Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Giorgio Gaslini born October 22, 1929 in Milan, Italy. He began performing aged 13 and recorded with his jazz trio at 16. In the 1950s and 1960s, He performed with his own quartet. He was the first Italian musician mentioned as a “new talent” in the Down Beat poll and the first Italian officially invited to a jazz festival in the USA New Orleans 1976-77.
He collaborated with leading American soloists, such as Anthony Braxton, Steve Lacy, Don Cherry, Roswell Rudd, Max Roach, but also with the Argentinian Gato Barbieri and Frenchman Jean-Luc Ponty. He also adapted the compositions of Albert Ayler and Sun Ra for solo piano, which the Soul Note label issued. He also composed the soundtrack of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1961 La notte (The Night).
From 1991 to 1995, Gaslini composed works for Carlo Actis Dato’s Italian Instabile Orchestra, and was the first to teach jazz courses at the Santa Cecilia Academy of Music in Rome in 1972. In the Seventies he scored ten films between 1970 to 1977.
Pianist, composer and conductor Giorgio Gaslini, who composed symphonic works, operas, and ballets, passed away on July 29, 2014 at 84 in Borgo Val di Taro, Italy in the province of Parma.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Spencer Williams was born on October 14, 1889 in New Orleans, Louisiana and was educated at St. Charles University in his hometown. Performing in Chicago, Illinois by 1907, he moved to New York City about 1916 where he co-wrote several songs with Anton Lada of the Louisiana Five. Among those songs was Basin Street Blues, which became one of his most popular songs and is still recorded by musicians to this day.
Touring Europe with bands from 1925 to 1928, during this time he wrote for Josephine Baker at the Folies Bergère in Paris. Returning to New York City for a few years, at the end of the Roaring Twenties, Williams was tried but then acquitted on a charge of murder. In 1932, he was back in Europe where he spent many years in London, England before moving to Stockholm in 1951.
A prolific composer, some of Spencer’s compositions that became hit songs were Basin Street Blues, I Ain’t Got Nobody, Royal Garden Blues, Mahogany Hall Stomp, I’ve Found a New Baby, Tishomingo Blues and Everybody Loves My Baby, among numerous others.
Returning once again to New York City in 1957, pianist, composer, vocalist and bandleader Spencer Williams, was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He passed away on July 14, 1965 in Flushing, New York.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Steve Elmer was born on October 6, 1941 in Brooklyn, New York. He began his musical training as a drummer in a Brooklyn junior high school when he was thirteen years old. He briefly attended Manhattan School of Music before he became the featured jazz drummer with the All American Big Brass Band’s 16-country three-month tour of Africa.
On his return, he spent the next two years playing drums with the Pepe Morreale Trio and cornetist Bobby Hackett. Elmer then earned his B.S in Music Education from Hofstra University and took a job teaching music in a Passaic, New Jersey elementary school followed by a year-and-a-half at Manhattan Vocational- Technical High School.
At age 25, Steve took the first of many formal piano lessons with the brilliant jazz pianist and teacher Lennie Tristano. After six years of intense training, Elmer decided to move away from the Tristano influence and follow his own musical instincts.
In 1969 Steve attended Queens College where he received a Master’s degree in Music Composition, and accepted an invitation to become an assistant professor. He developed a BA in Jazz Studies program where he and Count Basie alumnus Frank Foster served as the faculty.
Elmer stopped playing professionally from 1976-1991 until he met a young drummer named Myles Weinstein and discovered they were both on the same musical wavelength. He and Myles formed a group called The Jazz Mentality Chris Potter on saxophones and Ralph Hamperian on bass. The group recorded two CDs, Maxwell’s Torment and Show Business Is My Life featuring many of Steve’s original compositions.
In 2006, Steve recorded I Used To Be Anonymous, featuring nine original compositions. The trio toured Japan, recorded Fire Down Below, their second CD, in 2008 featuring ten more of his original compositions and a lot of classic jazz playing. Pianist and drummer Steve Elmer is looking forward to a return to Japan and recording his first solo piano album.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Bryce Benno Rohde was born on September 12, 1923 in Hobart, Tasmania, an island state of Australia. His early influences were Art Tatum and Nat King Cole but eventually leaned towards George Russell’s Lydian Concept.
He played jazz in Adelaide, Australia early in his career before a 1953 move to Canada. In 1954 he and two other expats plus an American formed the Australian Jazz Quartet/Quintet. The group recorded several albums and toured widely in the United States, but broke up in 1958 following a tour of Australia.
Rohde led his own quartets in Australia until 1964, then moved to California in 1965. After then he based himself out of San Francisco, leading his own ensembles at times. Among those Australian musicians with whom he worked extensively are Bruce Cale and Charlie Munro.
The pianist played New York City and Chicago, and recorded for Bethlehem Records. He also published a book combining original jazz compositions and his other passion, black and white photography. It shares the title of one of his seven recordings as a leader, Turn Right At New South Wales.
Over a career in jazz spanning more than 50 years he performed with Count Basie, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, and John Coltrane among others. He eventually settled in San Francisco, California where he continued to perform and record until his death. Pianist, composer and bandleader Bryce Rohde passed away on January 26, 2016.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Cæcilie Norby was born on September 9, 1964 in Frederiksberg, Denmark, into a musical family, her father a classical composer and her mother an opera singer. She was a founding member of the band Street Beat in 1982 then for two years, she was a member of the jazz-rock band Frontline. From 1985 to 1993, she worked with singer Nina Forsberg in the rock band One~Two. During the 1990s, she turned to jazz and released her first solo album for Blue Note.
Her self~titled debut recording co~produced by Niels Lan Doky featured Scott Robinson, Randy Brecker and Michael Brecker each played on one track. Doky produced her following album My Corner Of The Sky in 1996, which prominently featured pianists David Kikoski, Joey Calderazzo and Terri Lyne Carrington on drums. The repertoire for both recordings included only a few jazz standards like Summertime or Just One of Those Things, instead she and Lan Doky arranged classic popular songs for a jazz line-up, like Wild Is the Wind, By the Time I Get to Phoenix and a track by Curtis Mayfield on the first album. The Look of Love, Life on Mars, Spinning Wheel and Set Them Free by Sting she recorded on the second.
For both albums Norby wrote lyrics to compositions by Randy Brecker, Chick Corea, Don Grolnick and Wayne Shorter. Both albums gained wide attention and five-digit sales, especially in Denmark and also in Japan.
Her third album Queen of Bad Excuses, released in 1999, was a collaboration with bassist Lars Danielsson, who already played bass on her sophomore release. This time she brought into the studio pianists Ben Besiakov and Lars Jansson, drummers Anders Kjellberg, Per Lindvall, Billy Hart, guitarist John Scofield, saxophonist Hans Ulrik and percussionist Xavier Desandre Navarre. Vocalist Cæcilie Norby continues to advance the music.
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