fitzgerald record she turned to singing jazz. However, it was the singing style of Maxine Sullivan that was to have the greatest impact upon her. After college, Richardson moved to Rochester, New York and continued to pursue her interest in both folk music and jazz and she also taught herself to play the mandolin.
A move to Syracuse, New York had her working at Syracuse University and becoming Assistant Dean in the School of Management. She sang professionally during this period as a session back-up singer. Connecting again with Flanigan who had toured and recorded with Sullivan, and began singing with him. They married and recorded their debut album, Something To Remember You By, in 2002.
Vocalist Hanna Richardson, who has released a half dozen albums, continues to regionally perform, record and educate.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Randy Sutin was born on May 14, 1958 in Great Falls, Montana where he studied piano starting at age four and guitar when he turned eight. By the time he was ten he began study of the drums. He began playing mostly rock and some country professionally with local groups at age thirteen. At 20, he began to study mallet percussion, in particular the vibraphone, which became the main staple of his professional life as a musician.
In 1985, Randy relocated to Trenton, New Jersey, then to the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area four years later. He was a regular member of the Bill Hollis Quartet and soon began working regularly and recording with the Barry Sames Jazz Ensemble. A regular member of the late pianist Eddie Green’s group, he was featured on Eddie’s last recording, Shades of Green. He has also played and recorded with Walter Bell and the Latin Jazz Unit.
Over the last fifteen years, Sutin has continued playing as a regular member of the Barry Sames Jazz Ensemble, which does jazz arrangements of Christian music. He is featured as a soloist on both of Barry Sames’ recordings, Awaiting the Spirit and Celebration. This association with playing jazz for spiritual purposes and a desire to do a project with his wife, Marianne, who is an experienced yogi, led to his latest musical endeavor.
In 2007 they released Meditations for Percussion and Flute, a suite of compositions based on yoga practice blending a mixture of styles, but always falling back to jazz as its core. Together they created their record label, Balanced American Music. Recent work has focused on The Birdhouse Project, a trio with Jim Miller and Tyrone Brown, performing the compositions of Charlie Parker.
His most current project is with The Tyrone Brown String Ensemble. Randy is featured on both of their 2008 releases, The Magic Within and Moon of the Falling Leaves.
Vibraphonist Randy Sutin, who also plays marimba, continues to perform and record.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Steve Holt was born on May 9, 1954 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and exhibited musical ability in early childhood, playing piano at the age of four. By the time he was a teenager he was a regular on the Montreal club scene.
He was self-taught until he entered McGill University where he was taught by pianist Armas Maiste, whose bebop playing influenced him. Becoming a student of Kenny Barron he regularly traveled to New York City for private lessons. Holt graduated from McGill in 1981 with that university’s first Bachelor of Music major in Jazz Performance, and went on to teach jazz improvisation there.
His 1983 debut album, The Lion’s Eyes, was nominated for a Juno Award. He has worked with jazz musicians Larry Coryell, Eddie Henderson, and Archie Shepp. He moved to Toronto, Canada in 1987 and worked as an equity analyst and for a while Steve continued playing clubs at night.
In the Nineties he released three albums then decided to concentrate on music full-time. Three years later, his fifth album, The Dream, was released. Moving into music production he stopped performing jazz live until 2014. Following a move to the countryside, his interest in jazz performance returned.
In 2017, he opened a health food store in Warkworth, Ontario, Canada that operates as a jazz venue once a week. After a twenty year absence from the recording field, pianist Steve Holt released Impact, his new album in 2025 under the new band, The Steve Holt Jazz Impact Quintet.
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Jazz Poems
POEM IN WHICH I MAKE THE MISTAKE
OF COMPARING BILLIE HOLIDAY TO A
COSMIC WASHERWOMAN
We were driving back from the record store at the mall
when Terrance told me that Billie Holiday
was not a symbol for the black soul.
He said, The night is not African American either for
your information,
it is just goddamn dark,
and in the background
she was singing a song I never heard before
moving her voice like water moving
along the shore of a lake
reaching gently into the crevices, touching the pebbles
and sand.
Once through the dirty window of a train
on the outskirts of Hoboken, New Jersey,
I swear I saw a sonnet written high up in a
concrete wall,
rhymed quatrains rising from the
dyslexic alphabet of gang signs and obscenities
and Terrance said he saw a fresco
of brown and white angels flying
on a boarded-up building in Chinatown
and everybody knows
there’s a teenager genius somewhere out there,
a firebrand out of Ghana by way of Alabama,
this very minute in a warehouse loft,
rewriting Moby-Dick-The Story of the Great
Black Whale
When he burst out of the womb
of his American youth
with his dictionary and his hip-hop shovel,
when he takes his place on stage
dripping the amniotic fluid of history,
he won’t be any color we ever saw before,
and I know he’s right, Terrance is right, it’s
so obvious
But here in the past of that future,
Billie Holiday is still singing
a song so dark and slow
it seems bigger than her, it sounds very heavy
like a terrible stain soaked into the sheets,
so deep that nothing will ever get it out,
but she keeps trying,
she keeps pushing the dark syllables under the water
then pulling them up to see if they are clean
but they never are
and it makes her sad
and we are too
and it’s dark around the car and inside also is very
dark
Terrance and I can barely see each other
in the dashboard glow.
I can only imagine him right now
pointing at the radio
as if to say, Shut up and listen.
TONY HOAGLAND | 1953~2018
from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
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