Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Maurice Brown was born on January 6, 1981 in Harvey, Illinois. Showing a remarkable affinity for the trumpet, he performed with Ramsey Lewis at Chicago’s Symphony Center while matriculating through Hillcrest High School. Following graduation, he received a full scholarship to attend Northern Illinois University, and later continued his studies at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he worked with famed clarinetist Alvin Batiste.
Relocating to New Orleans shortly thereafter, Maurice began sitting in with numerous jazz veterans, including Clark Terry, Johnny Griffin, Ellis Marsalis and Lonnie Plaxico. He recorded as a sideman with Curtis Fuller, Fred Anderson, Roy Hargrove, Michelle Carr and Ernest Dawkins among others.
In 2001 Brown would win first place in the National Miles Davis Trumpet Competition and in 2003 he released his first album as a bandleader, heading his own quintet for Hip to Bop. The project showed an amazing affinity for bop-inflected jazz, along with a willingness to expand the genre’s lexicon through innovative techniques like playing trumpet solos through a wah-wah pedal.
Trumpeter Maurice Brown continues to live in New Orleans, playing both with his quintet and a hip-hop/funk combo called Soul’d U Out.
Dose A Day – Blues Away
More Posts: trumpet
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Myra Melford, born on January 5, 1957 in Evanston, Illinois is an avant-garde and post bop jazz pianist and composer. Raised in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, at 3 she started playing the piano on her own, climbing onto the piano bench and improvising. She began taking lessons when she was in kindergarten and developed a strong relationship with her teacher, classically trained boogie-woogie player Erwin Helfer. He introduced her to classical composers such as Bach before moving on to contemporary composers, such as Bartok. He would later teach her to play the blues.
High school saw Myra attending Northwestern University extension program, enrolling in Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington and studying environmental science. Although she wasn’t listening to jazz she knew it involved improvisation and a sign in a local restaurant for jazz piano lessons sparked her interest in music again. Shortly thereafter she changed her major to music and in 1980 attended Cornish College of the Arts under the tutelage of Art Lande and Gary Peacock.
While living in Olympia, Melford met prominent avant-garde musicians including Oliver Lake, Anthony Braxton Marty Ehrlich and Leroy Jenkins, whose performance with Amina Claudia Myers and Pharaoh Sanders intensified her commitment to improvisation.
A move in 1984 landed Medford in New York City where she studied composition with saxophonist Henry Threadgill, also studied privately with pianists Jaki Byard and Don Pullen, performed with Threadgill Jenkins and Butch Morris. In the late 80s she performed and recorded with flutist Marion Brandis, forming a trio and accelerating her career in the 90s as part of the first Knitting Factory tour of Europe. She recorded three albums with Lindsay Horner and Reggie Nicholson – Jump, Now & Now, and Alive in the House of Saints.
Later in the 90s, Myra moved toward larger groupings with diverse instrumentation, added trumpeter Dave Douglas and reed player Marty Ehrlich and created a quintet, the Myra Melford Extended Ensemble. She also formed a second five-piece, the Same River, and the self-titled debut album was released on Gramavision in 1996, followed by 1999’s Above Blue on Arabesque. She has performed with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and with Equal Interest, playing harmonium instead of piano.
Since 2000, Melford has formed and recorded as a trio, spent time in India studying harmonium, formed another ensemble to present her Indian studies, relocated to Berkeley, California accepting a professorship at UC Berkeley in contemporary improvisation. She formed Trio M and released another debut album in 2007 followed by a sophomore project in 2012
Myra has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s Performing Artist Award, and Alpert Award in the Arts for Music, Jazz Journalist Association Pianist and Composer of the Year among others and has a small but impressive catalogue of eight albums and continues to perform, record and educate.
Inspire A Young Mind
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Gil Mellé was born December 31, 1931 in New York City and began his career in jazz as a post-bop baritone and tenor saxophonist, signed with Blue Note at the age of 19, becoming the first Caucasian on the label. Between 1953 and ’57 he recorded five 10” records and his debut 12” LP, Patterns in Jazz for Blue Note. Leaving the label he then went to Prestige releasing three albums.
In the 1950s, Mellé’s paintings and sculptures were shown in New York galleries and he created the cover art for albums by Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins. During this period Gil played the tenor and baritone saxophone with George Wallington, Max Roach, Tal Farlow, Oscar Pettiford, Ed Thigpen, Kenny Dorham and Zoot Sims.
It was Mellé who introduced engineer Rudy Van Gelder to Alfred Lion, Blue Note’s founder, in 1952 after Lion was impressed with the sound of Mellé’s recordings. Abandoning jazz and moving to Los Angeles in the 60s his road led to composing for film and television, and experimenting with electronic music.
As a film and television composer, Mellé was one of the first to use electronic instruments that he built himself, was first to compose a main theme for Rod Serling’s Night Gallery series arranged entirely for electronic instruments as well as The Six Million Dollar Man. Gil composed more than 125 motion picture scores including That Certain Summer, The Andromeda Strain, The Judge and Jake Wyler.
Gil Mellé died of a heart attack on October 28, 2004 in Malibu, California.
Give The Gift Of Knowledge
More Posts: saxophone
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Jimmy Jones was born James Henry Jones on December 30, 1918 in Memphis, Tennessee and learned guitar and piano as a child. By the late 1920 he was playing in various orchestras in Chicago and played a trio with Stuff Smith in the mid 40s.
Following this period Jones would play with Don Byas, Dizzy Gillespie, J.C. Heard, Buck Clayton, Etta Jones and Sarah Vaughan into the early Fifties. He recorded with Clifford Brown in 1954 and toured Europe. During the Sixties he would play with Anita O’Day, Helen Merrill, Gil Evans, Dakota Staton, Morgana King, Harry Belafonte, Johnny Hodges, Clark Terry, Duke Ellington, Kenny Burrell and Cannonball Adderley on the short list.
Jimmy had a prolific career also as an arranger, working with Wes Montgomery, Nancy Wilson, Shirley Horn, Joe Williams, Billy Taylor and Chris Connor and recorded with Harry “Sweets” Edison, Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, Frank Wess, Milt Jackson and others. His recording catalog was limited as a leader releasing two album for the Riverside label in 1946. Jimmy Jones passed away on April 29, 1982 in Los Angeles, California.
Take A Dose On The Road
More Posts: piano
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Danilo Pérez was born on December 29, 1965 in Panama and started his musical training at 3 years old on bongos with his father Danilo Sr., a professional bandleader and singer. By age 10 he was studying the European Classical Piano repertoire at the National Conservatory in Panama, eventually transferring to the Berklee College of Music to study Jazz composition.
During the yeas 1985 to ’88 while at Berklee, Danilo played with Jon Hendricks, Terence Blanchard, Claudio Roditi and Paquito D’Rivera. He would go on to tour Poland in ’95 and play the Summer Olympics in Atlanta in ‘96 with Wynton Marsalis, be a part of the Grammy winning album Danzon, perform at President Clinton’s Inaugural Ball and played piano on the Bill Cosby theme song.
Perez has had the fortune to play and record with such luminaries as Charlie Haden, Michael Brecker, Jack DeJohnette, Dizzy Gillespie, Tito Puente, Joe Lovano, Gary Burton, Wayne Shorter, Tom Harrell, Roy Haynes, Steve Lacy and many others.
Pianist and composer Danilo Perez, whose primary influence of style and thought was Dizzy Gillespie, but as a child gleaned from the recordings the styles of Gershwin, Ellington, Coltrane and Monk. He has recorded over a dozen albums, served as a professor at the New England Conservatory of Music, and serves as the artistic director of the Berklee College of Music Global Jazz Institute.
Dose A Day – Blues Away
More Posts: piano