Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Burton Greene was born June 14, 1937 in Chicago, Illinois and rose to popularity in the Sixties on New York’s free jazz scene gigging with Alan Silva and Marion Brown. He credited the Free Form Improvisation Ensemble in 1963, then joined Bill Dixon’s and Cecil Taylor’s Jazz Composers Guild in ’64.
During this period he gigged with Rashied Ali, Albert Ayler, Gato Barbieri, Byard Lancaster, Sam Rivers, Patty Waters and others while recording two albums as a leader. Burton moved to Europe in 1969, first to Paris then to Amsterdam delving into the Klezmer medium and recording with several different group configurations into the 90s.
Since the mid-1990s Greene has often performed and recorded in New York and along the East Coast with a modest catalogue that includes eleven recordings.. His autobiography written over 20 years, Memoirs of A Musical Pesty-Mystic, was published in 2001. His recent performances and recorded groups based in New York include duets, trios, quartets and quintets with Mark Dresser, Roy Campbell, Lou Grassi, Adam Lane, Ed and George Schuller, Russ Nolan and Paul Smoker.
Take A Dose On The Road
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Marc Ribot was born on May 21, 1954 in Newark, New Jersey and worked extensively as a session musician. His early sessions with Tom Waits helped define Waits new musical direction in 1985.
His own work has touched on many styles, including n wave, free jazz and Cuban music. Ribot’s first two albums featured The Rootless Cosmopolitans, followed by an album of works by Frantz Casseus and Arsenio Rodriguez. Further releases found him working in a variety of band and solo contexts including two albums with his self-described “dance band”, Marc Ribot y Los Cubanos Postizos.
His relatively limited technical facility is due to learning to play right-handed despite being left-handed. He currently performs and records with his group Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog. Marc’s studio work involves several tracks accompanying the legendary pianist McCoy Tyner’s “Guitars” project. He has performed and recorded with Jack McDuff, John Scofield, Wilson Pickett, Cibo Matto, Bela Fleck, Derek Trucks, Madeline Peyroux, Medeski Martin & Wood, Elton John and many others.
He has toured Europe with his band Sun Ship, had a biographical documentary film called the The Lost String and has also judged the 8th Annual Independent Music Awards to support indie careers in music. He has twenty-one albums as a leader, a filmography that includes five and a biographical documentary about him titled The Lost String. Guitarist Marc Ribot also plays banjo, trumpet, cornet and sings and continues to perform, record and tour.
Dose A Day-Blues Away
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Keith Jarrett was born on May 8, 1945, in Allentown, Pennsylvania and had significant early exposure to music. He possessed absolute pitch and displayed prodigious musical talents as a young child. He began piano lessons just before his third birthday, and at age five he appeared on a TV talent program and by seven had given his first classical piano recital. During his teens he began leaning towards jazz, turned down classical training in Paris and attended Berklee College of Music
He started his career with Art Blakey and after his tenure as a Jazz Messenger moving on to play with Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis. Since the early 70s he has enjoyed a great deal of success in jazz, jazz-fusion, and classical music; as a group leader and a solo performer. His improvisations draw not only from the traditions of jazz but from other genres as well, especially Western classical music, gospel, blues, blues and ethnic folk music.
Jarrett has received the Polar Music Prize, the Leonie Sonning Music Prize, was inducted into the Down Beat Down Beat Hall of Fame, played with Jack DeJohnette, Charles Lloyd, Charlie Haden, Paul Motian, Dewey Redman, Airto Moreira, Palle Danielson and Jan Garbarek among others.
Jarrett’s compositions and the strong musical identities of the group members gave this ensemble a very distinctive sound. The quartet’s music is an amalgam of free jazz, straight-ahead post-bop, gospel music, and exotic, Middle-Eastern-sounding improvisations. He has played as a soloist, trio, returned also to classical music, incorporates vocalizations of grunts, squeals and tuneless singing. He continues to compose, record, perform and tour.
In 2003, Jarrett received the Polar Music Prize, the first (and to this day only) recipient not to share the prize with a co-recipient,[1] and in 2004 he received the Leonie Sonning Music Prize. In 2008, he was inducted into the Down Beat hall of Fame in the magazine’s 73rd Annual Readers’ Poll. He continues to tour and record.
Take A Dose On The Road
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Carlos Ward was born on May 1, 1940 in Ancon, Panama and was raised in Panama City. His first instrument was the ukulele and by age 12 he took to the clarinet. His early influences were his aunt and uncle, both pianist, the former classical. He listened to Bob Crosby’s Dixieland clarinet on the radio as were as calypso.
By 1952 his family relocated to Seattle, Washington where his friend Marion Evans introduced him to the alto saxophone. Through high school he hung out with drummer Doug Robinson and the rock group The Playboys. Ward would go on to attend the Navy School of Music and worked with Albert Mangelsdorff when he was stationed in Germany.
He listened to Monk and Coltrane but it was Ornette Coleman’s “The Shape of Jazz to Come” that made the greatest impression on him. After a prophetic meeting with John Coltrane, in 1965 he took his advice and moved to New York. This led to his first major effort was his work with John Coltrane’s unrecorded octet in the period between 1965-66. He had a long-lasting association with Don Cherry from 1973 to 1980 and beyond. His duet association with pianist Abdullah Ibrahim has also been significant to his career.
Ward was a member of Cecil Taylor’s group in the period immediately after altoist Jimmy Lyons death in 1986. He also was a member of The Ed Blackwell Project and led his own quartet in 1987.
Alto saxophonist and flautist Carlos Ward has four albums as a leader and has some 15 as a sideman while working with Carla Bley, Roswell Rudd and the Jazz Composers Orchestra, Karl Berger, Abdullah Ibrahim, Paul Motian, Sunny Murray, Sam Rivers, Rashied Ali and Don Pullen & The African-Brazilian Connection.
It is unfortunate for the industry that an injury to his playing hand has sidelined this musician for many years. However, Ward is readying himself for a return to the scene and hopefully we will hear from future generations of players who will partake of the opportunity to glean knowledge from this master.
Put A Dose In Your Pocket
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
James Peter Giuffre was born on April 26, 1921 in Dallas, Texas. A graduate of Dallas Technical High School and North Texas Teachers College, he first became known as an arranger for Woody Herman. He would become a central figure in West Coast jazz and cool jazz, and was a member of Shorty Roger’s groups before going solo. Giuffre played clarinet, as well as tenor and baritone saxophones, but eventually focused on clarinet.
His first trio in 1957 consisted of Giuffre, guitarist Jim Hall and double bassist Ralph Pena, later replace by Jim Atlas. With minor hit with Giuffre’s “The Train and the River” featured on a television special The Sound of Jazz, he was matched with Pee Wee Russell for a leisurely jam session. When Atlas left the trio, Jimmy replaced him with valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer. By 1961, Giuffre formed a new trio with Paul Bley and Steve Swallow and exploring free jazz hushed and quiet focus more resembling chamber music. The trio’s early ‘60s explorations of melody, harmony and rhythm are still as striking and radical as any in jazz.
Throughout the ‘60s Giuffre, Bley and Swallow eventually explored wholly improvised music, several years ahead of the free improvisation boom in Europe. By the early 1970s, Giuffre formed a new trio and utilized different instrumentation configurations as he ventured into electric and synthesizers. During this decade he headed the jazz ensemble at New York University, taught private lessons in saxophone and music composition. This continued through the ‘90s at the New England Conservatory of Music.
Jimmy Giuffre, who continually wrote creative and unusual arrangements and who was most notable for his development of forms of jazz which allowed for free interplay between the musicians, anticipating forms of free improvisation, passed away in Pittsfield, Massachusetts on April 24, 2008 of pneumonia, just two days shy of his 87th birthday.
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