Daily Dose Of Jazz…
John Grant Sangster was born November 17, 1928 in the Melbourne suburb of Sandringham, Victoria, Australia. He was an only child that attended primary schools in Sandringham and Vermont, and then Box Hill High School. While at high school he taught himself to play trombone and with a friend, Sid Bridle, formed a band.
In 1946 he started a civil engineering course at Melbourne Technical School. Two years later Sangster performed at the third annual Australian Jazz Convention, held in Melbourne. By the following year he led his own ensemble, John Sangster’s Jazz Six, which included Ken Evans on trombone. He provided trombone for Graeme Bell and his Australian Jazz Band, later took up the cornet and then the drums. They toured several times from 1950 to 1955, and in the late Fifties he began playing the vibraphone.
He went on to play with Don Burrows in the early 1960s, form his own quartet and experimented with group improvisatory jazz, after becoming interested in the music of Sun Ra and Archie Shepp. By the end of the Sixties his attention turned to rock musicians and he joined the expanded lineup of the Australian progressive rock group Tully, who provided the musical backing for the original Australian production of the rock musical Hair. He performed and recorded with Tully and their successors, Luke’s Walnut, throughout the two years he played in Hair. In 1970 he re-joined the Burrows group for Expo 1970 in Osaka, Japan.
In the 1970s Sangster released a series of popular The Lord of the Rings inspired albums that started with The Hobbit Suite in 1973. He was also the composer of a large number of scores for television shows, documentaries, films, and radio. In 1988, Sangster published his autobiography, Seeing the Rafters.
Trombonist John Sangster, who also plays trumpet, drums, percussion, cornet, vibraphone and is best known as a composer, died in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia on October 26, 1995 at age 66.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Richard Malden Heckstall-Smith was born on September 26, 1934 in the Royal Free Hospital, in Ludlow, Shropshire, England. Raised in Knighton, Radnorshire, he learned to play piano, clarinet and alto saxophone as a child. He attended a York boarding school but refused a second term there, instead enrolling in Gordonstoun, where his father had accepted a job as headmaster of the local grammar school.
Completing his education at Dartington Hall School, before co-leading the university jazz band at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, from 1953, by the age of 15 Dick had taken up the soprano sax while at Dartington. He was captivated by the sound of Sidney Bechet, then Lester Young and tenor saxophonist bebop jazzman Wardell Gray proved to be major influences for him.
An active member of the London jazz scene from the late 1950s, Heckstall-Smith did a six-month stint in 1957 with the Sandy Brown band. He joined Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, a groundbreaking blues group in 1962, recording the album R&B from the Marquee.
The following year, he was a founding member of that band’s breakaway unit, The Graham Bond Organisation. Then in 1967, he joined guitarist-vocalist John Mayall’s blues rock band, Bluesbreakers. He went on to jazz rock with Colosseum until ‘71, then recorded a solo album and ventured into jazz fusion with several groups, which sustained most of his performing through the remainder of his career.
In 1984 he published his witty memoirs, The Safest Place in the World, with an expanded version, retitled Blowing the Blues, published in 2004.
Diagnosed with acute liver failure, tenor, soprano, and baritone saxophonist Dick Heckstall-Smith, who also played piano, clarinet and alto saxophone, transitioned on December 17, 2004 at 70 in Hampstead, London, England.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
David W. Bargeron was born September 6, 1942 in Atho, Massachusetts. He became the lead trombonist with Clark Terry’s Big Band and played bass trombone and tuba with Doc Severinsen’s Band between 1968 and 1970.
In 1970 he joined Blood, Sweat, and Tears after Jerry Hyman departed and first appeared on the album B, S & T; 4. While with this group, he recorded the jazz-rock solo on the tuba in And When I Die/One Room Country Shack on the album Live and Improvised. His recording credits with BS&T include eleven albums. A break in their schedule allowed him to join the Gil Evans Orchestra in 1972.
After leaving Blood, Sweat, and Tears he became a freelance musician recording with Billy Joel, Paul Simon, Mick Jagger, James Taylor, Eric Clapton, David Sanborn, Carla Bley, and Pat Metheny.
He has performed with the George Gruntz Concert Jazz Band from Switzerland, the George Russell Living Time Orchestra, and was a long-time member of Jaco Pastorius’s Word of Mouth Band. He has recorded and toured with Tuba Tuba, a jazz tuba band which includes Michel Godard, Luciano Biondini, and Kenwood Dennard.
He is a member of Howard Johnson’s Gravity, a six-tuba group that has been together since 1968. Trombone and tubist David Bargeron, who has released several albums as a soloist and collaborator, at 80 still performs.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Pierre Courbois was born on April 23, 1940 in Nijmegen, Netherlands and after studying percussion at the Hogeschool der Kunsten in Arnhem, he left for Paris, France which was the center of jazz in Europe in the early 1960s. He worked with pianist Kenny Drew, violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, saxophonists Eric Dolphy, Ben Webster, Stan Getz, and Johnny Griffin, and guitarist René Thomas.
Courbois was one of the first musicians in Europe to experiment with free jazz. In 1961 he became the drummer and leader of the original Free Jazz Quartet. In 1965 he started another group, the Free Music Quintet, composed of international musicians. He also played and recorded with Gunter Hampel’s Heartplants Group with Manfred Schoof and Alexander von Schlippenbach.
Founding the first European jazz-rock group, Association P.C. in 1969, they won the Down Beat poll and stayed together until 1975. In 1982 Pierre put together the group New Association, and played with pianists Mal Waldron and Rein de Graaff, horn players Willem Breuker, Hans Dulfer and Theo Loevendie, and Ali Haurand’s European Jazz Quintet with Gerd Dudeck, Leszek Zadlo and Alan Skidmore.
In 1992 Courbois started a quintet and for the first time in his career performed pieces all composed by himself. This ensemble pleasantly surprised both the critics and the public with a return to the Charles Mingus tradition – thematic, melodic ensemble jazz and an experimentation with linear improvisation. Consistently reinventing himself he has gone on to create the Double Quintet, and the Five Four Sextet.
Drummer, bandleader and composer Pierre Courbois, who was awarded the Bird Award, the highest in the Dutch Jazz World and is a Knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau, continues to perform, record and compose.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Ladislav Déczi was born on March 29, 1938 in Bernolákovo, Czechoslovakia and showed an interest in the trumpet while in elementary school. He went through several music ensembles in high school and during his military service performed in Prague, Czechoslovakia. After his discharge he remained in Prague and started performing with the Rokoko Theater Sextet and then with the Jazz Outsiders. He then went on to work with Karel Velebny’s S+HQ and as the frontman for the Reduta Quartet.
By the mid-Sixties he founded Jazz Celulla, joined the Czechoslovak All Star Band, the Jazz Orchestra of the Czechoslovak Radio, and the Dance Orchestra of the Czechoslovak Radio. He recorded several solo albums, composed orchestral compositions.
Emigrating to America in 1986 he again took the frontman space for Celula New York. He performed with Elvin Jones, Bill Watrous, Junior Cook, Dave Weckl and Sonny Costanzo. He recorded several duo albums with Sarka Dvorak and composed an abundance of music for film and television productions. He has won several awards during his career and has toured Eastern Europe especially his homeland, Germany and Austria.
Trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Laco Déczi, who also paints, continues to perform, compose and record.
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