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…
Martial Solal was born on August 23, 1927 in Algiers, French Algeria to an opera singer and piano teacher. He began learning the piano from the age of six. After settling in Paris in 1950, he soon began working with leading musicians including Django Reinhardt and expatriates from the United States like Sidney Bechet and Don Byas. He formed a quartet and also occasionally leading a big band in the late that same year.
Martial began his recording career as a leader in 1953 and began composing film music, eventually providing over twenty scores. By 1963 he appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island but his Newport ’63 is a studio album recreating the live date. His regular trio featured bassist Guy Pedersen and drummer Daniel Humair and from 1968 he regularly performed and recorded with Lee Konitz in the U. S. and Europe.
Throughout his career Solal has performed solo and during 1993-94 he gave thirty solo concerts for French Radio, releasing a 2-CD set Improvise Pour Musique France on the JMS Records label. Solal has also written a piano method book titled Jazz Works.
In addition, pianist Martial has recorded three-dozen albums and worked with Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette Francois Moutin, Dave Douglas, Gary Peacock, Peter Erskine, Paul Motian, Marc Johnson, Toots Thielemans, John Scofield, Hampton Hawes, Daniel Humair, Niels Pederson, Joachim Kuhn, Hans Koller and Attila Zoller, among others.
In recent years, Martial Solal, who believes music is a language and each performance is a conversation between the participants, has continued to perform and record with his trio.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Bruz Freeman was born Eldridge Freeman on August 11, 1921 in Chicago, Illinois. Also known as “Buzz” Freeman with his brothers, guitarist George Freeman and tenor saxophonist Von Freeman, he played for several years in the house band at the Pershing Hotel.
In 1950, he was a member of John Young’s trio with bassist LeRoy Jackson and recorded with Young’s orchestra backing vocalist Lurlean Hunter.
By the mid-1950s, Bruz became a member of the Hampton Hawes Quartet, with Red Mitchell and Jim Hall, and with line-ups led by Herb Geller. In 1950, with his brothers George and Von, LeRoy Jackson, and Chris Anderson, he played with Charlie Parker shortly before his death. This jam session was recorded at Bird’s apartment and was later released in 1960 by Savoy Records.
He went on to record with Clora Bryant in the late Fifties and John Carter, Bobby Bradford, Bob Thiele in the Sixties. Fro 1977-1978 he joined a short-lived band based in California led by Kenny Mann and with Britt Woodman on trombone. Drummer Bruz Freeman never recorded as a leader and passed away on November 21, 2005 at age 84 in Boulder City, Nevada.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Charles Edward Haden was born on August 6, 1937 in Shenandoah, Iowa into a musical family who performed on the Haden Family radio show. He made his professional debut as a singer on the radio show when he was just two years old. He continued singing with his family until he was 15 but a bulbar form of polio affecting his throat and facial muscles sidelined him but a year earlier he had become interested in jazz after hearing Charlie Parker and Stan Kenton in concert.
Recovering from his bout with polio, Charlie began concentrating on the bass and soon set his sights on moving to Los Angeles, California to pursue his dream of becoming a jazz musician and in 1957 he realized his dream turning down a full scholarship at Oberlin College, which had no established jazz program at the time and attended Westlake College of Music.] His first recordings were made that year with Paul Bley, with whom he worked until 1959. He also played with Art Pepper for four weeks in 1957, and from 1958 to 1959, with Hampton Hawes whom he met through his friendship with bassist Red Mitchell and for a time shared an apartment with the bassist Scott LaFaro.
In May 1959, he recorded his first album with the Ornette Coleman Quartet, the seminal The Shape of Jazz to Come. Later that year, the Ornette Coleman Quartet moved to New York City, secured a six-week residency at the Five Spot Café that would represent the beginnings of free or avant-garde jazz.
By 1960, Haden’s narcotics addiction forced him to leave Coleman’s band, go into rehabilitation in 1963 in California, met his first wife and moved to the Upper West Side of New York City. He resumed his career in 1964, working with John Handy, Denny Zeitlin’s trio, performed with Archie Shepp in California and Europe and freelanced with Henry “Red” Allen, Pee Wee Russell, Attila Zoller, Bobby Timmons, Tony Scott, the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, Roswell Rudd, and returned to Ornette Coleman’s group in 1967.
Charlie went on to work with Keith Jarrett’s trio and his American Quartet, organized the collective Old and New Dreams, which consisted of Don Cherry, Dewey Redman, and Ed Blackwell from Coleman’s band. He founded his first band, the Liberation Music Orchestra at the height of the Vietnam War, working with arranger Carla Bley, exploring free jazz and political music. The original lineup consisted of Haden and Bley and Gato Barbieri, Dewey Redman, Paul Motian, Don Cherry, Andrew Cyrille, Mike Mantler, Roswell Rudd, Bob Northern, Howard Johnson and Sam Brown.
Over the course of his half-century career he established the Jazz Studies Program at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, been honored as Jazz Educator of the Year and as a leader has won several Grammy Awards, recorded forty-six albums as well as 134 albums as a sideman with Geri Allen, Ray Anderson, Ginger Baker, Bill Frisell, Kenny Barron, Beck, Paul Bley, Jane Ira Bloom, Michael Brecker, Henry Butler, Alice Coltrane, John Coltrane, Robert Downey Jr., Dizzy Gillespie, Jim Hall, Tom Harrell, Joe Henderson, Fred Hersch, Laurence Hobgood, Rickie Lee Jones, Lee Konitz, Brad Mehldau, David Liebman, Abbey Lincoln, Helen Merrill, Pat Metheny, Bheki Mseleku, Yoko Ono, Joe Pass, Enrico Pieranunzi, Joshua Redman, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, John Scofield, Wadada Leo Smith, Ringo Starr and Masahiko Togashi.
Double bassist, bandleader, composer, educator and NEA Jazz Master Charlie Haden, who revolutionized the harmonic concept of bass playing in jazz passed away in Los Angeles, California on July 11, 2014, at the age of 76 after suffering from effects of post-polio syndrome and complications from liver disease.
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Ahmad Alaadeen was born in Kansas City, on July 24, 1934 and grew up listening to all styles of music not limited to the Philharmonic, Lester Young, T-Bone Walker and Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson. He began playing the saxophone when he was in sixth grade, in time mastering flute, clarinet and oboe. He studied at R.T. Coles High School under the tutelage of Leo H. Davis, a well respected music instructor reported to have taught Charlie Parker.
Alaadeen debuted as a professional with Davis’ concert band playing e-flat horn when he was 14 and his first major job was playing baritone sax with pianist-bandleader Jay McShann. In later years he would rejoin McShann on tenor. He studied at the Kansas City Conservatory of Music, St. Mary’s University and DePaul University. Serving in the military during 1957-59, being the jazz saxophonist and principal oboist with the 4th Army Band, after his discharge he spent time in Chicago, playing in a program led by pianist-composer Richard Abrams that was the beginning of the AACM – the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians that included members Lester Bowie and Malachi Favors.
Returning to Kansas City, Ahmad continued to play, teach and lead the Deans of Swing in the 1990s, and the ensemble was picked in 1996 as Musician Magazine’s Best Unsigned Band. He started the ASR label to document his music, was awarded the Kansas City’s Jazz Heritage Award, the Missouri Humanities Council’s Community Heritage Award, the Missouri Arts Award and Kansas City’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Saxophonist, composer and educator Ahmad Alaadeen, whose swing and hard bop style passed away of cancer on August 15, 2010 at the age of 76.
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