Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Carla Bley was born Carla Borg on May 11, 1936 is best known for her work as a jazz composer, pianist, organist and band leader in the post bop generation and free jazz movement of the 60s.
Raised in Oakland, California she was encouraged by her father, piano teacher and choirmaster, to sing and learn the piano. Giving up church to immerse herself in roller-skating at fourteen, Carla moved to New York and became a cigarette girl at Birdland. It is here that she met and married Paul Bley, who encouraged her to start composing. Her compositions would later begin to appear on recordings by George Russell and Jimmy Guiffre, with compositions being performed by Gary Burton, Art Farmer and Paul Bley.
In 1964 she was involved in organizing the Jazz Composer Guild bringing together the most innovative musicians in New York and started the JCOA record label, which released albums by Clifford Thornton, Don Cherry and Roswell Rudd, Michael Mantler and herself. With Mantler the two started the New Music Distribution Services, now defunct, that specialized in small, independent labels issuing creative improvised music.
Carla Bley has collaborated with a number of other artists, including Kurt Weill, Jack Bruce, Charlie Haden, Phil Woods, Johnny Griffin, Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Lew Soloff, Phil Woods and her current partner bassist Steve Swallow. She has continued to record frequently with her own big band and a number of smaller ensembles.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Mary Lou Williams was born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs in Atlanta, Georgia on May 8, 1910 but grew up in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh, PA. As a very young child she taught herself to play the piano and one of her greatest influences was Lovie Austin. She had her first public performance at the age of six and went on to help support her ten half-brothers and sisters playing for parties. Mary Lou began performing publicly at the age of seven becoming admiringly known as “the little piano girl of East Liberty”.
In 1924 at age 14 she was taken on the Orpheum Circuit. The following year she played with Duke Ellington and his early small band, the Washingtonians. A year later she was jamming with McKinney’s Cotton Pickers at Harlem’s Rhythm Club and Louis Armstrong stopped in, listened to her picked her up and gave her a kiss. By 1929 she was married to John Williams and composing, arranging and playing piano for Andy Kirk’s Twelve Clouds of Joy, an association that would last until 1942.
Returning to Pittsburgh she put together a group that included Art Blakey, went on the road with Duke Ellington, moved to New York taking a job at Café Society and became closely associated with the bebop generation. She lived in Europe for two years in the fifties and upon her return took a hiatus from performing and began composing religious jazz music.
Throughout the seventies her career flourished recording both group and solo settings and commentating The History of Jazz. She toured extensively playing concerts and festivals, accepting an artist-in-residence appointment at Duke University and performed at the White House in 1978.
Mary Lou Williams was much more than a pianist. She was a composer and arranger who wrote hundreds of compositions and arrangements and recorded more than a hundred records. She wrote and arranged for Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, and was friend, mentor and teacher to Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.
Mary Lou Williams died of bladder cancer on May 28, 1981 in Durham, North Carolina at the age of 71. Looking back over her career at the end of her life Mary Lou Williams was known to have said, “I did it, didn’t I? Through muck and mud.”
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Michael Formanek was born on May 7, 1958 in San Francisco, California. The bassist and composer has had a long association with the jazz scene in New York City.
By the 1980s, Formanek was working as a sideman with Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson, Dave Liebman, Fred Hersch and Attila Zoller. His debut recording released as a leader at the onset of the nineties Wide Open Spaces, featured a few of the young lions at the time, saxophonist Greg Osby, violinist Mark Feldman, guitarist Wayne Krantz and drummer Jeff Hirshfield.
A series of albums followed through the decade as Formanek changed different configurations from trio to septet. Towards the end of the decade he was touring with Gerry Hemingway and recording duo and solo albums. He has worked with Dave Douglas, Marty Ehrlich, Kuumba Frank Lacy, Marvin Smith, Salvatore Bonafede, Peter Erskine, Jane Ira Bloom, Uri Caine, Lee Konitz, Kevin Mahogany and the Mingus Big Band, just to name a few.
Michael Formanek is currently the Director of the Peabody Jazz Orchestra and jazz bass instructor at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, Maryland.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Russell Garcia was born April 12 1916 in Oakland, California but for most of his life has resided in New Zealand. The self-taught musician with only a few lessons in high school could read music from a very young age. He began his career at age five when one of his brothers bought him a $5 cornet. In school he started up a jazz band so he could play his horn and it became an outlet for his compositions and arrangements.
When Garcia was eleven the Oakland Symphony Orchestra performed his arrangement of Stardust and by high school was playing five nights a week. After a year at San Francisco State University he dropped out and went on the road with several big bands. Finding no satisfaction in his progress he went to Hollywood and studied composition, harmony, orchestration, counterpoint and form with the best teachers and took lessons on every instrument so he could write for each with a deeper awareness. During that time while still in his twenties he conducted the West Hollywood Symphony Orchestra, preparing him for things to come.
Russell’s big break came in 1939 when he took the job of composer/conductor for “This Is Our America” and impressed then director Ronald Reagan, who in turn, recommended him to NBC. From that point on worked poured in. He worked with Henry Mancini on the Glenn Miller Story, Charlie Chaplin, Universal Studios, arranged and conducted Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald’s “Porgy & Bess”, then followed up with three more albums with Armstrong.
Always the innovator Garcia left Hollywood for jazz and using experimental frameworks assembled his groundbreaking four-trombone band with famed brass players Frank Rosolino, Tommy Pederson, Maynard Ferguson and Herbie Harper and Marty Paich. He recorded over sixty albums under his own name, as well as composing for Stan Kenton’s cutting edge Neophonic Orchestra. He collaborated with Frances Faye, Anita O’Day, Mel Torme, Andy Williams, Judy Garland, Orson Welles, Julie London and Oscar Peterson.
In 1966 he walked away from his success in music to advocate world peace, a promise he made to himself after surviving World War II’s Battle of the Bulge. He continues to lecture and record around the globe and has authored what is considered the definitive textbooks on composition, “The Professional Arranger Composer Books I and II” used in universities and conservatories worldwide. Composer and arranger Russell Garcia passed away on November 19, 2011.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
James Moody was born March 26, 1925 in Savannah, Georgia but grew up in New Jersey. He was attracted to the saxophone after hearing George Holmes Tate, Don Byas, and Count Basie. Joining the U.S. Air Force in 1943 he played in the “Negro Band” on the segregated base. Following his discharge, he began playing bebop with Dizzy Gillespie for two years. One of his colleagues was Kenny Barron, who would become an important collaborator.
He recorded his first record for Blue Note in 1948, the first in a long career playing both saxophone and flute. Relocating to Europe for three years stating he had been scarred by racism in the U.S., it was during this period that his acclaimed hit “Moody’s Mood For Love” was recorded and he added the alto to his repertoire. Returning to the States in 1952 he recorded with Prestige, played flute and sax with Pee Wee Moore and by the 60’s rejoined Dizzy.
Throughout the seventies he worked in Las Vegas show bands before returning to jazz as a leader and playing with the Lionel Hampton’s Golden Men Of Jazz. Preferring the tenor, Moody alternates with the alto and adding flute on many of his recordings.
The octogenarian continued to be a globetrotter with his quartet featuring pianist Renee Rosnes, bassist Todd Coolman and drummer Adam Nussbaum. He is a member of the Dizzy Gillespie Alumni All-Stars Big Band, often collaborating with conductor Jon Faddis, and worked alongside Jon in the WDR Big Band in Cologne, Germany. James Moody has been an institution in jazz since the 1940’s playing tenor, flute and occasionally the alto saxophone.
Saxophonist, flautist and composer James Moody passed away of complications from pancreatic cancer at age 85 in San Diego, California on December 9, 2010. Two months later he was posthumously awarded the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album for his recording “Moody 4B”, and named in his honor, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center hosts the James Moody Democracy of Jazz Festival.
