Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Billy Higgins was born on October 11, 1936 in Los Angeles, California. A jazz drummer who mainly played free jazz, he played on Ornette Coleman’s first records, beginning in 1958 and then freelanced extensively with hard bop and post-bop players. He was one of the house drummers for Blue Note Records and played on dozens of Blue Note albums of the 1960s. On a whole, he played on over 700 recordings, including recordings of rock and funk, and appeared as a jazz drummer in the 2001 movie Southlander.
Tipping his hat into the educator ring, in 1989 Higgins cofounded a cultural center, The World Stage, in Los Angeles to encourage and promote younger jazz musicians. The center provides workshops in performance and writing, as well as concerts and recordings. He also taught in the jazz studies program at the University of California, Los Angeles. Drummer Billy Higgins passed away of kidney and liver failure on May 3, 2001 at age 64 in Inglewood, California.
He left a legacy of music, having recorded eight albums as a leader and his sideman duties had him performing and recording with a who’s who list of musicians including but not limited to Gene Ammons, Robert Stewart, Chris Anderson, Gary Bartz, Paul Bley, Sandy Bull, Jaki Byard, Donald Byrd, Joe Castro, Don Cherry, Sonny Clark, George Coleman, John Coltrane, Bill Cosby, Stanley Cowell, Ray Drummond, Teddy Edwards, Booker Ervin, Art Farmer, Curtis Fuller, Stan Getz, Dexter Gordon, Grant Green, Charlie Haden, Slide Hampton, Herbie Hancock, Barry Harris, Eddie Harris, Jimmy Heath, Joe Henderson, Andrew Hill, Richard “Groove” Holmes, Paul Horn, Freddie Hubbard, Bobby Hutcherson, J. J. Johnson, Hank Jones, Dave Holland, Sam Jones, Clifford Jordan, Fred Katz, Steve Lacy, Charles Lloyd, Pat Martino, Jackie McLean, Charles McPherson, Pat Metheny, Blue Mitchell, , Red Mitchell, Hank Mobley, Thelonious Monk, Lee Morgan, Bheki Mseleku, David Murray, Horace Parlan, Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen, Art Pepper, Dave Pike, Jimmy Raney, Sonny Red, Freddie Redd, Joshua Redman, Sonny Rollins, Charlie Rouse, Pharoah Sanders, John Scofield, Shirley Scott, Archie Shepp, Sonny Simmons, Sonny Stitt, Idrees Sulieman, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Bobby Timmons, Mal Waldron, Cedar Walton, Don Wilkerson, David Williams and Jack Wilson, among others.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
John Wallace Carter was born on September 24, 1929 in Fort Worth, Texas and attended I.M. Terrell High School. He played music with schoolmates Ornette Coleman and Charles Moffett in the 1940s.
From 1961, he was based mainly on the West Coast, where he met Bobby Bradford in 1965 and went on to work together on a number of projects, most notably the New Jazz Art Ensemble. He also played with Hampton Hawes and Harold Land. In the Seventies he became well known for his extraordinary solo concerts.
At New Jazz Festival Moers 1979 he and the German clarinetist Theo Jörgensmann performed for three days. This catapulted him to garnering wide recognition from around the world. He and Jörgensmann met again in 1984. The program of the Berlin Jazz Fest was built around the clarinet and after Carter’s solo performance, he and Jörgensmann also played together.
Between 1982 and 1990 Carter composed and recorded Roots and Folklore: Episodes in the Development of American Folk Music, five albums focused on African Americans and their history. The complete set was acclaimed by jazz critics as containing some of the best releases of the 1980s.
A clarinet quartet with Perry Robinson, Jörgensmann and Eckard Koltermann was planned for 1991, but Carter did not recover from a nonmalignant tumor. Later that same year he was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame.
He recorded fourteen albums as a leader on the Black Saint, Flying Dutchman, Revelation, Dark Tree, Emanem, and Gramavision record labels. As a sideman he recorded with Horace Tapscott, Vinny Golia, and the Clarinet Summit. Clarinetist, saxophonist and flutist John Carter passed away on March 31, 1991.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Charles Moffett was born on September 6, 1929 in Fort Worth, Texas, and attended I.M. Terrell High School with Ornette Coleman. Before switching to drums, he began his musical career as a trumpeter. At age 13, he played trumpet with Jimmy Witherspoon and later formed a band, the Jam Jivers, with fellow students Coleman and Prince Lasha. After switching to drums, Moffett briefly performed with Little Richard.
Upon discharge from the United States Navy, Charles pursued a short career in boxing before studying music at Huston-Tillotson College in Austin, Texas. In 1953 he began teaching music at a Rosenberg, Texas public school.
1961 saw him moving to New York City to work with Coleman but the saxophonist soon went into a brief retirement period. Moffett worked with Sonny Rollins, recorded with Archie Shepp on the album Four for Trane, and led a group that included Pharoah Sanders and Carla Bley.
Upon Coleman’s return to performing in 1964, he formed a trio with bassist David Izenzon and Moffett,who also performed on vibraphone. He began teaching music again at New York Public Schools as a way to make ends meet when Coleman made only sporadic performances. He then moved to Oakland, California, where he served as the city’s music director, and was later the principal of the alternative Odyssey public school in Berkeley in the mid-1970s.
The title of his first solo album as a leader was The Gift, a reference to his love of teaching music. His then 7-year-old son Codaryl played drums on that album. Moffett later returned to Brooklyn, New York and taught at PS 142 Stranahan Junior High School. He would go on to record two more albums as a leader and another 28 as a sideman working with Coleman, Shepp, Eric Dolphy, Harold McNair, Joe McPhee, Charles Tyler Ensemble, Bob Thiele Emergency, Frank Lowe, Ahmed Abdullah, Sonny Simmons, Keshavan Maslak and Kenny Millions.
Free jazz drummer Charles Moffett passed away on February 14, 1997 but left us his legacy in his music and his children, double bassist Charnett Moffett, drummer Codaryl “Cody” Moffett, vocalist Charisse Moffett, trumpeter Mondre Moffett, and saxophonist Charles Moffett, Jr.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Bennie Maupin was born August 29, 1940 in Detroit, Michigan. He started playing tenor saxophone in high school and attended the Detroit Institute for Musical Arts, while playing locally. He moved to New York in 1963, freelancing with many groups, including ones led by Marion Brown and Pharoah Sanders.
Well known for his playing as a part of Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi sextet and Headhunters band and for performing on Miles Davis’s seminal fusion record, Bitches Brew. Maupin has collaborated with Horace Silver, Roy Haynes, Woody Shaw, Lee Morgan and many others. He has also performed on several Meat Beat Manifesto albums.
Noted for having a harmonically-advanced, “out” improvisation style, while having a different sense of melodic direction than other “out” jazz musicians such as Eric Dolphy.
Maupin was also a member of Almanac, a group with bassist Cecil McBee, pianist Mike Nock and drummer Eddie Marshall. He has recorded a half dozen albums as a leader and another three dozen as a sideman with John Beasley, Marion Brown, Mike Clark, Miles Davis, Jack DeJohnette, Eddie Henderson, Andrew Hill, Darek Oles, Lonnie Smith, McCoy Tyner, Lenny White, Patrick Gleeson and Jim Lang.
Multireedist Bennie Maupin, who plays various saxophones, flute and bass clarinet, failed to catch on as a bandleader, thus maintained a low profile during the past 15 years, until emerging in 2006 with the critically acclaimed Penumbra followed two years later Early Reflections on the Cryptogramophone label, then on Vocalion with Slow Traffic To The Left, Moonscapes. He continues to perform and tour.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Eddie Gale was born in Brooklyn, New York on August 15, 1941 and early in life he studied trumpet with Kenny Dorham. In the early 1960s he was introduced to Sun Ra by drummer Scoby Stroman and spent many hours exposed to Sun Ra’s philosophy about music and life. During this period he explored the use of trills, placement of whole tones and then a space chord, all ideas he could not find in exercise books.
During the 1960s and 1970s, he toured and recorded extensively with Sun Ra, until Ra’s death in 1993. In 1972 he moved to San Jose California, has helped to bring jazz into the 21st century by delving into the hip-hop world with the Oakland group Coup and by the late 1990s. Eddie has held regular creative music workshops at the Black Dot Cafe, a grassroots performance space in Oakland ran by artist/activist Marcel Diallo and his Black Dot Artists Collective.
Gale also held He has recorded with Cecil Taylor, Larry Young, and Elvin Jones, and performed with John Coltrane, Jackie McLean, Booker Ervin, and Illinois Jacquet.
Trumpeter Eddie Gale, known for his work in free jazz, has recorded his debut album as a leader Ghetto Music in 1968 and has since recorded four more as well as several more as a sideman. He continues to record, perform and educate young musicians.
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