Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Fred Anderson was born in Monroe, Louisiana on March 22, 1929. When he was ten, his parents separated, and he moved to Evanston, Illinois, where he initially lived with his mother and aunt in a one-room apartment. When Anderson was a teenager, a friend introduced him to the music of Charlie Parker, and he soon decided he wanted to play saxophone, purchasing his first instrument for $45. He listened to Lester Young, Johnny Hodges, Dexter Gordon, Gene Ammons, and Illinois Jacquet, all of whom would influence his playing. He also heard Young and Parker in concert on multiple occasions.
Unlike many musicians at the time, Anderson did not play with dance bands or school ensembles, and instead focused on practicing, taking private lessons, and studying music theory at the Roy Knapp Conservatory in Chicago, Illinois all the while supporting his family by working as a waiter. He also began making an effort to develop a personal sound on his instrument, with the goal of combining Ammons’ big sound with Parker’s speed.
At around this time, he began to develop a series of exercises which he incorporated into his daily practice routine, and which eventually became a book titled Exercises for the Creative Musician.
In the early 1960s, Anderson began listening to and studying the music of Ornette Coleman, and immediately related Coleman’s playing to that of Charlie Parker. Influenced by Coleman, he formed a piano-less band with trumpeter Bill Brimfield, bassist Bill Fletcher, and drummer Vernon Thomas, playing a mixture of bebop standards and Anderson originals. During the decade he would go on to play weekly jam sessions, joined the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) and remained in the States when many of his AACM colleagues left for Europe seeking better opportuities.
In the Seventies he formed the Fred Anderson Sextet, with trombonist George E. Lewis, reedist Douglas Ewart, bassist Felix Blackmon, drummer Hamid Drake, and vocalist Iqua Colson. By 1977 he and Brimfield visited Europe, where they recorded Accents with the Austrian trio Neighbours, then returned and opened a venue in Chicago that he named the Birdhouse, after Charlie Parker. Unfortunately, Anderson encountered resistance and harassment from officials and people in the neighborhood, who were suspicious of his motives, and he ended up closing the club a year later.
The following decade saw Fred taking over ownership of a bar in Chicago called the Velvet Lounge, and transformed it into a center for the city’s jazz and experimental music scenes, hosting Sunday jam sessions and numerous concerts. The club expanded and relocated in the summer of 2006.
Though he remained an active performer, Anderson rarely recorded for about a decade beginning in the early Eighties. In 1990, however, he received the first Jazz Masters Fellowship from Arts Midwest, and by the mid-1990s, he resumed a more active recording schedule, both as a solo artist, and in collaboration with younger performers. He would go on to perform as a soloist with 30 piece orchestras, mentor young musicians, and his Velvet Lounge has international fame.
Tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson, rooted in the swing, hard bop and free jazz idioms, who continued to record and tour throughout the 2000s and was scheduled to perform the day he died, transitioned on June 24, 2010.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
John Lindberg was born March 16, 1959 in Royal Oak, Michigan. He began his professional career at the age of 16, eventually moving to New York City in 1977. After moving to New York, he played with the Human Arts Ensemble alongside Joseph Bowie and Bobo Shaw. In 1977, with James Emery and Billy Bang. He co-founded the String Trio of New York.
In 1980 he formed a trio with Jimmy Lyons and Sunny Murray. From 1980 to 1983 he lived in Paris, playing there solo and with Murray and John Tchicai. He has recorded extensively as a leader. He studied bass with the bassist from the Battle Creek, Michigan symphony orchestra and jazz musician Roscoe Mitchell.
He has to date recorded twenty-five albums as a leader, eight with the String Tio of New York, and twenty with Anthony Braxton, Human Arts Ensemble, Susie Ibarra, Jimmy Lyons and Sunny Murray, Kevin Norton, Wadada Leo Smith and ten with Blob.
Double bassist John Lindberg continues to perform and record.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Butch Morris was born Lawrence Douglas Morris on February 10, 1947 in Long Beach, California. Before beginning his musical career, he served in the U.S. Army as a medic in Germany, Japan and Vietnam during the Vietnam War. He came to attention with saxophonist David Murray’s groups in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
>Morris led a group called Orchestra SLANG. The group features drummer Kenny Wollesen, alto saxophonist Jonathon Haffner, trumpeter Kirk Knuffke and others. He performed and presented regularly as part of the Festival of New Trumpet Music, held annually in New York City. He wrote most of the incidental music for the 1989 TV show, A Man Called Hawk, which starred Avery Brooks, with whom he co-wrote the theme music, along with Stanley Clarke. He also played with well-known artist and would-be drummer A.R. Penck in 1990.
The originator of Conduction (a term borrowed from physics), a type of structured free improvisation where Butch directs and conducts an improvising ensemble with a series of hand and baton gestures.
Cornetist, composer and conductor Butch Morris, known for pioneering his structural improvisation method Conduction, transitioned from lung cancer on January 29, 2013, at the age of 65 in New York City.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Wally Cirillo was born Wallace Joseph Cirillo on February 4, 1927 in Huntington, New York. He studied at the New York Conservatory of Modern Music and the Manhattan School of Music, and played with Chubby Jackson and Bill Harris in the early 1950s.
In 1954 he began working with John LaPorta, Teo Macero and Charles Mingus as part of the New York Jazz Composers Workshop. The following year, he led a session with Mingus, Macero, and Kenny Clarke, which was later reissued under Mingus’s name as Jazz Composers Workshop. The piece Transeason on this album was composed by Cirillo, makes use of serialism, one of the earliest manifestations of this compositional technique in jazz. He also recorded with LaPorta and with Johnny Mathis in the 1950s.
Cirillo relocated to Florida in 1961, where he led his own band and worked with Phil Napoleon, Flip Phillips, Ira Sullivan, and Joe Diorio. He recorded sparsely throughout his career.
Pianist and composer Wally Cirillo transitioned on May 5, 1977 in Boca Raton, Florida.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Paul F. Murphy was born on January 25, 1949 in Worcester, Massachusetts and began playing drums at a very early age and made the acquaintance of Gene Krupa at age six. He went on to study with Krupa, Louis Bellson, and Joseph Levitt, the principal percussionist of the National Symphony Orchestra and director of the Peabody Conservatory.
At age sixteen, Murphy began playing in the Washington, D.C. area with Duke Ellington’s bassist Billy Taylor, who exposed him to the music of pianist Cecil Taylor. At Taylor’s advice he moved to San Francisco, California where he established himself as a bandleader. While there, he met and befriended Cecil Taylor and Jimmy Lyons. At the suggestion of Lyons, he then moved to New York, where he managed Ali’s Alley, a club run by drummer Rashied Ali, and began playing and recording with Lyons’ groups as well as his own quintet. While in New York, Murphy immersed himself in both the experimental jazz and punk rock scenes.
Following Lyons’ untimely death in 1986, Murphy spent time playing drums in Las Vegas, Nevada before returning to San Francisco, where he formed Trio Hurricane with saxophonist Glenn Spearman and bassist William Parker. A move back to the Washington, D.C. area in 1990, and has since collaborated with pianists Joel Futterman and Larry Willis, poet Jere Carroll, and others.
Percussionist, bandleader and composer Paul Murphy, best known for leading a variety of small jazz ensembles, continues to perform and record.
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