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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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

John Wallace Carter was born on September 24, 1929 in Fort Worth, Texas and attended I.M. Terrell High School. He played music with schoolmates Ornette Coleman and Charles Moffett in the 1940s.

From 1961, he was based mainly on the West Coast, where he met Bobby Bradford in 1965 and went on to work together on a number of projects, most notably the New Jazz Art Ensemble. He also played with Hampton Hawes and Harold Land. In the Seventies he became well known for his extraordinary solo concerts.

At New Jazz Festival Moers 1979 he and the German clarinetist Theo Jörgensmann performed for three days. This catapulted him to garnering wide recognition from around the world. He and Jörgensmann met again in 1984. The program of the Berlin Jazz Fest was built around the clarinet and after Carter’s solo performance, he and Jörgensmann also played together.

Between 1982 and 1990 Carter composed and recorded Roots and Folklore: Episodes in the Development of American Folk Music, five albums focused on African Americans and their history. The complete set was acclaimed by jazz critics as containing some of the best releases of the 1980s.

A clarinet quartet with Perry Robinson, Jörgensmann and Eckard Koltermann was planned for 1991, but Carter did not recover from a nonmalignant tumor. Later that same year he was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame.

He recorded fourteen albums as a leader on the Black Saint, Flying Dutchman, Revelation, Dark Tree, Emanem, and Gramavision record labels. As a sideman he recorded with Horace Tapscott,  Vinny Golia, and the Clarinet Summit. Clarinetist, saxophonist and flutist John Carter passed away on March 31, 1991.

Dose A Day-Blues Away

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Charles Edward Haden was born on August 6, 1937 in Shenandoah, Iowa into a musical family who performed on the Haden Family radio show. He made his professional debut as a singer on the radio show when he was just two years old. He continued singing with his family until he was 15 but a bulbar form of polio affecting his throat and facial muscles sidelined him but a year earlier he had become interested in jazz after hearing Charlie Parker and Stan Kenton in concert.

Recovering from his bout with polio, Charlie began concentrating on the bass and soon set his sights on moving to Los Angeles, California to pursue his dream of becoming a jazz musician and in 1957 he realized his dream turning down a full scholarship at Oberlin College, which had no established jazz program at the time and attended Westlake College of Music.] His first recordings were made that year with Paul Bley, with whom he worked until 1959. He also played with Art Pepper for four weeks in 1957, and from 1958 to 1959, with Hampton Hawes whom he met through his friendship with bassist Red Mitchell and for a time shared an apartment with the bassist Scott LaFaro.

In May 1959, he recorded his first album with the Ornette Coleman Quartet, the seminal The Shape of Jazz to Come. Later that year, the Ornette Coleman Quartet moved to New York City, secured a six-week residency at the Five Spot Café that would represent the beginnings of free or avant-garde jazz.

By 1960, Haden’s narcotics addiction forced him to leave Coleman’s band, go into rehabilitation in 1963 in California, met his first wife and moved to the  Upper West Side of New York City. He resumed his career in 1964, working with John Handy, Denny Zeitlin’s trio, performed with Archie Shepp in California and Europe and freelanced with Henry “Red” Allen, Pee Wee Russell, Attila Zoller, Bobby Timmons, Tony Scott, the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, Roswell Rudd, and returned to Ornette Coleman’s group in 1967.

Charlie went on to work with Keith Jarrett’s trio and his American Quartet, organized the collective Old and New Dreams, which consisted of Don Cherry, Dewey Redman, and Ed Blackwell from Coleman’s band. He founded his first band, the Liberation Music Orchestra at the height of the Vietnam War, working with arranger Carla Bley, exploring free jazz and political music. The original lineup consisted of Haden and Bley and Gato Barbieri, Dewey Redman, Paul Motian, Don Cherry, Andrew Cyrille, Mike Mantler, Roswell Rudd, Bob Northern, Howard Johnson and Sam Brown. 

Over the course of his half-century career he established the Jazz Studies Program at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, been honored as Jazz Educator of the Year and  as a leader has won several Grammy Awards, recorded forty-six albums as well as 134 albums as a sideman with Geri Allen, Ray Anderson, Ginger Baker, Bill Frisell, Kenny Barron, Beck, Paul Bley, Jane Ira Bloom,  Michael Brecker, Henry Butler, Alice Coltrane, John Coltrane,  Robert Downey Jr., Dizzy Gillespie, Jim Hall, Tom Harrell, Joe Henderson, Fred Hersch, Laurence Hobgood,  Rickie Lee Jones, Lee Konitz, Brad Mehldau, David Liebman, Abbey Lincoln, Helen Merrill, Pat Metheny, Bheki Mseleku, Yoko Ono, Joe Pass, Enrico Pieranunzi, Joshua Redman, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, John Scofield, Wadada Leo Smith, Ringo Starr and Masahiko Togashi.

Double bassist, bandleader, composer, educator and NEA Jazz Master Charlie Haden, who revolutionized the harmonic concept of bass playing in jazz passed away in Los Angeles, California on July 11, 2014, at the age of 76 after suffering from effects of post-polio syndrome and complications from liver disease.

Take A Dose On The Road

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Graham Peter Hall, generally known as GP Hall, was born on July 15, 1943, and raised in Hampton Hill, London, United Kingdom, where he was schooled in classical, flamenco and jazz. As a teenager he went on to play in the Odd Lot Band and set up the Odd Lot Club as a venue for their music, which in turn attracted more established bands and players for concerts.

As he became better known, Hall went on to play at more celebrated London venues including The Roundhouse, the Middle Earth club and a residency at the 100 Club. He would back Deep Purple, The Hollies, Chris Farlowe and played with John Lee Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson and with Casey Jones & The Governors.

His musical approach broadened in the early 1970s where he spent time studying with Romani musicians and flamenco guitarist Manitas de Plata, became involved in more avant-garde work, writing, producing and performing, and became the musical director for the multi-media performance art group Welfare State International.

By 1972 GP composed and recorded The Estates on Prototype Records,  followed three years later by his sophomore project Manifestations. But around this time, his promising career fell into a fifteen-year depression due to personal trauma. It was until the Eighties that he re-emerged into the music world with his twenty-nine track Colors (Movements) a series of instrumental albums on the Kenwest label. The 90s saw the release of a solo album Imaginary Seasons on his own Imaginary Music label that was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize, followed by Figments Of Imagination in 1996 and an appearance on the Unknown Public compilation alongside guitarists Bill Frisell, Frank Zappa, John Zorn and Robert Fripp.

Into the new millennium the guitarist has continued to record new and old music  combining them with live performances, created eclectic instrumental and industrial inclined works, recorded several unreleased albums and collaborated with percussionist Justin Ash, painter Alistair Michie, Lol Coxhill, Paul Rutherford, Jeff Clyne, John Ellis and Lyn Dobson, among others.

Hall invented the musical genre known as Industrial Sound Sculptures, draws on classical, rock, jazz, flamenco, folk and blues styles and performs mainly in the free jazz and avant-garde genres, though much more melodic. He uses a variety of techniques such as slides, fingerpicking and found implements like crocodile clips, palette knives, velcro strips, an antique psaltery bow and wind-up toy to create a variety of different sounds.

Guitarist GP Hall is adept with electric and electronic playing but is also known for his particular virtuosity as an acoustic guitarist, an expert flamenco guitarist, and an accomplished classical-style player. He also plays a customized Shergold six-string bass guitar featuring a half-fretted, half-fretless fretboard and has been known to dabble in playing other instruments such as double bass, piano, soprano saxophone and varied percussion, and vocals as he continues his musical journey.

Dose A Day-Blues Away

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