Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Jacqueline Caryl Dankworth was born on February 5, 1963 in Northampton, Northamptonshire, England to jazz singer Cleo Laine and saxophonist John Dankworth. She attended St. Christopher School in Hertfordshire and is an alumna and fellow of Guildhall School of Music & Drama.
She worked as an actress with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal National Theatre, and in West End theatre. She played Cinderella in the musical Into the Woods and appeared in the film Shoreditch, singing the song My Man by Billie Holiday.
2003 saw Dankworth releasing her debut album As the Sun Shines Down On Me on Candid Records. This album brought her to the attention of Michael Parkinson and BBC Radio 2, and she appeared regularly on air throughout that year.
She was featured on Courtney Pine’s album Devotion, and performed with him at the Royal Festival Hall as part of the London Jazz Festival. Her sophomore album with the 2004 release, Detour Ahead. Since then she has recorded a total of seven albums.
She was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2019 Birthday Honours for services to music. Vocalist Jacqui Dankworth continues to perform, tour and record.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Cindy Scott was born in Tupelo, Mississippi on February 3, 1966 into an extended family of musicians and educators. Her mother was a concert pianist, and her father played fifteen instruments and they were both band directors. She has two sisters who are musicians and educators, and her cousin, guitarist and teacher Charlie Hall founded the Black Rose Acoustic Society in Colorado Springs and Colorado Roots Music Camp.
She received a music scholarship by Louisiana State University and played flute and piccolo in the wind ensemble while earning a degree in German. She later earned a Masters in International Business from the University of South Carolina. Scott embarked on a corporate career while continuing to perform and study music. 2005 saw Cindy dedicating herself fully to her musical pursuits and enrolled in the Jazz Studies program at the University of New Orleans.
Although Scott spent many years working in the corporate world, she always had one foot in the music world as a performer, bandleader, and student of the music. She recorded her first album Major to Minor in Houston, Texas in 2001 and released it the following year. She would go on to record a total of albums as a leader, eight as a sideperson and has produced two albums to date.
Cindy has held the position of Associate Professor of Music at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts since 2016 and is also the Director of Berklee’s Vocal Summit.
Vocalist Cindy Scott, who also plays the guitar and flute, continues to teach at camps and workshops around the world in addition to her performing and touring.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Gene Lake was born Oliver Gene Lake, Jr. on January 12, 1966 in St. Louis, Missouri. He began playing drums when he was five years old, and took lessons with Pheeroan akLaff as a high schooler at The High School of Music & Art in New York City. He attended Berklee College of Music, where he worked with Tommy Campbell, and played in local Boston bands in a variety of styles.
Gene played with his father in New York City in 1987 and 1988, then joined Henry Threadgill’s ensemble in 1990. Later in the Nineties, Gene worked with Steve Coleman, Lunar Crush with David Fiuczynski and John Medeski, Marcus Miller, Brandon Ross, David Sanborn, the World Saxophone Quartet, and Joe Zawinul.
He has recorded seven albums as a leader that includes The Oliver Lake Quartet, Dedication, and At This Time and another ten as a sideman. Outside of jazz, Lake also performed and recorded with R&B musicians Maxwell and Me’Shell Ndegeocello.
Drummer Gene Lake, who is the son of saxophonist Oliver Lake, continues to perform and record.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Sonya Jason was born on January 10, 1963 in Wayne, Nebraska. By the age of four, she began playing piano and took classical piano lessons for nine years. Joining the school band at age ten she took up the saxophone. At thirteen she joined her first jazz band where she learned the rudiments of swing, the basic ability that all jazz musicians must possess.
Her family’s move to the Southwest enabled Sonya to join the Apollo High School band in Phoenix, Arizona, then voted Arizona’s leading jazz band. It was here that she first heard the passionate recordings of Latin saxophonist Gato Barbieri, and began studying the bebop stylings of Charlie Parker, gaining further inspiration from the saxophone work of Phil Woods and David Sanborn.
She won the Phil Woods Scholarship offered by Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. Two years of liberal arts study at Mills College in Oakland California and private lessons with bebopper Hal Stein led to her move to Boston. While at Berklee she studied privately with saxophonists Joe Viola, Jimmy Mosher, George Garzone and Herman Johnson. She honed her arranging skills with Herb Pomeroy and Grammy award-winning arranger Robert Freedman. After graduating summa cum laude from Berklee in 1985, Sonya returned to Arizona to begin her professional career.
Gigging all over Arizona she gained versatility working with bands of varied styles, jazz, latin, top 40, reggae, rock, classical, big band swing, and show bands. In 1987 she formed a quartet that performed as opening act for Natalie Cole, Richard Marx, Chuck Berry, Ramsey Lewis, Janis Siegel, Smokey Robinson, Spyro Gyra, Lionel Hampton, Mose Allison and the Stanley Clarke/George Duke Project, to name a few..
In 1988 she released her debut recording Secret Lover on her Saja Productions label. in December 1988. In 1991 she moved to Los Angeles, California and signed with Warner Music Discovery and two years later her second release Tigress.
In addition, Sonya appeared in the Showtime movie, Lush Life, starring Jeff Goldblum and Forest Whitaker, and was featured in two cable music specials, Music and the Biz and Hurry Up and Wait.
Relocating to the San Francisco, California Bay Area in 1999. Since moving she has recorded a few albums, served as musical director and arranger for theCoastal Theatre Conservatory’s presentation of Cinderella with over a hundred youth of all ages, and was band director and orchestrator of This Side Of The Hill Players.
First-call saxophonist Sonya Jason carries on a thriving music teaching studio, continues to perform as a soloist for several bands and orchestras, tour and record.
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Jazz Poems
IN PRAISE OF BUDDY BOLDEN
- You have shown me dissipation, the tome, the rhythm, and cool sonorous blue…
- The right consciousness is always dream, it wakes in us ideology and topos.
- Not only the blues like melic, like persimmon and soda.
- Not anything, just blonde sorrow.
- I can’t wait to choose my own fall, the bass and pica.
- Did you taste the drug, the white words of sound…
- Nothing will prepare me, not even drums and delusion. I wander in their halls, their tantrums. But mine was apparatus and rebellion. The plumb edifice of transgression.
- When we play, nothing else matters, not the placards on the train, not the yet and the how. We find plums and pendulums.
- I told them that this was not enough. No horses, no shoulders, no fields to drown, only blankcotton testimony and confession.
- When we leave, we leave the pipe and parts of the body. You whistle like a factory. Me, like an empty room.
- I would like to test myself, and remove these old tunings and feathers, these tulips.
- Do it then. Leave for the salty tincture of the city, the North.
- The leaves were all cankered when I returned. Like a salvo I burned. Not for them. Not for this place. But for this rotten reflection. The only true rejection of process.
- You meant to leave the phonetic terror of the moon, the New Orleans horn of sand and distraction.
- Leave me to fall. For this is all that I know. I accept, I accept this black stone of mine, mine own three lives, my crime.
LUCIEN QUINCY
from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
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