Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Ralf Hübner was born on May 3, 1939 in Berlin, Germany where he attended the Hochschule für Musik from 1958-1962. During his tenure, he studied both double bass and drums and played with Benny Bailey and Nathan Davis.
Upon graduating he joined the Jazzensemble des Hessischen Rundfunks, an ensemble he would work with into the 1990s. He also began a decade-long association with Albert Mangelsdorff.
In the 1970s he worked with musicians and ensembles such as the Frankfurt Jazz Ensemble, Joki Freund, Volker Krieger, Itaru Oki, Michel Pilz, Manfred Schoof, and Eberhard Weber. In the 1980s and 1990s he worked with Christof Lauer among others. At eighty, drummer Ralf Hübner currently resides in Glashütten, Hessen, Germany.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Patrick Mungo Smythe was born on May 2, 1923 in Edinburgh, Scotland, the son of a solicitor. Educated at Winchester College he went on to study law at Oxford University. When World War II interrupted his studies, he enlisted with the Royal Air Force, serving for five years as a night-fighter pilot. After the war, he resumed his legal studies, this time at the University of Edinburgh where he was also recognized as a talented classical and jazz pianist.
Upon graduation, he spent several years in his father’s law firm, before leaving Edinburgh for London in the late Fifties in search of a professional career in music. For a brief time, Pat worked with Jamaican trumpeter Dizzy Reece, and in 1960 he joined the quintet led by another Jamaican, alto saxophonist Joe Harriott, who was beginning playing his revolutionary brand of free jazz. Smythe’s pivotal role highlighted one of the principal differences between Harriott and his American counterpart Ornette Coleman, who viewed the harmonic qualities of the piano as incompatible with his own brand of free improvisation.
The Harriott quintet stayed together until 1965, recording three ground-breaking albums ~ Free Form, Abstract and Movement, while also holding a long-term residency at the Marquee Club in Soho. Smythe stayed with Harriott after the dissolution of the quintet, becoming a key member of the group Indo-Jazz Fusions, co-led by Harriott and the Indian composer and violinist John Mayer. This double quintet of five Indian and five jazz musicians aimed to fuse Indian raga structures with jazz improvisation, performing and recording extensively until Harriott’s departure ended the project in 1969. With his knowledge of Indian ragas, Smythe was considered by Mayer to be the bridge between the two camps.
Over a diverse career, he worked and recorded with many other great names in jazz when they passed through Britain, including Stan Getz, Paul Gonsalves, Ben Webster, Eddie Lockjaw Davis, Zoot Sims and Bob Brookmeyer. He worked mainly as an accompanist in the London clubs throughout the 1970s, helping bring Scottish jazz vocalist Carol Kidd to prominence.
After a long illness, pianist Pat Smythe passed away on May 6, 1983 in London, England. The Pat Smythe Memorial Trust was established two years later, as a registered charity to provide financial awards to young jazz musicians of outstanding talent. It was funded entirely from benefit concerts and gave awards to such musicians as Julian Arguelles and Jason Rebello. The trust is now defunct.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Lenny Tristano was born Leonard Joseph Tristano on March 19, 1919 in Chicago, Illinois, the second of four brothers. He started on the family’s player piano at the age of two or three. He had classical piano lessons when he was eight, Born with weak eyesight, and then with measles, by the age of nine or ten, he was totally blind. He attended the Illinois School for the Blind in Jacksonville, Florida for a decade around 1928. During his school days, he played several other instruments, including trumpet, guitar, saxophones, and drums and by eleven, he had his first gigs, playing clarinet in a brothel.
Back in Chicago, Tristano got his bachelor’s degree in music from the American Conservatory of Music but left before completing his master’s degree, moving to New York City in 1946. He played saxophone and piano with leading bebop musicians, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Max Roach among others. He formed his own small bands, which soon displayed some of his early interests – contrapuntal interaction of instruments, harmonic flexibility, and rhythmic complexity. His 1949 quintet recorded the first free group improvisations, that continued in 1951, with the first overdubbed, improvised jazz recordings.
He started teaching music, with an emphasis on improvisation, in the early 1940s, and by the mid-1950s was concentrating on teaching instead of performing. He taught in a structured and disciplined manner, which was unusual in jazz education when he began. His educational role over three decades meant that he exerted an influence on jazz through his students, including saxophonists Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh.
Through the Fifties to the Sixties he would go on to record for the New Jazz label which would become Prestige Records, and Atlantic Records, he founded his own label Jazz Records, create his own recording studio, tour throughout Europe, played A Journey Through Jazz, a five-week engagement at Birdland, s well as other New York City jazz haunts. His last public performance in the United States was in 1968 but continued teaching into the Seventies.
Having a series of illnesses in the 1970s, including eye pain and emphysema from smoking for most of his life, on November 18, 1978 pianist, composer, arranger, and jazz improvisation educator Lennie Tristano passed away from a heart attack at home in Jamaica, New York.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Paul William Rutherford was born on February 29, 1940 in Greenwich, South East London, England. He initially played saxophone but switched to trombone. During the Sixties, he taught at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
By 1970, Rutherford, guitarist Derek Bailey and bassist Barry Guy formed the improvising group Iskra 1903, sans drums and percussion, permitting the players to explore a range of textures and dynamics which set it apart from such other contemporary improvising ensembles. The group stayed together until 1973, recording a double album from Incus, later reissued with much bonus material on the 3-CD set Chapter One.
The group’s name is the Russian word for spark and was the title of the Iskra revolutionary newspaper edited by Lenin. The “1903” designation means 20th-century music for the trio. Another edition of the group included Evan Parker under Iskra 1904, and Rutherford at one point assembled a 12-piece ensemble called Iskra 1912.
The group was later revived with Philipp Wachsmann replacing Bailey, a phase of the group’s life that lasted from roughly 1977 to 1995, documenting their earlier work on Chapter Two (Emanem, 2006) and its final recordings were issued on Maya (Iskra 1903) and Emanem (Frankfurt 1991).
Rutherford went on to play with Globe Unity Orchestra, London Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, Centipede, the Mike Westbrook Orchestra, and the Orckestra, a merger of avant-rock group Henry Cow, the Mike Westbrook Brass Band and folk singer Frankie Armstrong. He also played a very small number of gigs with Soft Machine.
He is perhaps most famous for solo trombone improvisations. His album The Gentle Harm of the Bourgeoisie is a landmark recording in solo trombone and his 1983 trio album Gheim, recorded at the Bracknell Jazz Festival is another acclaimed work. A film soundtrack was separately released as Buzz Soundtrack.
A major player in the British free improvisation scene and part of the European free jazz scene, he was one of the first to use unorthodox playing techniques for improvisation. Trombonist Paul Rutherford, one of the first to use trombone multiphonics, i.e. he sang into the trombone and blew at the same time, passed away from cirrhosis of the liver and a ruptured aorta on August 5, 2007, at the age of 67.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Chris Anderson was born on February 26, 1926 in Chicago, Illinois and was a self-taught pianist. He began playing in Chicago clubs in the mid-1940s and played with Von Freeman and Charlie Parker, among others. Hired as Dinah Washington’s accompanist in New York City, his tenure with Washington was a brief six weeks as she changed accompanists frequently. After his firing, he decided to stay in the city.
In 1960 he recorded what might be his best-regarded album My Romance on the VeeJay label with bassist Bill Lee and drummer Art Taylor. He was a great influence on his student Herbie Hancock.
Despite the respect of his peers, Anderson had difficulty finding work or popular acclaim due in large to his disabilities. He was blind and his bones were unusually fragile, causing numerous fractures, which at times compromised his ability to perform at the times or places requested, although he continued to record until he was well into his 70s. A DownBeat profile indicated he had osteogenesis, probably meaning osteogenesis imperfecta.
He would record his first album as a leader in 1960 and ultimately record a total of ten. As a sideman, he worked with Charlie Haden, Clifford Jordan, Sun Ra, and Frank Strozier. Pianist Chris Anderson passed away on February 4, 2008 in Manhattan, New York City.
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