Daily Dose Of Jazz…
John Josephus Hicks Jr. was born December 21, 1941 in Atlanta, Georgia, the eldest of five children. As a child he moved around the United States as his father, Rev. John Hicks Sr, took up jobs with the Methodist church. His mother was his first piano teacher after he began playing at six or seven in Los Angeles, California. He took organ lessons, sang in choirs and tried the violin and trombone. Once he learned to read music around the age of 11, he started playing the piano in church.
His development accelerated once his family moved to St. Louis, Missouri when Hicks was 14 and he settled on the piano. Attending Sumner High School and played in schoolmate Lester Bowie’s band, the Continentals, which performed in a variety of musical styles. Hicks worked summer gigs in the southern United States with blues musicians Albert King and Little Milton with the latter providing his first professional work in 1958.
He studied music in 1958 at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he shared a room with drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson. He also studied for a short time at the Berklee School of Music in Boston, Massachusetts before moving to New York in 1963.
In New York, John first accompanied singer Della Reese, then went on to play with Joe Farrell, Al Grey, Billy Mitchell, Pharoah Sanders, Jimmy Witherspoon, Kenny Dorham and Joe Henderson before joining Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in 1964. From 1965 to 1967 he worked on and off with vocalist Betty Carter, then joined Woody Herman’s big band, where he stayed until 1970, playing as well as writing arrangements for the band.
From 1972 to 1973, Hicks taught jazz history and improvisation at Southern Illinois University. From the 1970s onward he had a prolific career as a leader recording his debut in England followed by fifty-three more albums and as a sideman he recorded 300.
Towards the end of his life, he taught at New York University and The New School in New York. In 2006 John played in a big band led by Charles Tolliver, recorded his final studio album On the Wings of an Eagle.
Pianist, composer and arranger John HIcks, whose collection of papers, compositions, video and audio recordings are held by Duke University, died from internal bleeding on May 10, 2006.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Theodore G. Brown was born into a musical family on December 1, 1927 in Rochester, New York. He learned banjo and violin from his father who also taught him to read music at six, and clarinet and tenor sax from his uncle. After playing in army bands from 1945 to 1947 and then in Hollywood, California for the following year, he moved to New York City.
He worked with Lennie Tristano and fellow pupils and associates Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh for two years beginning in 1955. During that time Ted recorded a session for Vanguard, worked with Ronnie Ball, and played a date in Hollywood with Warne Marsh.
>Returning to New York City he worked extensively in clubs. Brown recorded with Konitz in 1959, and again in 1976, while leading his own group in the late Seventies. He also worked and recorded with Art Pepper and Hod O’Brien.
Cool jazz tenor saxophonist Ted Brown, who recorded as a leader or co-leader thirteen albums and as a sideman was a part of five albums with Tristano, Marsh and Konitz, is 97 years old.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
William Henry Bauer was born in New York City on November 14, 1915 and as a child he played ukulele and banjo before switching to guitar. He played with the Jerry Wald band and recorded with Carl Hoff and His Orchestra in 1941, before joining Woody Herman in 1944 as a member of the First Herd. In 1946, he played with Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden.
Working in small groups led by bassist Chubby Jackson and trombonist Bill Harris, Bauer established himself as a soloist in the bebop movement. In 1946, he began working with Lennie Tristano, enjoying a natural synergy in their style and approach. Their development of intuitive music led to the 1949 session Crosscurrents. He would go on to become a member of the NBC Tonight Show band in New York City and played in the Today Show band at the start of early television.
Continuing his pioneering guitar work in a partnership with Lee Konitz, whose avant-garde saxophone work was a perfect match for Billy’s guitar. The dialogue between the musicians crossed styles from bop and cool to the avant-garde. Their recordings have been described as “some of the most beautiful duet recordings in jazz. Duet For Saxophone and Guitar was an unusual instrument pairing which has been described as redefining the role of jazz guitar.
Bauer made one album under his own name, Plectrist, in 1956. Later, he arranged the song No One that appeared on the album Henry Golis Presents Good Music with Friends in 2007.
Guitarist Billy Bauer died of pneumonia in New York at the age of 89 on June 17, 2005.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Junior Mance was born Julian Clifford Mance, Jr. on October 10, 1928 in Evanston, Illinois. When he was five years old, he started playing piano on an upright where his father taught him to play stride piano and boogie-woogie. With his father’s permission, he had his first professional gig in Chicago, Illinois at the age of ten when his upstairs neighbor, a saxophone player, needed a replacement for a pianist who was ill.
At Roosevelt College in Chicago he signed up for music classes but discovered jazz was forbidden and left before the school year was finished. Mance first played and recorded with Gene Ammons in Chicago in 1947 while he was enrolled at Roosevelt. While on tour in Chicago, Lester Young saw him playing with Ammons and had him sit in. He ended up recording with Young for Savoy Records that year, and reunited with Ammons to record with Sonny Stitt for Prestige Records in 1950.
Drafted into the Army in 1951, two weeks before shipping out to Korea from basic training, Cannonball Adderley helped Mance score a position in the 36th Army Band at Fort Knox, Kentucky, where he remained as the company clerk. Back in Chicago after being discharged two years later, Junior immediately started working at the Bee Hive Jazz Club in Chicago. He backed Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, and Sonny Stitt among others.
Parker encouraged Mance to move to New York, and in 1954, he recorded with Dinah Washington, touring with her over the next two years and learning accompaniment technique from her arranger, Jimmy Jones. From a live session recorded in 1954 in Los Angeles, California that included him, Washington, Clifford Brown, Clark Terry, Maynard Ferguson, Herb Geller, Harold Land, Richie Powell, Keter Betts, George Morrow, and Max Roach, EmArcy released two LPs, Dinah Jams and Jam Session.
The Fifties saw Junior joining Cannonball Adderley’s first civilian band, making several recordings for EmArcy/Mercury and supported Dinah Washington on her In the Land of Hi-Fi album. He would go on torecord with Johnny Griffin, James Moody, and Wilbur Ware. Then he joined Dizzy Gillespie’s band. By the end of the decade he recorded his debut as a leader on the Verve label.
Over the course of his career he would record with Capitol and Atlantic, and Sackville record labels. He continued to record and perform during the next three decades. As an educator he taught at The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music for 23 years, counting Brad Mehldau and Larry Goldings among his students before retiring in 2011.
From 1990 to 2009 Mance was part of the all-star group called “100 Gold Fingers” which frequently toured Japan. The rotating lineup included Toshiko Akiyoshi, Monty Alexander, Geri Allen, Lynne Arriale, Kenny Barron, Joanne Brackeen, Ray Bryant, Bill Charlap, Cyrus Chestnut, Gerald Clayton, Eric Reed, and twenty-two others with bassist Bob Cranshaw and either Alan Dawson or Grady Tate on drums.
Pianist and composer Junior Mance, who suffered from Alzheimer’s and a fall, died on January 17, 2021 from a brain hemorrhage at the age of 92 in New York.Acquaint an inquisitive mind with a dose of an Evanston pianist who is in the company of musical genius around the world as a member of the jazz canon…Acquaint an inquisitive mind with a dose of an Evanston pianist who is in the company of musical genius around the world as a member of the jazz canon…Acquaint an inquisitive mind with a dose of an Evanston pianist who is in the company of musical genius around the world as a member of the jazz canon…Acquaint an inquisitive mind with a dose of an Evanston pianist who is in the company of musical genius around the world as a member of the jazz canon…
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Michel Gaudry was born on September 23, 1928 in Eu, France on 23 September 1928. He learned clarinet and piano as a child before switching to bass. Following studies at the Geneva Conservatory, he played with Michel Hausser, beginning his professional career in 1955. In the latter half of the 1950s he worked with Billie Holiday, Quentin Jackson, Carmen McRae, and Art Simmons.
In the early 1960s he was very active playing with Elek Bacsik, Kenny Clarke, Sonny Criss, Stephane Grappelli, Bud Powell, Stuff Smith, and Billy Strayhorn, as well as continuing a long time slot as a member of Jack Diéval’s group.
The Seventies he played with Gérard Badini’s group, Swing Machine, and was a regular performer at the Grande Parade du Jazz in Nice, France. In the 1980s he played with Jimmy Owens and Irvin Stokes.
In his later life, he dedicated himself to the history of World War II occupation of Normandy, France. Double bassist Michel Gaudry died on May 29, 2019 in Saint-Lô, France at the age of 90.
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