Daily Dose Of Jazz…
John Fedchock was born on September 18, 1957 in Cleveland, Ohio and earned his degree in music education from Ohio State University. He holds a master’s degree in Jazz Studies and Contemporary Media from the Eastman School of Music.
Fedchock began his career as a trombonist in 1980 working for several years in the Woody Herman Orchestra, becoming noted for his arrangements. He has worked and toured with T.S. Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Louie Bellson, Bob Belden, Rosemary Clooney, and Susannah McCorkle among others. He has also been a part of the Manhattan Jazz Orchestra and the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band.
An avid educator, he is in demand as a clinician at colleges and universities, was the trombone chair for the IAJE Resource Team, a board member of the International Trombone Association and is a trombone instructor at Purchase College and Temple University. As a leader John recorded his first album in 1992 with the New York Big Band, which remains active to the present.
Trombonist John Fedchock has followed with eight more recordings, his latest being Justifiably J.J.: A Centennial Tribute (Live at the Jazz Kitchen, Indianapolis) and continues to perform, record and tour.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Sil Austin was born Sylvester Austin on September 17, 1929 in Dunnelion, Florida and taught himself to play as a 12 year old. He won the Ted Mack Amateur Hour in St. Petersburg, Florida in 1945, playing “Danny Boy”. His performance brought him a record deal with Mercury Records and he moved to New York and studied at the Juilliard School of Music.
Austin played briefly with Roy Eldridge, Cootie Williams in 1951–52 and Tiny Bradshaw from 1952-54, before setting up his own successful touring group. He recorded over 30 albums for Mercury with a number of Top 40 hits on the pop charts with tunes like “Danny Boy” (his signature), “Slow Walk” and “My Mother’s Eyes”.
Sil Austin, a saxophonist who considered Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, and Sonny Stitt as his major influences, passed away of prostate cancer on September 1, 2001.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Hamiet Bluiett was born on September 16, 1940 in Brooklyn a.k.a. Lovejoy, Illinois, that was founded as a free black refuge community in the 1830s. As a child, he studied piano, trumpet, and clarinet, but was attracted most strongly to the baritone saxophone from the age of ten. He began his musical career by playing the clarinet for barrelhouse dances in Brooklyn, Illinois, before joining the Navy band in 1961. He attended Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
Following his time in the Navy, he returned to the St. Louis area in the mid-1960s. In the late 1960s Bluiett co-founded the Black Artists’ Group (BAG) in St. Louis, Missouri, comprised of a collective dedicated to fostering creative work in theater, visual arts, dance, poetry, film, and music. He led the BAG big band during 1968 and 1969.
Bluiett moved to New York City in 1969 and joined the Charles Mingus Quintet and the Sam Rivers large ensemble. In 1976 he co-founded the World Saxophone Quartet with two other BAG members, Julius Hemphill and Oliver Lake and David Murray. The group would quickly become jazz music’s most renowned saxophone quartet. He has remained a champion of the somewhat unwieldy baritone saxophone, organizing large groups of baritone saxophones.
In the 1980s, he also founded The Clarinet Family, a group of eight clarinetists playing clarinets of various sizes ranging from E-flat soprano to contrabass. Since the 1990s he has led a virtuosic quartet, the Bluiett Baritone Nation, made up entirely of baritone saxophones, with drum set accompaniment. His return to his hometown in 2002 affords him the opportunity to gig, perform with students from Neighborhood Music School in New Haven, Connecticut under the name of “Hamiet Bluiett and the Improvisational Youth Orchestra”.
Baritone saxophonist Hamiet Bluiett recorded over three-dozen albums and continued to perform, record and tour until his passing on October 4, 2018 at the age of 78 in St. Louis, Missouri.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Leonard Geoffrey Feather was born on September 13, 1914 in London, England and learned to play the piano and clarinet without formal training and started writing about jazz and film by his late teens. At age of twenty-one, Feather made his first visit to the United States and after working in the U.K. and the U.S. as a record producer finally settled in New York City in 1939, where he lived until moving to Los Angeles, California in 1960.
His compositions have been widely recorded, including “Evil Gal Blues” and “Blowtop Blues” by Dinah Washington, and what is possibly his biggest hit, “How Blue Can You Get?” by blues artists Louis Jordan and B. B. King, and some of his own recordings as a bandleader are still available. But it was as a journalist, critic, historian, and campaigner that he made his biggest mark as one of the most widely read and most influential writer on jazz, and having written the liner notes for hundreds of jazz albums.
Leonard wrote the lyrics to the Benny Golson jazz composition “Whisper Not” which was then recorded by Ella Fitzgerald on her 1966 Verve release of the same name. He was co-editor of the Metronome Magazine and served as the chief jazz critic for the Los Angeles Times until his death on September 22, 1994 in Sherman Oaks, California at age eighty.
He leaves a legacy of a talented daughter, vocalist Lorraine Feather, a couple of dozen albums and several books such as The Encyclopedia Yearbook of Jazz in the Sixties, Inside Jazz and From Satchmo to Miles among others.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Lonnie Plaxico was born on September 4, 1960 in Chicago, Illinois and started playing the bass at age twelve. He turned professional at 14 playing both double bass and bass guitar. His first recording was with his family’s band, and by the time he was twenty he had moved to New York City, where he had stints playing with Chet Baker, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Stitt, Junior Cook, and Hank Jones..
In 1978 he won the Louis Armstrong Jazz Award but first came to public attention through his work with the Wynton Marsalis group in 1982. Lonnie’s first regular attachment was with Art Blakey‘s Jazz Messengers from 1983–1986, with whom he recorded twelve albums. At the end of his work relationship with Blakey he joined Jack DeJohnette’s Special Edition, and stayed with them until 1993. During his tenure with Blakey, in the mid-1980s he joined the M-Base collective and played on the debut-releases of Steve Coleman, Cassandra Wilson, and Greg Osby
Plaxico held the musical director and featured bassist position for Cassandra Wilson for fifteen years and has performed and recorded with a wide range of artists, including Dizzy Gillespie, David Murray, Alice Coltrane, Stanley Turrentine, Andrew Hill, Joe Sample, Abbey Lincoln, Bill Cosby, Lonnie Liston Smith, Ravi Coltrane, Scott Tixier, Barbara Dennerlein, Helen Sung and Nina Vidal, among others.
Double bassist Lonnie Plaxico has thirteen albums to his credit as a leader and continues to perform and record.
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