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…
Alvin Batiste was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on November 7, 1932 and learned to play the clarinet. He was the first Black student to be invited to play with the New Orleans Philharmonic on Mozart’s Concerto. His childhood friend was fellow musician Ed Blackwell and in 1956, he spent time in Los Angeles, California working with Ornette Coleman.
Batiste released five albums as a leader with his debut, Musique D’Afrique Nouvell Orleans, hitting the streets in 1984. His final album, Marsalis Music Honors Series: Alvin Batiste, was a tribute produced by Branford Marsalis and also features Russell Malone and Herlin Riley.
Alvin worked as a sideman with Cannonball Adderley, Henry Butler, Billy Cobham, Marlon Jordan, the Clarinet Summit with John Carter, David Murray and Jimmy Hamilton, Mark Whitfield, Wynton Marsalis on the latter’s Crescent City Christmas Card. Though he could have risen to the top as a performer, he chose a life of teaching and mentoring.
As an educator he taught at his own jazz institute at Southern University in Baton Rouge. In addition, several well-known musicians studied under him such as Branford Marsalis, Randy Jackson of American Idol, Donald Harrison, Henry Butler, Charlie Singleton of Cameo, Ronald Myers and Woodie Douglas of Spirit.
He went on to host the radio show Jazz Sessions on WBRH, has held workshops and clinics around the globe as well as performing in concert in West Africa, Europe and the United States. Clarinetist, composer, arranger and educator Alvin Batiste, who performed in the avant-garde genre of jazz, passed away on May 6, 2007.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Rudolph “Rudy” Van Gelder was born on November 2, 1924 in Jersey City, New Jersey. His interest in microphones and electronics can be traced to a youthful enthusiasm for amateur radio. Named for his uncle who had been the drummer in Ted Lewis’s band in the mid-1930s, he took trumpet lessons and trained as an optometrist at the Pennsylvania College of Optometry, in Philadelphia, thinking he could not earn a living as a recording engineer.
From 1943, after graduating, Van Gelder had an optometry practice in Teaneck, New Jersey, and moonlighted recording local musicians in the evenings who wanted 78-rpm recordings of their work. From 1946, Van Gelder recorded in his parents’ house in Hackensack, New Jersey, in which a control room was built adjacent to the living room, which served as the musicians’ performing area. The dry acoustics of this working space were partly responsible for Van Gelder’s inimitable recording aesthetic.
Interested in improving the quality of the playback equipment he acquired everything that could play back audio: speakers, turntables and amplifiers. One of Rudy’s friends, baritone saxophonist Gil Mellé, introduced him to Alfred Lion, a producer for Blue Note Records, in 1953. Within a few years he was in demand by many other independent labels based around New York City, such as Bob Weinstock, owner of Prestige Records. To accommodate each label – Blue Note, Prestige, Savoy, Impulse, Verve he assigned them to different days as Lion was more stringent with the sound of original music, Weinstock had essentially blowing sessions for some of the best musicians in jazz history.He also engineered and mastered for the classical label Vox Records in the Fifties.
Van Gelder worked during the day as an optometrist until the summer of 1959, when he moved his operations to a larger studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey and became a full-time recording engineer. The new studio’s design was inspired by the work of Frank Lloyd Wright had high ceilings and fine acoustics with “no food or drink and do not touch microphones” policy as he himself always wore gloves when handling equipment.
By 1967 the labels were beginning to utilize other engineers more regularly but Rudy remained active engineering nearly all of Creed Taylor’s CTI Records releases, a series of proto-smooth jazz albums that were financially successful, but not always well received by critics. He was not without his detractors. Despite his prominence in the industry, like Lion who didn’t care for the overuse of reverb, and Charles Mingus refused to work with him because he change the sound of his bass. He remastered the analog Blue Note recordings into 24-bit digital recordings in its RVG Edition series and also remasters of some of the Prestige albums, and was happy to see the LP go by the wayside because it was hard for him to get the sound the way he thought it should be.
He received awards and honors being named a fellow of the Audio Engineering Society (AES), received the society’s most prestigious award, the AES Gold Medal, named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts, received the Grammy Trustees Award, and Thelonious Monk composed and recorded a tribute to Van Gelder titled Hackensack.
Producer and recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder, who specialized in jazz and regarded as the most important recording engineer of jazz by some observers, passed away at home in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey on August 25, 2016. Among the several thousand jazz sessions he recorded are the acknowledged classics John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, Miles Davis’s Walkin’, Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage, Sonny Rollins’s Saxophone Colossus and Horace Silver’s Song for My Father.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz..
Jay Clayton was born on October 28, 1941, in Youngstown, Ohio as Judith Colantone and after studying at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio she ventured to New York City and took lessons from Steve Lacy. Together with her husband, percussionist Frank Clayton, she presented Jazz at the Loft in their home around 1967. Among the featured musicians Sam Rivers, Cecil McBee, Joanne Brackeen, Dave Liebman, Larry Karush, Pete Yellin, Hal Galper, Jeanne Lee, Bob Moses, Junie Booth, John Gilmore, and Jane Getz.
Earning her own reputation as an avant-garde singer, Jay developed her personal wordless vocabulary. Her pioneering vocal explorations placed her at the forefront of the free jazz movement and loft scene in the 1970s, where she counted among the first singers to incorporate poetry and electronics into her improvisations. She performed and recorded with Muhal Richard Abrams, John Fischer’s Interface, Byron Morris’s Unity and for a long time she was a member of the Steve Reich ensemble. She was one of the first singers to record composer John Cage’s vocal music.
Clayton’s own performance dates appear under the heading the Jay Clayton Project, while she titles her work with other esteemed vocalists Different Voices. She co-leads a trio, Outskirts, with drummer Jerry Granelli and saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom. She has more than 40 recordings to her credit, Clayton has appeared alongside Bud Shank, Charlie Haden, Kirk Nurock, Stanley Cowell, Lee Konitz, Julian Priester, George Cables, Gary Bartz, Gary Peacock, Fred Hersch, Jeanne Lee, Lauren Newton, Urszula Dudziak, and Bobby McFerrin.
As an educator, in 1971 Jay began leading her own workshops, partly together with Michelle Berne and Jeanne Lee. By 1981 onwards she taught at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington for 20 years. In addition to that tenure, she taught for several semesters at New York’s City College, at Graz in Austria, Berlin, Cologne and Munich. She developed the vocal program for the Banff Center in Canada, which she co-taught with fellow vocalist Sheila Jordan. The two are also teaching together at Vermont Jazz Workshop and at Jazz in July at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has taught masterclasses to the Manhattan School of Music and the Peabody Conservatory.
In 2001 her book, Sing Your Story: A Practical Guide for Learning and Teaching the Art of Jazz Singing, was published. She was the first artistic director for the first ever Women in Jazz Festival, served as a consultant for ABC Cable’s Women in Jazz, and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet the Composer, and Chamber Music America. Vocalist Jay Clayton continues to perform, record and tour.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Bert Wilson was born on October 15, 1939 in Evansville, Indiana and contracted polio from a public swimming pool at age 4, and for the rest of his life was in a wheelchair. When he was 10, he heard the music of Charlie Parker in a Chicago hospital school, an experience he often said affected his life far more than the disease.
After graduating from high school Wilson moved to Los Angeles, California where he became interested in the avant-garde “free jazz” of Ornette Coleman. In 1966 he moved to New York, where he lived alone on the sixth floor of a building with no elevator. In New York City and Los Angeles he recorded with fiery alto saxophonist Sonny Simmons, drummers James Zitro and Smiley Winters and trumpeter Barbara Donald.
As an educator some of his students over the years have included the Dave Matthews Band’s Jeff Coffin, Los Angeles ace Ernie Watts, Tower of Power member Lenny Pickett and Latin percussionist Michael Olson. It was Olson in 1979, who along with keyboardist Michael Moore, of the band Obrador, learned that Wilson was living alone and miserable in Woodstock, New York and threw a benefit concert to move him to Olympia, Washington.
From that time forward, Bert was an active participant in the Northwest jazz scene, performing at the Earshot Jazz Festival and other major events, as well as, performing weekly with saxophonist Chuck Stentz at the Water Street Cafe.
On June 6, 2013 tenor saxophonist Bert Wilson, who did things on the saxophone that nobody else could do, passed away of a heart attack at age 73 in Olympia, Washington. He left behind many recordings as a sideman and as a leader of his own band, Rebirth.
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