Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Alvin Leroy Fielder Jr was born November 23, 1935 in Meridian, Mississippi to a mother who played the violin and piano and a father who played the cornet and was a pharmacist by profession. His brother William became a trumpeter. He initially learned the piano as a young child, but stopped and did not regain an interest in music until he was 12 when he heard a Max Roach record. He took drum lessons from Ed Blackwell while studying pharmacology at Xavier University of Louisiana, and then continued his degree at Texas Southern University. He did all this while maintaining his musical development by taking lessons with local drummers and performing at night. He went on to complete his pharmacology studies with a master’s degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

In Chicago, Illinois he played with Sun Ra during 1959 and 1960. Encouraged by fellow musicians Muhal Richard Abrams and Beaver Harris, he became more experimental in his playing and went on to be a charter member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). The AACM’s first released recording featured him on Roscoe Mitchell’s Sound. In the mid-to-late 1960s, while working part-time as a pharmacist, Alvin played in his own trio with Fred Anderson and bassist/cellist Lester Lashley.

1969 saw he returned home to Mississippi where he took responsibility for managing the family business, becoming involved in political activism, and continued to pursue his passion for music. In 1971 he met John Reese and helped develop the Black Arts Music Society (BAMS). Fielder was instrumental in bringing many AACM and other musicians to Mississippi. In 1975, he began working with Kidd Jordan in what became the Improvisational Arts band, which featured various musicians over three decades and appeared at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival every year from 1975 to 2008. In 1995, he participated as a founding faculty member in the Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong Summer Jazz Camp.

He recorded twenty-seven albums with Ahmed Abdullah, Charles Brackeen, Damon Smith, and Dennis Gonzalez, and continued exploring free jazz in the 1990s with Joel Futterman, Kidd Jordan, and others, and toured with Andrew Lamb. He was awarded the Resounding Vision Award by Nameless Sound in Houston, Texas. Drummer Alvin Fielder passed away of complications from congestive heart failure and pneumonia, in Jackson, Mississippi on January 5, 2019.

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