Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Sara Jacovino was born on July 9, 1983 and earned both a Bahelors and Masters degree in music from the University of North Texas. While there she studied composition with Neil Slater and Paris Rutherford and trombone with Steve Wiest and Tony Baker.
Since leaving Texas for New York City, she has entrenched herself in the jazz scene as a trombonist, composer, and arranger. who has drawn the recognition of many of her peers nationwide. She has received awards from the BMI Foundation, Downbeat Magazine, the Airmen of Note, The International Trombone Association and among others.
Sara leads her own quartet and is a member of The Birdland Big Band, The Diva Jazz Orchestra, David Berger and the Sultans of Swing, Band of Bones, The Manhattan Bridges Orchestra, and The Afro-Bop Alliance. She is an active musician in the Broadway scene performing in numerous musical productions and currently holds the tenor/bass trombone chair in “Tina, The Tina Turner Musical” at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre.
A sought after session musician as both a lead/section trombonist and soloist. Her writing and playing is often featured by the Birdland Big Band, The Diva Jazz Orchestra, and can be heard on numerous albums by the University of North Texas One O’Clock Lab Band including: “Lab 2008,” “Lab 2007,” “Lab 2006” and “Live at Blues Alley, and by the award winning UTubes Jazz ensemble.
She enjoys working as a guest artist and clinician for University and High school jazz programs. Sara will be a guest performer and clinician at both the International Trombone Festival in 2021 and IWBC Festival in 2022.
Trombonist Sara Jacovino continues to perform, compose, arrange and continues to accept commissioned works.
More Posts: arranger,bandleader,composer,history,instrumental,jazz,music,trombone
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Lembit Saarsalu was born July 8, 1948 in Roosna-Alliku, Estonia. He started playing jazz at an early age. He debuted at the Tallinn International Jazz Festival at the age of 16. He worked for many years in the State Philharmonic of the Estonian SSR , where as a paid musician he gave numerous concerts both at home and abroad. In the 1980s, Saarsalu devoted himself completely to jazz.
For decades, he has led local and international ensembles. He worked in a duo with Leonid Vintskevich, started a new international jazz festival Rainbow Jazz with music producer Merle Kollom and a competition for young musicians in Tartu.
As an educator Saarsalu introduced jazz in schools and has performed together with Olav Ehala and other well-known Estonian musicians for more than 40,000 students. Since the fall of 2016, he has been working as a saxophone and ensemble teacher in the rhythm music department of the Tartu Music School.
In the 1980s Eesti Televisioon made two films about Lembit, he has performed on Finnish and Spanish television and has made numerous recordings, numbering 200 recordings for Estonian Radio. His style ranges from blues and swing to free forms of jazz.
He has been repeatedly chosen as the best tenor saxophonist, awarded the annual prize of the Sound Art Endowment Fund of the Estonian Cultural Capital.
Saxophonist , bandleader and composer Lembit Saarsalu, who has been called the saxophone king and the calling card of Estonian jazz, continues to perform, compose and teach.
More Posts: bandleader,composer,history,instrumental,jazz,music,saxophone
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Ron Collier was born on July 3, 1930 in Coleman, Alberta, Canada and began his musical training in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He was a member of the Kitsilano Boys’ Band. He studied music privately in Toronto with Gordon Delamont and was the first jazz musician to receive a Canada Council grant that led him to study orchestration in New York in 1961 and 1962.
He formed the Ron Collier Jazz Quartet, which performed in the 1950s at the Stratford Festival and on CBC’s Tabloid with Portia White, and in 1963 with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra.
Duke Ellington performed with the Ron Collier Orchestra on the 1969 album North of the Border in Canada. The album included his compositions and those by several Canadian composers. He also created orchestrations for a number of Ellington’s concerts and recordings.
He composed the scores to three films in the 1970s and began directing a student orchestra at Toronto’s Humber College. His band won the Big Band Open Class at the Canadian Stage Band Festival in 1982. He would go on to perform in and lead a number of jazz groups.
Trombonist, composer, and arranger Ron Collier, who was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, died on October 22, 2003 in Toronto, Canada at the age of 73.
More Posts: arranger,composer,history,instrumental,jazz,music,trombone
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Darius Brubeck was born David Darius Brubeck on June 14, 1947 in San Francisco, California into a musical family. His father Dave and mother Iola Brubeck named after his father’s teacher and mentor, French composer Darius Milhaud. Moving from Oakland, California they settled in Wilton, Connecticut in 1960 and ultimately graduated from Wilton High School in 1965.
Darius majored in ethnomusicology and the history of religion at Wesleyan University, graduating cum laude in 1969. While there he composed and performed the music for the film Christopher’s Movie Matinee. During the next decade and into the early 1980s he would go on to lead two groups, The Darius Brubeck Ensemble and Gathering Forces, cross America as a sideman with Don McLean and record two albums with guitarist Larry Coryell. He toured the world and recorded as a member of Two Generations of Brubeck and The New Brubeck Quartet, both led by his father.
In 1983, Brubeck and his South African wife, Catherine, moved to Durban, South Africa, joined the music Department at the University of Natal and initiated the first degree course in Jazz Studies offered by an African university. In 1989, he was appointed as Professor of Jazz Studies and Director of the Centre for Jazz and Popular Music, where he taught until 2005.
A move to London, England in 2005, Darius taught courses at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and Brunel University. Appointed as a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Jazz Studies in 2007, he taught at Yıldız Technical University in Istanbul, turkey and subsequently at the Gheorghe Dima Music Academy in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, in 2010.
His years in South Africa saw him forming five student/staff bands, record the album The Jazzanians: We Have Waited Too Long to be released in 2024, form the band Afro Cool Conceptwhich toured for nearly 15 years and recorded a live album in New Orleans.
As a composer Brubeck has written music for all types of ensemble, large and small. He has arranged and written an original composition for his father’s 80th birthday, and the Rockefeller Foundation awarded him a residency as a composer at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Italy.
Pianist, author, composer, arranger and educator Darius Brubeck, who has had a documentary film made by Michiel ten Kleij titled Playing the Changes: Tracking Darius Brubeck, currently leads The Darius Brubeck Quartet.
More Posts: arranger,bandleader,composer,educator,history,instrumental,jazz,music,piano
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Richard M. Jones, born Richard Marigny Jones on June 13, 1892 in Donaldsonville, Louisiana and grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana. Suffering from a stiff leg he walked with a limp, causing fellow musicians to give him the nickname “Richard My Knee Jones” as a pun on his middle name. In his youth he played alto horn in brass bands. His main instrument, however, became the piano and by 1908 he was playing in Storyville, the red-light district of New Orleans. A few years later, he often led a small band which sometimes included Joe Oliver and also worked in the bands of John Robichaux, Armand J. Piron, and Papa Celestin.
In 1918, Jones moved to Chicago, Illinois where he worked as Chicago manager for publisher and pianist Clarence Williams. Jones began recording in 1923, making gramophone records as a piano soloist, accompanist to vocalists, and with his bands The Jazz Wizards and The Chicago Cosmopolitans. He recorded for Gennett, OKeh, Victor, and Paramount record labels in the 1920s.
He also worked for OKeh Records as supervisor of the company’s “Race” Records for most of the decade, separately the Caucasian artists from the Black. During this period he was the producer of Louis Armstrong’s influential Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings. In the 1930s, Jones performed a similar management role for Decca.
Pianist, composer, band leader, and record producer Richard M. Jones, sometimes written Richard Mariney Jones and who had numerous songs bearing his name as author, including Trouble in Mind and worked for Mercury Records until his death on December 8, 1945 in Chicago, at the age of 53.