Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Bennie Maupin was born on August 29, 1940 in Detroit, Michigan and undertook extensive instrumental studies, both privately and at the Detroit Institute of Musical Art from age 14 until 1962. During this period his influences were Yusef Lateef, Wayne Shorter, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins. By 1966 he was working with Roy Haynes followed by a two-year tenure with Horace Silver in ’68.
Maupin joined Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi sextet and his Headhunters band, and then joined Miles Davis for the recording of Bitches Brew. He has also performed on several Meat Beat Manifesto albums.
Bennie is noted for having a harmonically advanced, “out” improvisation style, and as a composer, he has the ability to create brief melodies and song forms that create vast landscapes for improvisation.
Multireedist Bennie Maupin was also a member of the group “Almanac” with Cecil McBee, has recorded a half dozen albums as a leader and another two-dozen as a sideman. He has worked with the likes of Lee Morgan, Eddie Henderson, Marion Brown, John Beasley, Mike Clark, Jack DeJohnette, Darek Oles, Lonnie Smith, McCoy Tyner and Lenny White. He appears in the 2016 biopic I Called Him Morgan about trumpeter Lee Morgan and continues to pursue his career in music from jazz to rock to abstraction.
In January 2025 he lost his home, instruments, and other belongings in the Eaton Wild Fire in Los Angeles, California. Flutist, clarinetist and saxophonist Bennie Maupin continues to perform and record.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Joel Harrison was born on July 27, 1957 in Washington D.C. In the Sixties he became enamored with the inventive guitarists such as Jimi Hendrix and John McLaughlin. By his twenties, after graduating from Bard College, he hitchhiked across America exploring the rich diversity contained between its coasts.
Joel’s musical style encompasses a melding of jazz, classical, country, rock and world influences as the composer, arranger, songwriter, vocalist and bandleader stretches from concert hall to jazz club and the occasional dive bar. Finding inspiration from music too often barred from admission into the jazz consciousness, he continues his exploration into the reinterpretations of Miles Davis, Charles Ives, Walt Whitman, Jack Kerouac and Hank Williams.
He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a two-time winner of the Jazz Composer’s Alliance Composition Competition, 1st Place at the Percussive Arts Society worldwide competition, and has received grants from Chamber Music America, Meet the Composer, the Flagler Cary Trust, NYSCA, and the Jerome Foundation.
With a string of albums under his belt in a variety of genres, guitarist Joel Harrison has played and recorded with an impressive list of collaborators that includes Christian Howes, Donny McCaslin, Nels Cline, David Binney, Norah Jones, Dave Liebman, Uri Caine, Jamey Haddad, and Dewey Redman. He continues to compose, record, perform and tour.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Tanya Kalmanovitch was born in Fort McMurray, Alberta on July 5, 1970 and learned to play the viola as a child and would go on to master the violin. She attended and graduated in 1992 from Juilliard School with a degree in viola performance and soon after debuted her jazz chops with the Turtle Island String Quartet.
Her 2003 debut recording with her quartet Hut Five was hailed by the Montreal Gazette as “an exceptional recording, one of the more engaging recordings heard in some time” and was garnished with a number of stars by DownBeat magazine. Actively performing in New York City since 2004, Tanya has been named “Best New Talent” by All About Jazz New York, while Time Out New York identified her from a small pool of suspects as “the Juilliard-trained violist who’s been tearing up the scene”.
Tanya has performed with Mark Turner, Benoît Delbecq, Mark Helias, Dominique Pifarély, Andy Laster, Tom Rainey, Ernst Reijseger, Mat Maneri, and the Turtle Island String Quartet, Martin Hayes, John Cage and Shujaat Husain Khan. She has travelled frequently to India where she has studied Karnatic music with violinist Lalgudi G. J. R. Krishnan and veena player Karaikudi S. Subramanian while conducting doctoral dissertation research on jazz exotica.
Teaching regularly at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London UK, the Koninklijk Conservatorium in Den Haag NL, and as a member of the faculty of the department of Creative Improvisation at Boston’s New England Conservatory, she also conducts workshops on improvisation.
She is a founding member of the Brooklyn Jazz Underground, a collective of ten independent bandleaders based in New York City. She is also the Canadian representative to the International Association of Schools of Jazz, a founding member of the Jazz String Caucus of the International Association for Jazz Education, and a mentor to the Sisters in Jazz Program. Violist and violinist Tanya Kalmanovitch now lives in the spaces between modern jazz, classical music and free improvisation as she continues to compose, perform and educate.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Lynne Arriale was born May 29, 1957 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She was adopted as an infant only to discover the piano keyboard at three. Her initial training being classical, eventually earned her Master’s from the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music. However, it wasn’t until after college that her interest in the works of Keith Jarrett and Herbie Hancock led her to jazz.
She gained renown in the 1990s with her collaborator, drummer Steve Davis and bassist Jay Anderson. Lynne first came to prominence when she won the 1993 International Great American Jazz Piano Competition and performed at the Jacksonville Jazz Festival. She has toured Japan with the acclaimed 100 Golden Fingers ensemble, performed with jazz legends Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan, Kenny Barron, Harold Mabern, Junior Mance, Monty Alexander, Roger Kellaway, Ray Bryant, and Cedar Walton.
An active educator and adjudicator pianist Lynne Arriale is a member of The Jazz Education Network has adjudicated the Montreux Jazz Competition, American Pianists Association Fellowship Awards, and The Kennedy Center’s Mary Lou Williams Competition, and the Jacksonville Piano Competition. She is currently Associate Professor of Jazz Studies and Director of Small Ensembles at The University of North Florida in Jacksonville and conducts educational clinics and master classes as she continues to perform and tour throughout the world.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Lou Bennett was born May 18, 1926 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and first learned to play the piano before switching to the organ. It wasn’t until hearing Jimmy Smith play, that Bennett chose to stop playing bebop piano and make this instrument his professional calling.
Lou toured the U.S. with an organ trio between 1957 and 1959, and then moved to Paris in 1960. There he recorded and performed at the Blue Note with Jimmy Gourley, Kenny Clarke, Philip Catherine, Franco Manzecchi and Rene Thomas. He returned to America only once, for the 1964 Newport Jazz Festival.
By the 1980s he played in his own quintet and during this period toured extensively throughout Spain. As a leader he recorded twelve albums for RCA, Impulse, BelAir, Fonatana, Vogue and other labels into the Nineties. Jazz organist Lou Bennett passed away on February 10, 1997 in Paris, France.
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