Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Akua Dixon was born July 14th and raised in New York City, growing up in a family suffused with music, starting with her early experience singing in the Baptist church. She began playing cello in the fourth grade and soon was playing with her sister, the late violinist Gayle Dixon. By junior high they were playing little gigs and in high school she started freelancing.
After graduating from the High School of the Performing Arts, Dixon studied at the Manhattan School of Music and post graduation she joined the pit band at the Apollo Theater as an essential proving ground. There she backed such artists as Rev. James Cleveland, Barry White, James Brown and Dionne Warwick, but after Sammy Davis Jr. insisted the Westbury Music Fair include Black musicians in the orchestra she broke into Broadway pit bands and worked shows the likes of Charles Aznavour, Liza Minnelli (Liza with a Z), La Cage Aux Folles, Cats, Doonesbury, Dream Girls, and many others.
Finding a home with the Symphony of the New World, she experienced the Ellingtonian epiphany that led her to her study and immersion into jazz, spirituals and the secret s of improvising. In the Seventies she joined Noel Pointer’s String Reunion, served as director of new music and supplied the group with a steady stream of compositions and arrangements. At the same time, Akua launched her own string quartet, Quartette Indigo, which made its big league debut at the Village Gate with her sister Gayle Dixon, Maxine Roach, and John Blake Jr.
Throughout her career Dixon has worked and collaborated with Archie Shepp, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Woody Shaw, Jimmy Heath, Frank Foster, Leroy Jenkins, Charles Burnham, Abdul Wadud, Archie Shepp, Don Cherry, Buster Williams, Carmen McRae, Dizzy Gillespie, Abbey Lincoln, Tom Harrell, and her former husband Steve Turre, She was a founding member of the Max Roach Double Quartet where she learned to phrase bebop. She’s conducted for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, lectured at the Smithsonian Institution, and composed an opera commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation, The Opera of Marie Laveau that premiered at Henry Street New Federal Theatre in New York City.
As an educator she has spent much of her time teaching at various institutions and conducting dozens of performances through the Carnegie Hall Neighborhood Concert Series. Cellist, arranger, composer, vocalist and educator Akua Dixon stays busy composing new music for her string group, the Moving On Quartet and other ensembles in addition to performing and recording.
Take A Dose On The Road
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Abdul Wadud was born Ronald DeVaughn on April 30, 1947 in Cleveland, Ohio. The son of R&B singer Raheem DeVaughn, he took up the cello and concentrated solely on the instrument from the age of nine, and never decided to double on bass.
Abdul studied at Youngstown State and Oberlin in the late ’60s and early ’70s. He played in the Black Unity Trio at Oberlin, met Julius Hemphill and the two subsequently worked together well through the Eighties. He has performed with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra in the ’70s, earned his master’s degree in 1972, and then in 1976 played with Arthur Blythe for the first time and has maintain a working relationship.
He also worked and recorded with Frank Lowe, George Lewis, Oliver Lake, Sam Rivers, Cecil Taylor, David Murray, Chico Freeman, Anthony Davis and James Newton. Along with Newton and Davis they performed as a trio and were also a part of the octet Episteme from 1982 to 1984. Abdul recorded and in a duo with Jenkins for Red in the ’70s and as a leader for Bishara and Gramavision in the ’70s and ’80s. He has been a member of the Black Swan Quartet, Human Arts Ensemble, Julius Hemphill Quartet and Muhal Richard Abrams Orchestra.
His plucking and bowed solos have been featured in jazz and symphonic/classical settings, he is easily considered the finest cellist to emerge from the ’60s and ’70s generation, playing in both jazz and classical settings. Cellist Abdul Wadud transitioned on August 10, 2022 in Cleveland, Ohio at the age of 75.
Dose A Day – Blues Away
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Raymond Matthews Brown was born on October 13, 1926 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and started piano lessons at age eight. By high school he noticed a proliferation of pianists, unable to afford his first choice of trombone, took the upright bass vacancy in the high school jazz orchestra.
Influenced early by bassist Jimmy Blanton, the young Brown started making a name for himself around Pittsburgh playing with Jimmy Hinlsey and Snookum Russell. After graduating from high school he bought a one-way ticket to New York, met up with hank Jones, met Dizzy Gillespie who hired him on the spot and started working alongside Art Tatum and Charlie Parker.
During his five-year tenure with Gillespie he met and married Ella Fitzgerald, then worked with Jazz At The Philharmonic, recorded with Blossom Dearie on her first five albums between ‘57 and ‘59, joined Oscar Peterson in 1951 becoming a mainstay for the next 15 years.
In 1966 Ray moved to Los Angeles where he was in high demand by several television show orchestras, worked with Frank Sinatra, Billy Eckstine, Tony Bennett, Sarah Vaughan and Nancy Wilson. Becoming a manager and promoter as well as a performer, Brown managed the Modern Jazz Quartet and a young Quincy Jones, produced shows at the Hollywood Bowl, wrote jazz bass instruction books and developed a jazz cello.
Over the course of his career he has recorded prolifically with a luminary list of musicians, was award a Grammy for his composition Gravy Waltz, reunited with the legendary Oscar Peterson Trio and subsequent albums earned no less than four Grammys. He continued to tour and perform up until the time of his death. Double bassist Ray Brown passed away in his sleep on July 2, 2002 after having played a round of golf in Indianapolis, Indiana. The following year he was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame.
Inspire A Young Mind
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Oscar Pettiford was born September 30, 1922 in Okmulgee, Oklahoma to a Choctaw mother and Cherokee/African American father. Growing up playing in the family band in which he sang and danced, he switched to piano at the age of 12 then to double bass when he was at the age of 14. Despite being admired by the likes of Milt Hinton, he stopped playing in 1941, feeling he couldn’t make a living. Five months later, he once again met Milt, who persuaded him to return to music.
In 1942 he joined the Charlie Barnet band and 1943 saw him gaining wider public attention after recording with Coleman Hawkins on his “The Man I Love.” He also recorded with Earl Hines, Ben Webster, led a group with Dizzy Gillespie and went to California with Hawkins to play in the film The Crimson Canary and on the soundtrack.
Following this he joined Duke Ellington, then Woody Herman but by the 50s mainly became a leader. It was in this role he inadvertently discovered Cannonball Adderley after one of his musicians tricked him into letting Adderley, an unknown music teacher, onto the stand, he had Adderley solo on a demanding piece, on which Adderley performed impressively.
Pettiford is considered the pioneer of the cello as a solo instrument in jazz music, first played the cello as a practical joke on Woody Herman. However, in 1949, after breaking his arm and finding it impossible to play his bass, he started playing the cello allowing him to perform during his rehabilitation. He made his first recordings with the instrument in 1950. The cello thus became his secondary instrument, and he continued to perform and record with it throughout the remainder of his career.
He recorded extensively during the 1950s for the Debut, Bethlehem and ABC Paramount labels among others, and for European companies after his move to Copenhagen, Denmark in 1958. Oscar Pettiford passed away from a virus associated with polio on September 8, 1960 in Copenhagen and along with his contemporary, Charles Mingus, he stands out as one of the most-recorded bassist and bandleader/composers in jazz
Dose A Day – Blues Away
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Ron Carter was born May 4, 1937 in Ferndale, Michigan and started playing the cello at the age of 10, but when his family moved to Detroit, he ran into difficulties regarding the racial stereotyping of classical musicians and instead moved to bass. He attended Cass Technical High School and later the Eastman School of Music, played in the later Philharmonic Orchestra. He received his bachelor’s degree at Eastman in 1959, and in 1961 a master’s degree in double bass performance from the Manhattan School of Music.
His first jobs as a jazz musician were with Jaki Byard and Chico Hamilton and made his first records were made with Eric Dolphy and Don Ellis in 1960. Ron led his first date as leader, “Where?”with Dolphy and Mal Waldron and a date “Out There” with Dolphy, George Duvivier and Roy Haynes playing advanced harmonies and concepts were in step with the third stream movement. He truly came to fame in the early ‘60s in the second great Miles Davis quintet with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Tony Williams.
Over the course of his career, Carter who is also an acclaimed cellist has appeared on over 2,500 albums make him one of the most-recorded bassists in jazz history. He has played with Sam Rivers, Freddie Hubbard, Duke Pearson, Lee Morgan, McCoy Tyner, Andrew Hill, Horace Silver, Joe Henderson, Hank Jones and too many more to name.
He was a member of the New York Jazz Quartet, the Classical Jazz Quartet, was a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of the Music Department of The City College of New York after twenty years teaching and received an honorary Doctorate from the Berklee College of Music. He is currently on the faculty of the Julliard School teaching bass in the school’s Jazz Studies program, sits on the Advisory Committee of the Board of Directors of The Jazz Foundation of America.
Inspire A Young Mind