Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Gil Coggins was born Alvin Gilbert Coggins on August 23, 1928 in New York City of West Indian heritage and started playing piano at an early age. He attended The High School of Music and Art in Harlem and also school in Barbados.
In 1946, Coggins met Miles Davis while stationed in Missouri and after his discharge he began playing piano professionally, working with Davis on several of his Blue Note and Prestige releases. He also recorded with John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, Ray Draper and Jackie McLean.
Coggins gave up playing jazz professionally in 1954 and took up a career in real estate, playing music only occasionally. He did not record as a leader until 1990, when Interplay Records released “Gil’s Mood”. He continued performing through the 190s and into the new millennium. On February 15, 2004 pianist Gil Coggins passed away from complications sustained in a car crash eight months earlier in Forest Hills, New York. His second album recorded as a leader, “Better Late Than Never”, was released posthumously in 2007 on the Smalls Records label.
More Posts: piano
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Malachi Favors was born August 22, 1927 in Lexington, Mississippi. He began playing double bass at age fifteen and began performing professionally upon graduating high school. His early performances included work with Dizzy Gillespie and Freddie Hubbard. But by 1965, he was a founding member of the AACM – Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and a member of Muhal Richard Abrams’ Experimental Band.
Malachi was a protégé of Chicago bassist Wilbur Ware. His first known recording was a 1953 session with tenor saxophonist Paul Bascomb and four years later recorded with pianist Andrew Hill. He began working with Roscoe Mitchell in 1966 and this group eventually became the Art Ensemble of Chicago, for which he is most prominently known. Favors also worked outside the group, with artists including Sunny Murray, Archie Shepp and Dewey Redman.
Favors’ most notable records include “Natural and the Spiritual”, “Sightsong” andthe 1994 Roman Bunka collaboration and recording at the Berlin Jazz Fest of the German Critics Poll Winner album “Color Me Cairo”.
At some point in his career Malachi added the word “Maghostut” to his name and because of this he is commonly listed on recordings as Malachi Favors Maghostut.
Most associated musically with bebop, hard bop and particularly free jazz, Favors not only plays the double bass but electric bass, guitar, banjo, zither, gong and other instruments. Malachi Favors died of pancreatic cancer in Chicago, Illinois on January 30, 2004 at the age of 76.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Carl Perkins was born August 16, 1928 in Indianapolis, Indiana and as a child suffered with polio. Overcoming a slightly crippled left hand he learned to play piano, holding his arm sideways over the keyboard. His early professional playing came touring with the big bands of Tiny Bradshaw and Big Jay McNeely but then he settled and worked mainly in Los Angeles, becoming a West Coast fixture from 1949 on.
Best known for his performances with the Curtis Counce Quintet, he performed alongside tenor saxophonist Harold Land, trumpeter Jack Sheldon and drummer Frank Butler. In 1954 Carl performed with the Clifford Brown-Max Roach group, and recorded with Frank Morgan in 1955.
Perkins recorded on as a leader for Savoy, Duotone, and Pacific Jazz labels between 1949 and 1957 and for the Boplicity label between 1955-56 titled “Introducing Carl Perkins”. He composed the jazz standard “Grooveyard” that was recorded in a 1958 session led by Harold Land.
Over the course of his short career absent of fame and beleaguered with drug addiction, Perkins recorded with Chet Baker, Art Pepper, Dizzy Gillespie, Jim Hall and Dexter Gordon to name a few.
Carl Perkins, known to be one of the best hard bop pianist of his day, died due to an untimely drug overdose at age 29 on March 17, 1958 in Los Angeles, California.
More Posts: piano
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Idrees Sulieman was born on August 7, 1923, in St. Petersburg, Florida. He studied trumpet and music at the Boston Conservatory, and gained early experience playing with the Carolina Cotton Pickers and the wartime Earl Hines Orchestra in the early Forties.
Sulieman was closely associated with Mary Lou Williams, worked with cab Calloway, John Coltrane, Count Basie and Lionel Hampton. He recorded with Coleman Hawkins and gigged with Randy Weston in the 50s, toured with Oscar Dennard through Europe in 1961, and then settled in Stockholm, moving to Copenhagen in 1964.
A major soloist with The Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland Band in the mid-’60s through 1973, and frequently worked with radio orchestras. Idrees recorded as a leader for Swedish Columbia and SteepleChase, he played in the 1985 big band of Miles Davis on the album “Aura,” which was released in 1989. He worked and recorded some twenty-two albums as a leader and sideman with Teddy Charles, Mal Waldron, Lester Young, Cedar Walton, Sam Jones, Billy Higgins, Horace Parlan and Niels-Henning Orsted Pederson among others.
Hard bop trumpeter Idrees Sulieman’s career slowed down considerably in the ’90s as he aged and he died of bladder cancer on July 23, 2002 at St. Anthony’s Hospital in his hometown of St. Petersburg, Florida.
More Posts: trumpet
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Eric Alexander was born August 4, 1968 in Galesburg, Illinois and began as a classical musician studying piano at six, clarinet at nine, switching to alto saxophone three years later. While at Indiana University he switched to the tenor saxophone and jazz before transferring to William Paterson University where he studied with Harold Mabern, Rufus Reid, Joe Lovano, Gary Smulyan, Ralph LaLama, Norman Simmons, Steve Turre and many others.
Alexander first achieved fame by finishing second behind Joshua Redman and ahead of Chris Potter at the 1991 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Saxophone Competition. He was quickly signed and began recording his more than three-dozen albums as a leader and collaborator.
Influenced primarily by Sonny Stitt, Dexter Gordon and George Coleman, playing in the hard bop and post-bop styles, he has worked with such notables as Ron Carter, Joe Farnsworth, Pat Martino, Peter Bernstein, Vincent Herring, Grant Stewart and Mike LeDonne among others. Alto saxophonist Eric Alexander continues to record and tour as a leader, extensively with the sextet One For All.
More Posts: saxophone