Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Sadao Watanabe was born on February 1, 1933 in Utsunomiya, Japan and first began learning music at the age of 18. He started performing professionally in 1953. By 1958 he had established himself as a world-class saxophonist having performed with leading musicians and quartets. In 1962 he left Japan to study at Berklee College of Music in Boston.
Known for his bossa nova recordings, Sadao’s work encompasses a large range of styles with collaborations from musicians all over the world. Of his 72 albums to date, he has had 13 albums reach the top 50 Billboard charts and two within the Top 10. He has also had numerous albums reach number one on the jazz charts.
Watanabe has been awarded the Order of the Rising Sun – the imperial medal of honor, the Fumio Nanri Award, and an honorary Doctorate Degree from Berklee College of Music.
In addition to his musical career, alto and soprano saxophonist and flutist Sadao Watanabe is also a published photographer with six books to his credit in Japan. He is also a U.S. citizen sharing his time between his homeland and Los Angeles, California as he continues to perform, record and tour.
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Daily Dose OF Jazz…
Clare Fischer was born October 22, 1928 in Durand, Michigan and started general music study in grade school with violin and piano as his first instruments. By age 7 he was picking out four-part harmony on the piano and by 12 was composing classical music and creating instrumental arrangements for dance bands.
In high school he added cello, clarinet and saxophone to his arsenal of instruments and studied music theory, harmony and orchestration privately. He started his own band at 15, writing all the arrangements, went on to college studying music composition and theory as a piano major. After graduation and a stint in the Army as the arranger for the U.S. Military Academy Band at West Point, N.Y., he returned to Michigan State and received his Masters in 1955.
He went on to arrange for the vocal quartet Hi-Lo’s that would later become a major influence on Herbie Hancock, would record under his own name in 1962 for Pacific Jazz, play with Bud Shank, Joe Pass and Cal Tjader among others, arrange for Sergio Mendes and Willy Ruff, began playing organ and composed his most famous compositions, Pensativa and Morning.
By the mid-‘70s Fischer was pioneering the electric keyboard, reconnected with Tjader started his group Salsa Picante, won a Grammy for his album 2+2 and Free Fall, forayed into R&B doing orchestral sweeteners, worked with Rufus with Chaka Khan, The Jacksons, Earl Klugh, The Debarges, Shot-gun and Atlantic Starr and pop artists such as Paul McCartney, Prince, Celine Dion and Robert Palmer, picking up numerous gold records.
From the Eighties on Clare has been commissioned to score symphonic work using Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn themes, working with Branford Marsalis, the Netherlands Metropole Orchestra, arranged for Spike Lee’s Girl 6, has conducted clinics and master classes at numerous universities, and continued to record in small group and orchestral settings until his death in Los Angeles, California on January 26, 2012 at age 82..
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Hubert Laws was born November 10, 1939 in the Studewood section of Houston, Texas, the second of eight children. He grew up across the street from a honky-tonk called Miss Mary’s Place where his grandfather played harmonica and his mother, a pianist, played gospel music. He began playing flute in high school after volunteering to substitute for the school orchestra’s regular flutist. Becoming adept at jazz improvisation he played in the Houston-area jazz group the Swingsters, which eventually evolved into the Modern Jazz Sextet, the Night Hawks, and The Crusaders. At age 15, he was a member of the early Jazz Crusaders while in Texas from 1954–60. Multi-talented, he also played classical music during those years.
A scholarship to Juilliard School of Music in 1960 saw him studying music in the classroom and with master flutist Julius Baker. Laws went on to play with both the New York Metropolitan Opera Orchestra (member) and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra during the years 1969–72. In 971 he recorded renditions of classical compositions by Fauré, Stravinsky, Debussy, and Bach on the CTI album Rite of Spring with strings and enlisted the talents of Airto Moreira, Jack DeJohnette, Bob James, and Ron Carter.
During his years at Juilliard he played flute with Mongo Santamaría and began recording as a bandleader for Atlantic in 1964, releasing the albums The Laws of Jazz, Flute By-Laws, and Laws Cause. He has worked with In the Seventies he can also be heard playing tenor saxophone on some recordings.
The 1980’s saw the minor hit Family on CBS Records getting played on many UK soul radio stations. In the 1990s Hubert resumed his career, recording with opera singers Kathleen Battle and Jessye Norman. His albums on the Music Masters Jazz label—My Time Will Come in 1990 and Storm Then Calm in 1994 show a return to his old form of his early 1970s albums.
Over the course of his career he also recorded with Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, Nancy Wilson, Quincy Jones, Paul McCartney, Paul Simon, Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Lena Horne, Leonard Bernstein, James Moody, Jaco Pastorius, Sérgio Mendes, Bob James, Carly Simon, George Benson, Clark Terry, Stevie Wonder, J. J. Johnson, The Rascals, Morcheeba Ashford & Simpson, Chet Baker, George Benson, Moondog, his brother Ronnie, Gil Scott-Heron, among others, and was a member of the New York Jazz Quartet. .
Laws has been honored with the Lifetime Achievement Awards from the National Flute Association and the National Endowment for the Arts in the field of jazz, as well as a recipient of the NEA Jazz Masters Award and three Grammy nominations. Flautist and tenor saxophonist Hubert Laws continues to compose, record and perform.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Luiz Floriano Bonfá was born on October 17, 1922 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He studied weekly with Uruguayan classical guitarist Isaías Sávio from the age of 11, spending five hours traveling to and from the guitarist’s Santa Teresa home. However his extraordinary dedication and talent for the guitar, Sávio excused the youngster’s inability to pay for his lessons.
Bonfá first gained widespread exposure in Brazil in 1947 when he was featured on Rio’s Rádio Nacional. He was a member of the vocal group Quitandinha Serenaders in the late Forties. As a composer his first compositions such as Ranchinho de Palha and O Vento Não Sabe were recorded and performed by Brazilian crooner Dick Farney in the 1950s. His first hit song was De Cigarro em Cigarro, recorded by Nora Ney in 1957.
Farney introduced Luiz to Antônio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes, the leading songwriting team behind the worldwide explosion of Brazilian jazz/pop music in the late 1950s and 1960s. He collaborated with them and with other prominent Brazilian musicians and artists in productions of de Moraes’ anthological play Orfeu da Conceição, which several years later gave origin to Marcel Camus’ film Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro).
Bonfá wrote some of the original music featured in the film, including the numbers “Samba de Orfeu” and his most famous composition, “Manhã de Carnaval” (of which Carl Sigman later wrote a different set of English lyrics titled “A Day in the Life of a Fool”), which has been among the top ten standards played worldwide.
As a composer and performer, he was at heart an exponent of the bold, lyrical, lushly orchestrated, and emotionally charged samba-canção style that predated the arrival of João Gilberto’s more refined and subdued bossa nova style. Bonfá became a highly visible ambassador of Brazilian music in the United States beginning with the famous November 1962 Bossa Nova concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall.
Luiz worked with Quincy Jones, George Benson, Stan Getz, and Frank Sinatra, and Elvis Presley sang his composition Almost in Love with lyrics by Randy Starr in the 1968 MGM film Live a Little, Love a Little. His composition The Gentle Rain with lyrics by Matt Dubey, and Sambolero have been recorded by numerous jazz musicians of the decades.
Guitarist and composer Luiz Bonfá, who played in a polyphonic style, harmonizing melody lines in a manner similar to that made famous by Wes Montgomery, passed away at 78 in Rio de Janeiro on January 12, 2001.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Lalo Schifrin was born Boris Claudio Schifrin in Buenos Aires, Argentina on June 21, 1932. At the age of six he began a six-year course of study on piano with Enrique Barenboim and at 16 studied piano with Andreas Karalis and harmony with Argentine composer Juan Carlos Paz. By twenty he was attending the Paris Conservatoire during the day and playing at night in jazz clubs.
1955 saw Lalo playing with Astor Piazzolla and on stage at the International Jazz Festival in Paris. Back in Argentina he formed a jazz orchestra, met Dizzy in ’58 and wrote Gillespiana for his big band. He would go on to work with Xavier Cugat, move to New York, take the piano chair in Dizzy’s quintet and wrote a second extended composition titled, The New Continent.
The Sixties had MGM signing Schifrin to his first movie score, he moved to Hollywood, changed The Man from U.N.C.L.E. to a jazz melody and won an Emmy for the theme. He would go on to score television and movies like Mission Impossible, Mannix, Cool Hand Luke, Dirty Harry, The Exorcist, Bullitt and even ABC’s Eyewitness News.
Over the course of his career Lalo Schifrin has recorded over 50 albums and soundtracks, 90 television and film scores as a leader, composer and conductor; and has worked with Cannonball Adderley, Eddie Harris, Count Basie, Luiz Bonfa, Candido Camera, Louis Bellson, Al Hirt, Jimmy Smith, Sarah Vaughan, Cal Tjader, Paul Horn and many others.
In 1997, the composer founded Aleph Records; played an orchestra conductor in Red Dragon, has had his music sampled by hip-hop artists, has been nominated twenty-one times and won four Grammy Awards, one Cable Ace Award, received six Oscar nominations and has a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame. He continues to compose, conduct and perform.
