Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Jonah Jones was born Robert Elliott Jones in Louisville, Kentucky on December 31, 1909. He started playing alto sax at the age of 12 in the Booker T. Washington Community Center band in Louisville before quickly transitioning to trumpet where he excelled immediately. Jones began his career in the 1920s playing on a riverboat named “Island Queen” which plied between Kentucky and Ohio.
By 1928 he joined with Horace Henderson, later worked with Jimmie Lunceford, had an early and successful collaboration with Stuff Smith from 1932-1936, and by the Forties he was working in big bands like Benny Carter’s and Fletcher Henderson. He would spend most of the decade with Cab Calloway’s band that later became a combo.
Starting in the 1950s he had his own quartet and began concentrating on a formula that gained him wider appeal for a decade. The quartet consisted of George “River Rider” Rhodes on piano, John “Broken Down” Browne on bass and “Hard Nuts “Harold Austin on drums. The most mentioned accomplishment of this style is perhaps their version of “On The Street Where You Live”. This effort succeeded and he began to be known to a wider audience. This led to his quartet performing on “An Evening With Fred Astaire” in 1958 and winning a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Performance by a group in 1960.
Jonah went on to become a sensation in France, returned to more “core” jazz work with Earl Hines, played in the pit orchestra for the stage play Porgy and Bess starring Cab Calloway, was inducted into the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame in 1999. Trumpeter Jonah Jones passed away on April 29, 2000.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Lewis Nash was born December 30, 1958.Growing up in Phoenix, Arizona he was encouraged into jazz by his high school band teacher. By the age of 18, the drummer was a first call sideman for visiting musicians to Phoenix, and received the call to move to New York and join Betty Carter’s band at the age of 22.
he became a highly in-demand sideman during this period, and since his tenure with Carter, has gone on to record and tour with some of the most important and highly regarded jazz musicians of all time. Among them were Tommy Flanagan, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Stitt, Oscar Peterson, Sonny Rollins, Ron Carter, Hank Jones, Nancy Wilson, McCoy Tyner, Wynton Marsalis, Joe Williams and the list goes on and on.
A renowned master stylist, particularly in be-bop and post-bop styles, Nash is at home in a wide range of stylistic territory, including funk, free, and Latin based jazz styles. He is known for his seemingly endless depth of melodic vocabulary, drawing from all eras of jazz percussion, while adding his own unmistakably identifiable approach to the construction of his comping figures and soloing. His versatility has made him one of the foremost brush stylists of his generation.
Nash is also passionate and dedicated to jazz education, and has fostered the careers of a long list of younger players. He is in high demand as a clinician and educator at schools, workshops and major educational jazz festivals worldwide. He formed his own group in the late 1990s and currently leads several groups of varying instrumentation, from duo to septet, as well as a member of Blue Note 7.
More Posts: drums
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Edmund Leonard Thigpen was born on December 28, 1930 in Chicago, Illinois but was raised in Los Angeles, California where he attended the same high school, Thomas Jefferson, as fellow jazz greats Dexter Gordon, Art Farmer and Chico Hamilton. He majored in sociology at Los Angeles City College, left for East St. Louis to pursue music while living with his father, also a drummer, who played with Andy Kirk’s Clouds of Joy.
Ed first worked professionally in New York City with the Cootie Williams orchestra in 1951 at the Savoy Ballroom, during this decade he played with musicians such as Dinah Washington, Gil Melle, Oscar Pettiford, Eddie Vinson, Paul Quinichette, Charlie Rouse, Lennie Tristano, Jutta Hipp, Johnny Hodges, Dorothy Ashby, Bud Powell and Billy Taylor.
In 1959 he replaced guitarist Herb Ellis in the Oscar Peterson Trio in Toronto, Canada, recorded with Teddy Edwards-Howard McGhee in 1961, led his own 1966 session “Out of the Storm” for Verve, and went on tour with Ella Fitzgerald for five years beginning in 1967.
A move to Copenhagen in 1974 saw Thigpen collaborating with several other American expatriate jazz musicians who over the past two decades had settled in the city such as Kenny Drew, Ernie Wilkins, Thad Jones, along with native Danes Mads Vinding, Niels-Henning Orsted Pederson, Alex Riel and Sven Asmussen. He also worked with visiting musicians Clark Terry, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Milt Jackson and Monty Alexander.
Ed Thigpen, a drummer with over 50 albums to his credit as a leader and sideman, passed away peacefully after a brief period in Copenhagen’s Hvidovre Hospital on January 13, 2010 at the age of 80.
More Posts: drums,percussion
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Willie Gary “Bunk” Johnson was born December 27, 1879 although there is some speculation surrounding his birth year as 1889. He received lessons from Adam Olivier, began playing professionally in Olivier’s orchestra and spent some adolescent years occasionally playing with Buddy Bolden’s band.
During the decade 1905-1915 Bunk was regarded as one of the top trumpeters in New Orleans in between repeatedly leaving to tour with minstrel shows and circus bands. In 1931 he lost his trumpet and front teeth when a violent fight broke out at a dance that put an end to his playing. He thereafter worked in manual labor, occasionally giving music lessons on the side when he could.
The later years of the thirties saw writers researching jazz history and trading letters with Johnson in which he stated he could play again if he had new teeth and trumpet. Writers and musicians took up a subsequent collection and got his new dentures via Sidney Bechet’s dentist brother, a new horn and made his first recording in 1942.
This propelled Bunk into public attention, attracting a cult following and he played New Orleans, San Francisco, Boston and New York City. His work in the 1940s show why he was well regarded by his fellow musicians—on his best days playing with great imagination, subtlety and beauty. Earlier fame eluded him for he was unpredictable, temperamental, with a passive-aggressive streak and a fondness for drinking alcohol to the point of serious impairment. In 1948, jazz trumpeter Bunk Johnson suffered from a stroke and died the following year in New Iberia on July 7, 1949.
More Posts: trumpet
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
John Scofield was born on December 26, 1951 in Dayton, Ohio but early in his life the family moved to Wilton, Connecticut and it was here that he discovered his interest in music. He attended Berklee College of Music but left to record with Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan followed by joining the Billy Cobham/George Duke Band touring and recording for two years.
Affectionately known as “Sco”, he went on to record with Charles Mingus, replace Pat Metheny in Gary Burton’s band and in 1976 signed with Enja Records releasing his first album “John Scofield” the next year. He formed his own band with Steve Swallow and Adam Nussbaum in ’70 and joined Miles Davis for three and half years in 1982. Leaving Miles he formed the Blue Matter Band and released three albums, in the nineties he put together a quartet that included Joe Lovano, Charlie Haden and Jack DeJohnette and recorded several albums for Blue Note. Towards the end of his tenure with Blue Note, Scofield returned to a more funk and soul jazz-oriented sound, a direction that has dominated much of his subsequent output to the present.
Scofield has played and collaborated with Joe Henderson, Joey DeFrancesco, Herbie Hancock, Pat Metheny, Bill Frisell, Pat Martino, Mavis Staples, Medeski, Martin & Wood, Jaco Pastorious, John Mayer, Hal Galper and the Metropole Orchestra along with many other well-known artists.
Guitarist John Scofield is at ease in the bebop idiom as well as he is versed in Jazz-fusion, funk, blues, soul, rock and other forms of modern American music and currently is an adjunct professor at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education.
More Posts: guitar