Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Cornell Luther Dupree was born on December 19, 1942 and raised in Fort Worth, Texas. Growing up with King Curtis, he graduated from I.M. Terrell High School and began his career playing in the Atlantic Records studio band, recording on albums by Aretha Franklin and King Curtis as a member of his band, The King Pins. He played on the 1969 Lena Horne and Gábor Szabó recording, as well as recordings with Archie Shepp, Grover Washington, Jr., Snooky Young and Miles Davis.
A founding member of the band Stuff, which featured fellow guitarist Eric Gale, Richard Tee on keyboards, Steve Gadd and Chris Parker on drums, and Gordon Edwards on bass, they recorded several albums. He and Tee recorded together on many occasions, and in addition he recorded with Joe Cocker, Brook Benton, Peter Wolf, Hank Crawford, Charles Earland, Eddie Harris, Gene Harris, Donny Hathaway, Roland Kirk, Yusef Lateef, Arif Mardin, Les McCann, Jack McDuff, David Newman, Bernard Purdie, Buddy Rich, Marlena Shaw, Sonny Stitt, Stanley Turrentine, Cedar Walton and Charles Williams.
In 2009, Dupree appeared in a documentary titled Still Bill, chronicling the life and times of Bill Withers. Appearing on stage playing a guitar-led version of Grandma’s Hands, Withers joined him from the audience to sing the lyrics. At the time he was suffering from emphysema and played his guitar on a stool, breathing using an oxygen machine.
Guitarist Cornell Dupree recorded nine albums, wrote a book on soul and blues guitar: Rhythm and Blues Guitar and reportedly recorded on 2,500 sessions before passing away on May 8, 2011 at his home in Fort Worth, Texas awaiting for a lung transplant.
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Walter Booker was born December 17, 1933 in Prairie View, Texas and moved with his family to Washington, D.C. in the mid-1940s. He played clarinet and alto saxophone in college with a concert band. In 1959 he began on bass while in the US Army, serving side-by-side in the same unit with Elvis Presley. He worked with Andrew White in Washington after his discharge, playing in the JFK Quintet during the early 1960s.
Moving to New York City in 1964, Booker was hired by Donald Byrd. After his stint with Byrd, he recorded and toured with Ray Bryant, Betty Carter, Chick Corea, Stan Getz, Art Farmer, Charles McPherson, Lee Morgan, Hank Mobley, Milt Jackson, Harold Vick, Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins. All this was done before joining the Cannonball Adderley Quintet in 1969, starting an association which lasted until Adderley’s death in 1975. He would go on to record and perform with Joe Zawinul, Joe Williams, Gene Ammons, Joe Chambers, Roy Hargrove, Archie Shepp, Kenny Barron and numerous others.
Walter’s next gig was a tour the United States with the Shirley Horn Trio, along with Billy Hart on drums. During the same time, Booker designed, built, and ran the Boogie Woogie Studio in NYC, a mecca for musicians from all over the world. Through the Eighties he played and recorded with Nat Adderley, Nick Brignola, Arnett Cobb, Richie Cole, John Hicks, Billy Higgins, Clifford Jordan, Pharoah Sanders, Sarah Vaughan, Leroy Williams, Marcus Belgrave, Roni Ben-Hur, Larry Willis, John HIcks and Phil Woods.
Booker married pianist Bertha Hope with whom he played in a trio that included drummer Jimmy Cobb. In addition to his own quintet, he also formed Elmollenium, based on the same core group as the Quintet plus Bertha and dedicated to playing the music of Elmo Hope.
Bassist Walter Booker, a highly underrated stylist whose playing was marked by voice-like inflections, glissandos and tremolo techniques, passed away in his Manhattan home on November 24, 2006, at the age of 72.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Robben Ford was born December 16, 1951 in Woodlake, California and raised in Ukiah, California. He began playing the saxophone at age 10 and the guitar at age fourteen. Robben and his brothers created the Charles Ford Blues Band in honor of their father.
By age 18, Ford’s band was hired to play with Charlie Musselwhite and they recorded two albums The Charles Ford Band and Discovering the Blues. He went on to record two albums with Jimmy Witherspoon titled Live and Spoonful. In the 1970s he joined the jazz fusion band, L.A. Express, led by saxophonist Tom Scott. In 1974 the band backed George Harrison on his American tour and played on the Joni Mitchell albums The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Miles of Aisles.
Leaving the L.A. Express in 1976, Robben recorded his debut solo album, The Inside Story with a band that later became the Yellowjackets. 1982 saw him appearing on the KISS album Creatures of the Night, playing lead guitar on the songs Rock And Roll Hell and I Still Love You. He worked with Miles Davis in 1986 and can be heard on Davis’ Montreux box set. He joined Philippe Saisse, Marcus Miller and J.T. Lewis as a member of The Sunday Night Band for the second and final season of the late-night NBC television program, Sunday Night in 1989.
He has recorded with Dizzy Gillespie, Georgie Fame, Rickie Lee Jones, Neil Larsen, David Sanborn, Bob Malach, Ruthie Foster, Larry Carlton and Charlie Haden, to name a few. In the 1990s he released several more albums and on into the new millennium, received five Grammy Award nominations, and was named one of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of the 20th Century” by Musician magazine. He has produced five instructional DVDs and performed on the soundtracks of the films Pink Cadillac, The Firm, No Way Home and The Whole Nine Yards.
He credits pianist and arranger Roger Kellaway and saxophonist and arranger Tom Scott as major influences on his musical development. Guitarist Robben Ford continues to cross genres of jazz, blues and rock with recording, performing and touring.
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Grover Washington Jr. was born on December 12, 1943 in Buffalo, New York. His mother was a church chorister and his father was a saxophonist and collected old Jazz gramophone records, which put music everywhere in the home. Growing up he listened to Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, and others like them. At the age of eight his father gave him a saxophone and he practiced and would sneak into clubs to see famous Buffalo blues musicians.
Leaving Buffalo he played with a Midwest group called the Four Clefs and then the Mark III Trio from Mansfield, Ohio. Then drafted into the U.S. Army he met drummer Billy Cobham, who as a mainstay in New York City, he introduced Washington to musicians around the city. After leaving the Army, he freelanced around New York City, but eventually landed in Philadelphia in 1967. The first two years of the Seventies decade provided his first recording sessions on Leon Spencer’s debut and sophomore albums on Prestige Records, together with Idris Muhammad and Melvin Sparks.
His big break came when alto saxophonist Hank Crawford couldn’t make a recording date with Creed Taylor’s Kudu Records and Grover took his place. This led to his first solo album, Inner City Blues in which he displayed his talent on the soprano, alto, tenor, and baritone saxophones.
His rise to fame with his first three albums established him as a force in jazz and soul music, but it was his fourth album in 1974, Mister Magic, that became his major commercial success. The album crossed over all the charts and with guitarist Eric Gale in tow again for the 1975 follow-up album Feels So Good proved both could reach #10. A string of acclaimed records brought Washington through the 1970s, culminating in the signature piece Winelight in 1980, in which he collaborated on Just The Two Of Us with Bill Withers and dedicated Let It Flow to Dr. J of the Philadelphia 76ers. The album went platinum, won two Grammy awards for Just the Two Of Us and Winelight and was nominated for both Record and Song Of The Year.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s Washington gave rise to Kenny G, Walter Beasley, Steve Cole, Pamela Williams, Najee, Boney James and George Howard. Over the course of his career he performed and recorded with Kathleen Battle, Kenny Burrell, Charles Earland, Dexter Gordon, Urbie Green, Eddie Henderson, Masaru Imada, Boogaloo Joe Jones, Gerry Mulligan, Don Sebesky, Johnny “Hammond” Smith, Mal Waldron and Randy Weston.
On December 17, 1999 while waiting in the green room after performing four songs for The Saturday Early Show, at CBS Studios in New York City, saxophonist Grover Washington Jr. collapsed. He was pronounced dead at about 7:30 pm at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital and his doctors determined he had suffered a massive heart attack. He was 56. In tribute, a large mural of him, part of the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, is just south of the intersection of Broad and Diamond streets.
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Jaco Pastorius was born John Francis Anthony Pastorius III on December 1, 1951 in Norristown, Pennsylvania to Jack Pastorius, a big band singer and drummer. Shortly after his birth the family moved to Oakland Park, Florida, where he went to elementary and middle school at St. Clement’s Catholic School in Wilton Manors. Picking up music at an early age he formed his first band named the Sonics along with John Caputo and Dean Noel while in high school at Northeast High. He was also a talented athlete playing football, basketball, and baseball. His nickname came from a play on the spelling of umpire Jocko Conlan when French pianist Alex Darqui assumed Jaco was the correct spelling.
Following in the footsteps of his father Jack, playing the drums until he injured his wrist playing football at age 13. Pastorius then bought an electric bass from a local pawn shop for $15, began to learn to play with drummer Rich Franks, and switched from drummer to becoming the bassist for the Las Olas Brass.band. By the age of 17 he had begun to appreciate jazz and had saved enough money to buy an upright bass. Though its deep, mellow tone appealed to him, it strained his finances and had difficulty maintaining the instrument, and one day found it had cracked. At that point he traded it in for a 1962 Fender Jazz Bass.
His first real break came when he became bass player for Wayne Cochran and the C.C. Riders. He also played on various local R&B and jazz records with Little Beaver and Ira Sullivan. At 22, Jaco began teaching bass at the University of Miami, where he met student Pat Metheny in 1972, but he was too advanced a player to remain a student and likewise became part of the UM music faculty at the age of 18. By 1974 they began playing and recording together, first with pianist Paul Bley as leader and Bruce Ditmas on drums, on an album later titled Jaco, on the Paul Bley/Carol Goss Improvising Artists label. They followed this with drummer Bob Moses on a trio album on the ECM label, titled Bright Size Life in 1976).
1975 saw Pastorius introduced to Blood, Sweat & Tears drummer Bobby Colomby, who had been asked by Columbia Records to find new talent for their jazz division. This meeting produced his debut album as a leader titled Jaco Pastorius in 1976, that became a breakthrough album for the electric bass, and is considered by many as the finest bass album ever recorded. The album also boasted a lineup of heavyweights Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, David Sanborn, Lenny White, Hubert Laws, Don Alias, and Michael Brecker, as well as, soul singers Sam & Dave, who reunited to appear on the track Come On, Come Over.
He joined Weather Report after a somewhat rocky introduction after a Miami concert to Joe Zawinul, claiming he expected more from the band. Put off by his comments, Pastorius persisted and an admiration soon formed for the brash young bassist who claimed to be the best in the world. A demo tape and correspondence followed and in 1976 he joined Weather Report during the recording sessions for Black Market, and for the next five years became a vital part of the band by virtue of the unique playing qualities, his skills as a composer and arranger, and his exuberant showmanship on stage.
Pastorius guested on many albums by Ian Hunter of Mott the Hoople, David Sanborn, Aynsley Dunbar, Joni Mitchell, Al Di Meola, Flora Purim, Airto Moreira, Mike Stern, guitarist Bireli Lagrene and drummer Brian Melvin. In 1985, he recorded an instructional video, Modern Electric Bass, hosted by bassist Jerry Jemmott.
Following Weather Report he put together the big band project Word Of Mouth with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Peter Erskine, Toots Thielemans, and Hubert Laws in tow. Though well produced on both coasts and in Belgium, the album didn’t do well as audiences were moving away from improvisation and chamber like jazz rock for a more commercially viable sound in the late Seventies. Warner Bros. released him from his contract and he had difficulty getting signed afterwards.
Now in his thirties Pastorius began touring in 1982 and his visit to Japan, though a highlight, surfaced the beginnings of deteriorating behavior. He shaved his head, painted his face black and threw his bass into Hiroshima Bay at one point. In his early career Pastorius had avoided alcohol and drugs. With Weather Report he increasingly used alcohol and other drugs, the abuse of which exacerbated his mental issues and led to increasingly erratic and sometimes anti-social behavior. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in late 1982 following his Word of Mouth tour of Japan.
By 1986, Pastorius’s health had further deteriorated, he began living on the streets after being evicted from his New York apartment, was admitted to Bellevue Hospital in New York, where he was prescribed carbamazepine in preference to lithium. He moved back to Fort Lauderdale and again lived on the streets for weeks at a time. After sneaking onstage at a Carlos Santana concert in 1987 and being ejected, he kicked in the glass door of the Midnight Bottle Club in Wilton Manors, engaged in a violent confrontation with the club bouncer Luc Havan, that left him hospitalized with multiple facial fractures, injuries to his right eye and left arm.
He fell into a coma and a massive brain hemorrhage a few days later led to brain death for bassist Jaco Pastorius, passing away on September 21, 1987 at Broward General Medical Center in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He was 35. In 1988, following his death, he was elected by readers’ poll for inclusion in the Down Beat Hall of Fame, the second bassist honored in this way. To date, only seven bassists have been inducted, the others being Jimmy Blanton, Ray Brown, Ron Carter, Charles Mingus, Charlie Haden and Milt Hinton.
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