Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Steve Swallow was born on October 4, 1940 in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. As a child he studied piano and trumpet before turning to the double bass at age 14. While attending a prep school, he began trying his hand in jazz improvisation. In 1960 he left Yale, settled in New York City and played with Jimmy Giuffre’s trio with Paul Bley.
After joining Art Farmer’s quartet in 1964, Swallow began to write. It is in the 1960s that his long-term association with Gary Burton’s various bands began. The early 1970s saw him switch exclusively to electric bass guitar, preferring the 5-string.
Steve became an educator in 1974 for two years teaching at the Berklee School of Music. In ‘78 he became an essential and constant member of Carla Bley’s band, toured extensively with John Scofield in the early 1980s, has returned to this collaboration several times over the years.
Bassist Steve Swallow has consistently won the electric bass category in Down Beat magazine’s Critics and Readers yearly polls since the mid-80s. Having grown a catalogue of some five-dozen albums as a leader and sideman, he continues to compose, perform and record.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
John Gilmore was born on September 28, 1931 and grew up in Chicago, Illinois but didn’t start playing the clarinet until age 14. While in the Air Force in the late Forties he took up the saxophone, then pursued a musical career, playing briefly with pianist Earl Hines before encountering Sun Ra in 1953.
For the next four decades, Gilmore recorded and performed almost exclusively with Sun Ra. Thought to have the makings of stardom like Rollins or Coltrane, the latter taking informal lessons from Gilmore in the late 50s and partially inspired by his sound on “Chasin’ The Trane”.
By 1957 he was co-leading a Blue Note date with Clifford Jordan titled Blowing In From Chicago, that is regarded as a hard bop classic with Horace Silver, Curley Russell and Art Blakey. In the mid-1960s John toured with the Jazz Messengers, participated in recording sessions with Paul Bley, Andrew Hill, Pete LaRoca, McCoy Tyner and a handful of others. In 1970 he co-led a recording with Jamaican trumpeter Dizzy Reece, however his main focus throughout remained with the Sun Ra Arkestra.
Gilmore was devoted to Sun Ra’s use of harmony, which he considered both unique and a logical extension of bebop. He was the Arkestra’s leading sideman and soloist, performing with fluency and tone on straight-ahead post bop sessions and abstractly capable of long passages based exclusively on high-register squeals. Though his fame was shrouded in the relative anonymity as a member of Sun Ra’s Arkestra, he led the band after Ra’s death up until his own passing of emphysema in 1995.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Billy Bang was born on William Vincent Walker on September 20, 1947 in Mobile, Alabama and while he was still an infant his family moved to the Bronx in New York City. As a child he attended a special school for musicians in Harlem and being small in physical size was assigned a violin instead his first choices, the saxophone or drums. It was around this time that he acquired the nickname of “Billy Bang”, derived from a popular cartoon character.
Billy studied the violin until he earned a hardship scholarship to a private high school in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, at which point he abandoned the instrument due to a lack of a music program. He had difficulty adjusting to school life, encountering racism and developing confusion about his identity, and his later onset of schizophrenia.
Bang left the school after two years, attended a school in the Bronx, dropped out when he was drafted, at 18 joined the Army and arrived in Vietnam in time for the Tet Offensive. Returning from the war he became politically active, fell in with an underground group of revolutionaries, purchased weapons and impulsively bought another violin from the same pawnshop.
In 1977, Bang co-founded the String Trio of New York with guitarist James Emery and bassist John Lindberg, exploring his experience in Vietnam in two albums: Vietnam: The Aftermath and Vietnam: Reflections.
Free jazz composer and violinist Billy Bang passed away on April 11, 2011 from complications due to lung cancer. He is survived by a legacy of some three-dozen albums.
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