Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Chris Biscoe was born on February 5, 1947, in Pensford, Somerset, England and in 1963 taught himself to play alto saxophone and then started playing tenor, soprano, baritone, and also comparatively rare alto clarinet. Before he became a notable presence on the UK Jazz scene, he was a computer programmer.
From 1970 to 1973 Biscoe played with National Youth Jazz Orchestra in London, doing gigs with various other London-based bands of that period, including Redbrass. He worked with several notable jazz musicians during the Seventies such as Harry Beckett, Ken Hyder, Didier Levallet, Chris McGregor, Andy Sheppard, Graham Collier, Danilo Terenzi, Pete Hurt, Tommy Chase, Pete Saberton, Barry Guy, Dave Holdsworth, and Pete Jacobsen.
In 1979, Chris had a long-term association with Mike Westbrook touring throughout Europe and playing international festivals in Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Canada and the USA. In the same year, he also formed a quartet featuring Peter Jacobsen, expanded to a quintet in 1980, a sextet in 1986, and reformed as a quartet in 1987. During the Eighties he also recorded two albums.
During the late 1980s and 1990s, Biscoe toured and recorded with George Russell, Andy Sheppard, Liam Noble, Gail Thompson’s Jazz Africa, Harry Beckett, and also played in France with Didier Levallet’s groups and the collective band called Zhivaro. In 1991, he released a second cassette, Modern Alarms, and also recorded in the Dedication Orchestra in the Spirits Rejoice project.
Between 1997 and 2000, he became the first English musician to join the Orchestre National de Jazz. Multi-instrumentalist Chris Biscoe plays the alto, soprano, tenor and baritone saxophone, the alto clarinet, piccolo, and flute and continues to play and record.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Leroy Williams was born in Chicago, Illinois on February 3, 1939 and first began playing drums as a teenager in the 1950s. From 1959 to the middle of the 1960s he played with Judy Roberts, and following this stint he moved to New York City and played with Booker Ervin in 1967.
1968 found him playing with Sonny Rollins, Archie Shepp, and Clifford Jordan; in 1969 he first began playing and collaboration with Barry Harris. 1970 saw him playing with Hank Mobley, Wilbur Ware, and Thelonious Monk, the latter of which he went with on a tour of Japan.
Later in the 1970s he played and recorded with Hank Mobley, Yusef Lateef, Ray Bryant, Charles McPherson, Stan Getz, Andrew Hill, Sonny Stitt, Junior Cook, Al Cohn, Buddy Tate, Ted Dunbar, Slide Hampton, Red Rodney and Bob Wilber, among others.
In the 1980s Williams played with Talk Talk, Level 42, Art Davis, Barry Harris, Tommy Flanagan, Steve Turre, and recorded with Pepper Adams, Bill Hardman. In the 1990s he performed and recorded with Frank Morgan, with Anthony Braxton, Lee Konitz, Ralph Lalama, and Pete Malinverni. Most recently, he was a member of El Mollenium with Roni Ben-Hur, Bertha Hope, and Walter Booker.
He was a member of the cast in the music documentary Bird Now and played one of the Angels of Mercy in the Steve Martin film spoof Leap Of Faith about fake faith healers. At the turn of the decade, Williams was a member of the cooperative band el Mollenium, which also included guitarist Roni Ben-hur, pianist Bertha Hope, and bassist Walter Booker. The band is devoted largely to interpreting the music of the late pianist Elmo Hope. Drummer Leroy Williams continues to be active.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
On January 31, 1928 Keshav Sathe was born in Bombay, India where he began his professional career in 1951, working with a local Indian vocalist by the name of Kelkar. He moved to the United Kingdom in 1956 and joined the Asian Music Circle, a pool of London-based Indian musicians run by former political activist Ayana Deva Angadi. He worked with visiting Indian sitarist Bhaskar Chandavarkar, and in 1961 they played together with the harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler. This was his initial contact with jazz.
In 1965 Sathe began his Indo Jazz Fusion performances and recordings with John Mayer and Joe Harriott, a musical relationship that lasted until 1970. In 1967 his trio was invited with Diwan Motihar on sitar, and Kasan Thakur playing the tamboura, to join the trio of jazz pianist Irène Schweizer together with Barney Willen, Mani Neumeier, Uli Trepte and Manfred Schoof. They appeared at the Donaueschingen Festival and Berlin Jazz Tage and recorded Jazz Meets India in Villingen, the Black Forest.
In the Seventies, he worked and toured with Julie Felix and Danny Thompson, joined the John Renbourn Group, toured the UK, Europe and the US, and produced records, including A Maid in Bedlam, Enchanted Garden and Live in America.
In the 1980s, Sathe formed a group with Tony Roberts which included the dancer Shobhana Jeyasingh, touring UK and Northern Ireland. With the singer Alisha Sufit and group, he made the record “Magic Carpet”. From 1965 to 1993 he regularly accompanied the late singer/dancer Surya Kumari in recitals and teaching workshops. He appears on Suns of Arqa’s live album Musical Revue which was recorded in Manchester in 1982.
Apart from these, Keshav has made numerous incidental recordings, worked for television, radio, and taught tabla until 2003. Indian tabla player Keshav Sathe, best known for his contributions to the Indo-jazz fusion genre passed away on January 18, 2012.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Bernie Leighton, born on January 30, 1921 in West Haven, Connecticut, first played piano professionally at the end of the 1930s. In the early Forties, he played with Bud Freeman, Leo Reisman, Raymond Scott and Benny Goodman before serving in the Army.
Following his discharge, he found work as a studio sideman through the Sixties with Dave Tough, Billie Holiday, Neal Hefti, Goodman again, Artie Shaw, John Serry, Sr., James Moody and Bob Wilber. He toured a year with Tony Bennett from 1972 to 1973.
While Leighton was best known as a sideman, he also recorded extensively as a leader, releasing albums on Keynote Records, Mercury Records, Columbia Records, Brunswick, Disneyland and Capitol. He also recorded a tribute to Duke Ellington released in 1974. He has a cameo role in the 1986 film Hannah and Her Sisters. Pianist Bernie Leighton passed away on September 16, 1994 in Coconut Creek, Florida.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Charles Frederic Ramsey, Jr. was born on January 29, 1915 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Taking his BA at Princeton University in 1936, then went to work at Harcourt Brace in the late Thirties. The early Forties had him at the United States Department of Agriculture and Voice of America.
With Charles Edward Smith, Ramsey wrote Jazzmen in 1939, an early landmark of jazz scholarship particularly noted for its treatment of the life of King Oliver. After receiving Guggenheim fellowships, he visited the American South in the middle of the 1950s to make field recordings and do interviews with rural musicians, some of which were used in releases by Folkways Records and in a 1957 documentary, Music of the South.
He curated an anthology of early jazz recordings for Folkways, titled simply Jazz. Ramsey worked with the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University from 1970. He researched Buddy Bolden’s life with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and continued with a Ford Foundation grant. He presented early jazz interviews on National Public Radio in 1987. The writer of jazz and record producer Charles Ramsey passed away on March 18, 1995 in Paterson, New Jersey.