Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Lembit Saarsalu was born July 8, 1948 in Roosna-Alliku, Estonia. He started playing jazz at an early age. He debuted at the Tallinn International Jazz Festival at the age of 16. He worked for many years in the State Philharmonic of the Estonian SSR , where as a paid musician he gave numerous concerts both at home and abroad. In the 1980s, Saarsalu devoted himself completely to jazz.
For decades, he has led local and international ensembles. He worked in a duo with Leonid Vintskevich, started a new international jazz festival Rainbow Jazz with music producer Merle Kollom and a competition for young musicians in Tartu.
As an educator Saarsalu introduced jazz in schools and has performed together with Olav Ehala and other well-known Estonian musicians for more than 40,000 students. Since the fall of 2016, he has been working as a saxophone and ensemble teacher in the rhythm music department of the Tartu Music School.
In the 1980s Eesti Televisioon made two films about Lembit, he has performed on Finnish and Spanish television and has made numerous recordings, numbering 200 recordings for Estonian Radio. His style ranges from blues and swing to free forms of jazz.
He has been repeatedly chosen as the best tenor saxophonist, awarded the annual prize of the Sound Art Endowment Fund of the Estonian Cultural Capital.
Saxophonist , bandleader and composer Lembit Saarsalu, who has been called the saxophone king and the calling card of Estonian jazz, continues to perform, compose and teach.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Arthur Doyle was born June 26, 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama and was inspired to play music as a child after watching Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington on television. During his high school years, he began listening to Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, and picked up gigs as a saxophonist. While still a teenager, he played with saxophonist Otto Ford, trumpeter Walter Miller and in R&B and blues groups.
After graduating high school, Doyle attended Tennessee State University in Nashville, receiving a degree in Music Education. While there he played with trumpeter Louis Smith and singers Gladys Knight and Donny Hathaway. He briefly went to Detroit, Michigan to play with hard bop trumpeter Charles Moore. He gravitated toward free jazz after playing at a Black Panthers festival.
Moving to New York City in 1968, Doyle worked with Sun Ra and Bill Dixon, and met and befriended saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and guitarist Sonny Sharrock. The following year, he recorded with Noah Howard and while in the city he met drummer Milford Graves, who encouraged him to pursue his natural affinity for pure sound. In 1977 he recorded his debut album Alabama Feeling, his first as a leader. He began playing with guitarist Rudolph Grey, and in 1980 along with Grey and drummer Beaver Harris, they became known as The Blue Humans and recorded Live NY 1980.
At around this time, Arthur began struggling with anxiety issues, and moved to Endicott, New York, where he worked as a counselor. In 1981, he moved to Paris, France where he began an association with multi-instrumentalist Alan Silva and his Celestrial Communication Orchestra, and participated in the recording of the album Desert Mirage in 1982. The following year, while in France, he was accused of rape and imprisoned. Maintaining his innocence he was pardoned and released in 1988 and during his time in prison, he wrote over 150 songs and assembled what he called the Arthur Doyle Songbook.
In the early Nineties Doyle returned to the United States, moving back to Endicott, and restarted his involvement in music. He resumed his association with Grey, playing at CBGB and releasing Arthur Doyle Plays and Sings from the Songbook Volume One on Grey’s Audible Hiss label. Over the next decade, he played and recorded with drummers Hamid Drake, Sabu Toyozumi, and Sunny Murray, among others, and formed The Arthur Doyle Electro-Acoustic Ensemble.
Saxophonist, bass clarinetist, flutist, and vocalist Arthur Doyle, who was best known for playing what he called free jazz soul music, died on January 25, 2014 in his hometown.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Patrick Godfrey was born in Toronto, Canada on June 25, 1948 and began playing piano for church dances at age 12. HIs early influences were Fats Domino, Henry Mancini, Leonard Bernstein and Bach. He played and sang in a number of Toronto rock bands, which led to session work with many well known Canadian musicians Bruce Cockburn, Murray McLaughlan, Raffi, Marc Jordan, Shirley Eikhard, Ben Mink, and Mendelson Joe among others.
Around 1970 he worked with singer Len Udow in Winnipeg, Canada and met Richard Condie and wrote the music for Richard’s first animation. The subsequent friendship resulted in him scoring all of his animations. Godfrey has worked with many other animators, including David Fine and Alison Snowden for whom he scored the Oscar winner Bob’s Birthday and all 52 episodes of the TV series Bob and Margaret.
In demand as a producer, Patrick has produced albums featuring artists such as Holly Cole, The Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band, The Lafayette String Quartet, and Michael Jones. His personal recording career includes eighteen albums.
Pianist Patrick Godfrey continues to perform in concert and teaches improvisation, composition and songwriting at the Victoria Conservatory of Music, Victoria BC.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Tony Oxley was born on June 15, 1938 in Sheffield, West Riding of Yorkshire, England. A self-taught pianist by the age of eight, he first began playing the drums at seventeen and was taught by Haydon Cook. While playing evening gigs with local dance bands at night, he was sacked from his regular job, at a cutlery-making company, for falling asleep.
During his National Service from 1957 to 1960 with the Black Watch military band he studied music theory and improved his drumming technique. After leaving the army he became a member of a dance band playing for passengers on the Queen Mary and made several trips to New York. When on shore leave Tony visited clubs and heard Philly Joe Jones, Horace Silver, Art Blakey. From 1960 to 1964 he led a quartet which performed locally back home.
1963 saw Oxley playing Saturday afternoon gigs with other aspiring young jazz musicians and working with Gavin Bryars and guitarist Derek Bailey, in a trio known as Joseph Holbrooke. Moving to London, England in 1966 he became house drummer at Ronnie Scott’s, where he accompanied visiting musicians such as Joe Henderson, Lee Konitz, Charlie Mariano, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, and Bill Evans until the early 1970s. He was a member of bands led by Gordon Beck and Mike Pyne.
As a sideman he appeared on the John McLaughlin 1969 album Extrapolation and formed a quintet with Bailey, Jeff Clyne, Evan Parker, and Kenny Wheeler, releasing the album The Baptised Traveller. Tony helped found Incus Records with Bailey and others and Musicians Cooperative. The label would go on to release more than 50 albums, received a three-month artist-in-residence job at the Sydney Conservatorium in Australia and joined the London Jazz Composers Orchestra and collaborated with Howard Riley.
Oxley wwent on to join saxophonist Alan Skidmore’s quintet, tutor at the Jazz Summer School in Barry, South Wales, and form the band Angular Apron, and start the Celebration Orchestra He toured and recorded with Anthony Braxton, and began a working relationship with Cecil Taylor. Over the next few decades he joined several bands, recorded a series of albums and ventured into electronic and acoustic percussion music.
Free improvising drummer and electronic musician Tony Oxley died on December 26, 2023.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
John William Stevens was born on June 10, 1940 in Brentford, Middlesex, England, the son of a tap dancer. He listened to jazz as a child but was more interested in drawing and painting, through which he expressed himself throughout his life. He studied at the Ealing Art College and then started work in a design studio, but left at 19 to join the Royal Air Force. It was here that he studied the drums at its School of Music in Uxbridge, England and where he met Trevor Watts and Paul Rutherford, two musicians who became close collaborators.
In the mid-1960s, Stevens began to play in London jazz groups with Tubby Hayes and Ronnie Scott, and in 1965 he led a quartet. He moved away from mainstream jazz when he heard free jazz from the U.S. by musicians like Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler. By 1966, he formed the Spontaneous Music Ensemble (SME) with Watts and Rutherford. The band moved into the Little Theatre Club at Garrick Yard, St Martin’s Lane, London, England. In 1967, they released their debut album, Challenge, however, his interest turned to quiet music, non-Western music and improvisation.
Stevens would go on to play with free improvisors Derek Bailey, Peter Kowald, Julie Tippetts and Robert Calvert, until the mid-1970s when the SME settled down to regulars Stevens, Nigel Coombes on violin, and Roger Smith on guitar. During the same period he consistently played with guitarist and songwriter John Martyn as part of a trio that included bassist Danny Thompson, recording Martyn’s 1976 Live at Leeds.
The Eighties saw John becoming an educator involved with Community Music, an organisation through which he took his form of music making to youth clubs, mental health institutions, the Lewisham Academy of Music, and other unusual places. Notes taken during these sessions were later turned into a book for the Open University called Search and Reflect.
Drummer John Stevens died at the age of 54 from a heart attack on September 13, 1994.
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