Daily Dose Of Jazz…
John Douglas Surman was born August 30, 1944 in Tavistock, Devon, England. He initially gained recognition playing baritone saxophone in the Mike Westbrook Band in the mid-1960s, and was soon heard regularly playing soprano saxophone and bass clarinet as well.
His first playing issued on a record was with the Peter Lemer Quintet in 1966. After further recordings and performances with jazz bandleaders Westbrook and Graham Collier and blues-rock musician Alexis Korner, he made the first record under his own name in 1968.
In 1969, he founded The Trio along with two expatriate American musicians, bassist Barre Phillips and drummer Stu Martin. In the mid-1970s, he founded one of the earliest all-saxophone jazz groups, S.O.S., along with alto saxophonist Mike Osborne and tenor saxophonist Alan Skidmore.
During this early period, he also recorded with (among others) saxophonist Ronnie Scott, guitarist John McLaughlin, bandleader Michael Gibbs, trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff, and pianist Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath.
In 1972 he had begun experimenting with synthesizers. The musical relationships he established during the Seventies with pianist John Taylor, bassist Chris Laurence, and drummer John Marshall; singer Karin Krog and drummer/pianist Jack DeJohnette continued for decades.
Since the 1990s, he has composed several suites of music that feature his playing in unusual contexts, and has worked with bassist Miroslav Vitouš, bandleader Gil Evans, pianist Paul Bley and Vigleik Storaas, saxophonist and composer John Warren, guitarists Terje Rypdal and John Abercrombie and trumpeter Tomasz Stańko.
Baritone and soprano saxophonist, clarinetist, synthesizer player, and composer of free jazz and modal jazz, who continues to often use themes from folk music has also composed and performed music for dance performances and film soundtracks.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Peter Perfido‘was born on July 21, 1956 in Hartford, Connecticut. He started his drumming musical journey in the early Sixties being influenced by the British Wave of the Beatles, the Kinks, the Animals, and the Who. By the mid 70’s Peter had begun to discover jazz and improvised music. While predominantly self-taught, he studied privately with Kit McDermott, Bob Moses and Jerry Granelli. His career has involved playing jazz, improvised music, rock and blues with scores of lauded musicians from diverse styles and backgrounds.
Peter has performed and/or recorded with Chet Baker, Gary Peacock, Lee Konitz, Jimmy Woode, Bill Barron, Art Lande, Julian Priester, David Friedman, Tomasz Stanko, Sal Nistico, Kent Carter, Rasul Siddik, Bob Degen, Heinz Sauer, Bob Mover, Ed Schuller, Anthony Braxton, Joe Lee Wilson, Lou Bennett, Bobby Few, Barney Wilen, Bobby Few, Liz McComb, Michelle Hendricks, Ferenc Snetberger, Rinde Eckert, Lonnie Plaxico , Stephen Haynes, Michel Pilz, Lonnie Plaxico, and the list goes on.
He has toured across the USA, Western Canada, Europe, Asia, the USSR and the Pacific islands. Currently living in Hohrod, Alsace, France, drummer Peter Perfido performs mostly in Europe these days with groups spanning a wide spectrum of influences from mainstream modern jazz to open ended explorations with free improvisation, as well as shuffling and rocking the blues.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Edwin John Prévost was born June 22, 1942 in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, England of Huguenot heritage. Brought up by a single parent mother in war-damaged London Borough of Bermondsey. He won a state scholarship to Addey and Stanhope Grammar School, Deptford, London. Enrolled in the Boy Scouts Association’s 19th Bermondsey Troop to join the marching band and as a teenager began to get involved with the emerging youth culture music, first skiffle, then introduced to a big jazz record collection of a school friend with rich parents.
Prévost worked part-time after school, purchasing his first snare drum from the Len Hunt Drum Shop on Archer Street. Leaving school at 16, he took various clerical positions, while continuing his musical interests. Immersed in the music of bebop, his playing technique was insufficient, however, New Orleans trad jazz offered scope for his growing musical prowess.
He played in various bands mostly in the East End of London. It was during a tenure with one of these bands he met trumpeter David Ware, who shared a passion for hard-bop jazz. Together, while in their early twenties they formed a modern jazz quintet which included Lou Gare, who was a member of the Mike Westbrook Jazz Orchestra.
In 1965 AMM was co-founded by Eddie, Lou Gare, and Keith Rowe and were shortly joined by Lawrence Sheaff. All had a jazz background and were soon augmented by composer Cornelius Cardew. They stayed together until 1972 when some split and others took their place.
Over the years Prévost has conducted many improvised music workshops. However, as a result of a seminar he conducted at The Guelph Jazz Festival, Canada in 1999, Prévost began to formulate a framework for a workshop based upon a more thorough working of AMM principles and practice.
Percussionist Eddie Prévost, who has recorded twenty albums as a leader, twenty-eight with the free improvisation group AMM, and another thirty as a sideman with Derek Bailey, John Wolf Brennan, John Butcher, Cornelius Cardew, Chris Corsano, Sachiko M, Jim O’Rourke, Bruce Russell, David Sylvian, Telectu, Ken Vandermark, Alexander von Schlippenbach, Christian Wolff, Marilyn Crispell, continues to perform and record.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Steve Holt was born on May 9, 1954 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and exhibited musical ability in early childhood, playing piano at the age of four. By the time he was a teenager he was a regular on the Montreal club scene.
He was self-taught until he entered McGill University where he was taught by pianist Armas Maiste, whose bebop playing influenced him. Becoming a student of Kenny Barron he regularly traveled to New York City for private lessons. Holt graduated from McGill in 1981 with that university’s first Bachelor of Music major in Jazz Performance, and went on to teach jazz improvisation there.
His 1983 debut album, The Lion’s Eyes, was nominated for a Juno Award. He has worked with jazz musicians Larry Coryell, Eddie Henderson, and Archie Shepp. He moved to Toronto, Canada in 1987 and worked as an equity analyst and for a while Steve continued playing clubs at night.
In the Nineties he released three albums then decided to concentrate on music full-time. Three years later, his fifth album, The Dream, was released. Moving into music production he stopped performing jazz live until 2014. Following a move to the countryside, his interest in jazz performance returned.
In 2017, he opened a health food store in Warkworth, Ontario, Canada that operates as a jazz venue once a week. After a twenty year absence from the recording field, pianist Steve Holt released Impact, his new album in 2025 under the new band, The Steve Holt Jazz Impact Quintet.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Herbert Joos was born on March 21, 1940 in Karlsruhe, Germany. He learned trumpet first by self-study and then by a private teacher. He studied double bass from 1958, but then turned to flugelhorn, baritone horn, mellophone, and alphorn.
Since the mid-1960s, he has been a member of Modern Jazz Quintet Karlsruhe, from which the group Fourmenonly was created with Wilfried Eichhorn and Rudolf Theilmann. Afterward, he was a member of various modern and free jazz formations with Bernd Konrad, Hans Koller, Adelhard Roidinger and Jürgen Wuchner among others. He played at festivals and in the Free Jazz Meeting Baden-Baden of the SWF at a flugelhorn workshop with Kenny Wheeler, Ian Carr, Harry Beckett and Ack van Rooyen and made a name for himself with his solo recording, The Philosophy of the Flugelhorn in 1973.
He led his own wind trio, quartet and orchestra. He achieved more recognition in the 1980s as a member of the Vienna Art Orchestra, which he influenced. Since the 1990s he has participated in the SüdPool project. He has appeared as a duo with Frank Kuruc as well as in Patrick Bebelaar’s groups, for Michel Godard, Wolfgang Puschnig, Clemens Salesny and Peter Schindler. He also played with the Orchestre National de France.
In 2017, he was awarded the Jazzpreis Baden-Württemberg for his life’s work. Instead of a speech after the laudations, he thanked in a short phrase, and played a concert with a sixteen piece orchestra.
Herbert Joos, who produced drawings, book illustrations and paintings, died on December 7, 2019 after surgery in a Baden-Baden, Germany hospital.
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