Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Nicole Rampersaud was born on December 17, 1981 in Toronto,Canada. Studying trumpet through high school she then went to earn an undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto in Jazz Performance. From there a scholarship led her studies to the New England Conservatory, where she earned her Master’s Degree in Jazz Studies. While at the Conservatory, Nicole studied with Danilo Perez, John McNeil, Jerry Bergonzi, Joe Morris, Herb Pomeroy, Joe Maneri, and Bob Moses. She also studied composition with Michael Gandolfi and Ken Schaphorst.
Developing her singular voice that intersects with a broad range of musical practices and traditions, Nicole has become a sought-after collaborator with a host of artists. A few of his contemporary musicians are Anthony Braxton, Joe Morris, Ra-kalam Bob Moses, Sandro Perri, and many more.
Rampersaud’s primary groups include Brass Knuckle Sandwich with pianist Marilyn Lerner, a duo with guitarist Joel LeBlanc, and she is a founding member of the trio c_RL alongside Allison Cameron and Germaine Liu. She has performed with AIMToronto Orchestra, Eucalyptus, Michael Vlatkovich 5 Winds, and Montreal-Toronto Art Orchestra.
Since 2008, she has been building a catalogue of solo compositions that deconstruct the trumpet’s sonic possibilities and co-founded the improvisation-driven series, Understory. Trumpeter and composer Nicole Rampersaud continues to relentlessly seek out and create spaces to work with a diverse and expanding group of music-makers.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
David Panton was born on October 20, 1946 in the Midlands, England where his formative musical experience revolved around singing in the local church choir and later with a mixed voice choir and an amateur operatic society. He began teaching himself classical piano from the age of twelve and by fifteen had begun to compose by improvising at the keyboard. At seventeen he joined the army as a bandsman, taking up the oboe and being posted for a year in 1964 to Kneller Hall, the Military School of Music. He later attended Birmingham School of Music for piano tuition under the late William Fellowes for a year from 1966. His composing took on a more modern direction which was largely unintelligible to his military colleagues.
After four years as bandsman he resigned to pursue a musical career back in civilization, taking up the alto saxophone as a result of hearing some of the American and British free jazz players of the time such as Ornette Coleman and Mike Osborne. He formed several groups and gave solo performances at the Birmingham Arts Lab, Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham and Midlands Institue as well as numerous pubs. He made contact with London based musicians John Stevens, Evan Parker, Derek Bailey and Maggie Nichols which led to occasional appearances around the city.
He ventured into folk music with the group Forest, followed by the experimental theatre group Chameleon Laboratory Theatre. In 1979 he received an Arts Council jazz bursary, allegedly the first provincal based musician to do so, with a second following in 1981. By 1989 he abandoned music and started up an audio cassette duplication business. When the demise of the audio cassette undermined business viability, David opted to take up a civil service post in the late Nineties from which he retired in 2006.
In 2009 he was awarded the MA in Music from the Open University and has continued to pursue music activities in academia.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Pharoah Sanders was born Ferrell Lee Sanders on October 13, 1940 in Little Rock, Arkansas, an only child. He began his musical career accompanying church hymns on clarinet but his initial artistic accomplishments were in the visual arts. When he was at Scipio Jones High School in North Little Rock, he began playing the tenor saxophone.
After graduating from high school in 1959, Sanders moved to Oakland, California, where he lived with relatives. He briefly studied art and music at Oakland City College. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from an unknown art institution.
He began his professional career playing tenor saxophone in Oakland, then moved to New York City in 1962. The following year he was playing with Billy Higgins and Don Cherry and caught the attention of Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane. In 1965, he became a member of Coltrane’s band, as the latter gravitated towards the avant-garde jazz of Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, and Cecil Taylor.
Sanders first recorded with Coltrane on Ascension, followed by their dual-tenor album Meditations, then joined Coltrane’s final quintet. Pharoah released his debut album as a leader, Pharoah’s First, was not what he expected. In 1966 he signed with Impulse! and the years Sanders spent with the label were both a commercial and critical success.
The 1970s had Sanders continuing to produce his own recordings including the 30-minute wave-on-wave of free jazz, The Creator Has A Master Plan from the album Karma, featuring vocalist Leon Thomas and to work with Alice Coltrane on her Journey in Satchidananda album. Although supported by African-American radio, Sanders’ brand of brave free jazz became less popular.
His major-label return came in 1995 when Verve Records released Message from Home, followed by Save Our Children (1998). But again, Sanders’s disgust with the recording business prompted him to leave the label. In the 2000s, a resurgence of interest in jazz kept Sanders playing festivals and was awarded a NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship for 2016 and was honored at a tribute concert in Washington DC on April 4, 2016.
In 2020 he recorded the album Promises, with the English electronic music producer Floating Points and the London Symphony Orchestra. It was widely acclaimed as a clear late-career masterpiece.
Saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, known for his overblowing, harmonic, and multiphonic techniques, died on September 24, 2022 at his home in Los Angeles at the age of 81.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Mwata Bowden was born on October 11, 1947 in Memphis, Tennessee. He is part of a group known as 8 Bold Souls and frequently engages in collaborations with Tatsu Aoki. He helped establish the Miyumi Project which was a blend of music with different ethnic backgrounds, highlighting contributions from Japanese taiko drumming in the framework of jazz music.
As part of his regular repertoire, Bowden plays a range of saxophones and clarinets, including the E-flat clarinet, B-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, contra-alto clarinet, and contrabass clarinet, as well as flute, zamada, and didgeridoo.
As an instructor in improvisational jazz at the University of Chicago teaches young aspiring musicians in the Chicago area. Saxophonist, clarinetist and flutist Mwata Bowden, who is a part of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, continues to perform.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Paul Hession was born on September 19, 1956 in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England where his parents bought him a guitar when he was seven and encouraged his musical development by getting him in the church choir. His first paid gigs were weddings. He started playing drums around fourteen and was mainly self taught working himself through the different musical genres until he reached jazz.
After several years of playing jazz he turned to free improvisation and formed Art, Bart & Fargo with saxophonists Alan Wilkinson and Peter Malham. While living in London, England he played with numerous improvisers and formed a trio with Chris Green and Roberto Bellatalla. Returning to Leeds in the mid-Eighties he continued playing and running music workshops.
By the time he turned thirty he made a solo recording and tour and continued to play and record solo. He started working with electroacoustic dimensions as a soloist. Hession went on to run the Improvised Music Workshop in the late 1980s and a decade later founded Improvised Music Leeds, a workshop that was founded to teach drumming to youth.
Paul created his next trio, Hession/Wilkinson/Fell which became his most prolific group. They recorded for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and broadcast on the radio program Two New Hours. He toured the United States and parts of Canada before returning to Europe and playing several cities and festivals.
In 2018 he received his doctorate from the University of Leeds for research into augmenting solo percussion with analogue and digital electronics. Another trio later with Hans Peter Hilby and Michael Bardon, he remains active.
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