MALA WALDRON

Mala’s music career has taken her all over the world, performing for international tours and festivals, as well in some of NYC’s most prestigious stages, including the Iridium Jazz Club, the Blue Note, the Jazz Standard, the 55 Bar, and Brooklyn’s BAM Café. Most recently she performed in Washington DC at the Kennedy Center.

Mala was a featured performer at the first annual Coltrane Day Festival, was featured in the book, Giving Birth to Sound: Women in Creative Music (Renate da Rin and & William Parker editors) and can be seen in the documentary film, ‘The Girls in the Band,” directed by Judy Chaikin.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Fred Hersch was born October 21, 1955 in Cincinnati, Ohio to Jewish parents and began playing the piano at the age of four, composing music by eight. By ten he won national piano competitions.

Hersch first became interested in jazz while at Grinnell College in Iowa. He dropped out of school and started playing jazz in Cincinnati, continuing his studies at the New England Conservatory under Jaki Byard and attracting attention from the press in a college recital. Upon graduation, he became a jazz piano instructor at the college.

1977 saw Fred moving to New York City, then gigged with Art Farmer in Los Angeles, California in 1978. He would play with Farmer again three years later, played for singer Chris Connor, then with Joe Henderson. He would go on to perform with Jane Ira Bloom, Jamie Baum, Toots Thielemans, Eddie Daniels, and Janis Siegel. A fortuitous firing of his pianist by Art Pepper gave Hersch the launch of his career when he filled in for the pianist.

In 1986, he taught at Berklee College of Music, performed and recorded sixty-four albums as a leader or co-leader, seventy-nine as a sideman and wrote an autobiography, Good Things Happen Slowly: A Life In and Out of Jazz.

In 1993, Hersch came out as gay and has been treated for HIV since 1984. He fell into a coma in 2008 for two months but when he regained consciousness, he had lost all muscular function as a result of his long inactivity and could not play the piano. After rehabilitation, he was able to play again. He continues to compose, perform and record.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Fritz Pauer was born on October 14, 1943 in Vienna, Austria and began his professional playing career as a teenager, performing with Hans Koller for two years beginning in 1960 before leading his own ensembles in Berlin, Germany. In the 1960s he played with Don Byas, Booker Ervin, Dexter Gordon, Friedrich Gulda, Annie Ross and Art Farmer, recording three albums with the latter as a sideman.

As an educator he taught at the Vienna Municipal Conservatory from 1968-1970, after which he became a member of the ORF-Big Band. The 1970s saw Fritz recording as a leader as well as with Klaus Weiss and Peter Herbolzheimer.

By the mid-1980s Pauer was living in Peru for a brief period, then moved to Switzerland in 1986. Later in life education once again entered his life and he became a university professor. An early 2000s collaboration with Jay Clayton and Ed Neumeister was released as the album 3 for the Road.

Pianist, composer and bandleader Fritz Pauer transitioned on July 1, 2012.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

George Colar, better known as Kid Sheik or Kid Sheik Cola, was born on September 15, 1908 in New Orleans, Louisiana. In his youth he started playing blues piano around 1920, but took up trumpet after being inspired by and taking lessons from Wooden Joe Nicholas and Chris Kelly for whom he sat in from time to time. During this period he briefly had a band of his own.

In the Thirties he played second trumpet with Buddy Petit, marched with Kid René’s band and from 1952 was a member of the Eureka Brass Band. He worked with George Lewis in the mid-1940s. His Gin Mill Blues is considered a nice fish fries boogie.

Over the years, Kid Sheik performed with many jazz notables, including Harold Dejan’s Olympia Brass Band and Louis Armstrong. By the 1960s he had his own band. He was still blowing strong in New Orleans in 1970.

Kid Sheik was the subject of the official New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival poster in 1990. He is featured in a 35mm twelve-minute black and white film directed by Frank Decola titled The Cradle Is Rocking, a copy of which is in the Folkstreams Collection in the Southern Folklife Collection of the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

He is most associated with Dixieland jazz and was a long-term performer with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. In his later years, he married pianist Sadie Goodson. Trumpeter Kid Sheik Cola, who got his nickname from his chic style of dress, transitioned on November 7, 1996.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Joseph Jarman was born on September 14, 1937 in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and grew up in Chicago, Illinois. At DuSable High School, he studied drums with Walter Dyett, switching to saxophone and clarinet when he joined the United States Army after graduation. During his time there, he was part of the 11th Airborne Division Band for a year.

After his discharge in 1958, Jarman attended Wilson Junior College, where he met bassist Malachi Favors Maghostut and saxophonists Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill, and Anthony Braxton. These men would often perform long jam sessions at the suggestion of their professor, Richard Wang. Mitchell introduced Jarman to pianist Muhal Richard Abrams, and Jarman, Mitchell, and Maghostut joined Abrams’ Experimental Band, a private, non-performing ensemble, when that group was founded in 1961. The same group of musicians along with Fred Anderson and Phil Cohran went on to found the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in 1965,.

His solo recording career began at this time, putting together a sextet, however, Jarman disbanded the group in 1969 after the passing of two members. He had joined Mitchell, Maghostut and Lester Bowie in the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble which would eventually become known as the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The group was known for being costumed on stage for different reasons.

The group moved to Paris in 1969, and lived there for many years in a commune that included Steve McCall, the drummer who went on to form the jazz trio Air. Moving back to Chicago in the 1970s, Joseph  lived in a musicians’ building in Hyde Park, with Malachi Favors as his roommate. In 1983, he moved to Brooklyn, New York.

Jarman left the Ensemble until 1993 to focus on his spiritual practice, and didn’t return to music until 1996, releasing two albums and then joining a trio with Myra Melford in Chicago, which would eventually be called Equal Interest.

Along with the saxophone and clarinet, Jarman also played (and recorded on) nearly every member of the woodwind family, as well as a wide variety of percussion instruments. Aside from his work with relatively traditional jazz line-ups, he also composed for larger orchestras and created multimedia pieces for musicians and dancers.

Saxophonist, composer, and poet Joseph Jarman transitioned from respiratory failure at the Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, New Jersey on January 9, 2019. He was 81.

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