Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Nathaniel Adderley was born on November 25, 1931 in Tampa, Florida but grew up in Tallahassee when both his parents were hired to teach at Florida A&M University. While living in Tallahassee in the early 40s, he and his brother Julian played with Ray Charles, in the ‘50s he worked with his brother’s original group, and with Lionel Hampton and J. J. Johnson.
In 1959 joined his brother’s new quintet and stayed with it until Cannonball’s death in 1975. It was during this tenure that Nat composed “Work Song,” “Jive Samba,” and “The Old Country” for this group that have since become jazz standards.
After his brother’s death he led his own groups and recorded extensively working with Ron Carter, Sonny fortune, Johnny Griffin, Antonio Hart and Vincent Herring, among others. Adderley moved to Harlem in the 1960s, Teaneck, New Jersey in the 1970s, before moving to Lakeland, Florida where he was instrumental in the founding and development of the annual Child of the Sun Jazz Festival, held annually at Florida Southern College.
Nat Adderley, cornetists and trumpeter in the hard bop and soul jazz genres, lived with diabetes throughout his career, an illness that resulted in his death from complications on January 2, 2000. He left the jazz world a body of work that has been memorialized by a host of jazz musicians.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Charles “Buddy” Bolden was born on September 6, 1877 in New Orleans, Louisiana and is regarded as a key figure in the development of a New Orleans style of ragtime music that would later come to be known as jazz.
He was known as “King Bolden” and his band was a top draw in New Orleans from about 1900 until 1907, when he was incapacitated by schizophrenia. He left no known surviving recordings, but he was known for his very loud sound and constant improvisation. Instead of imitating other cornetists, Bolden played music he heard “by ear” and adapted it to his horn. In doing so, he created an exciting and novel fusion of ragtime, black sacred music, marching-band music and rural blues.
He rearranged the typical New Orleans dance band of the time to better accommodate the blues; string instruments became the rhythm section, and the front-line instruments were clarinets, trombones, and Bolden’s cornet. Bolden was known for his powerful, loud, “wide open” playing style.
While there is substantial first hand oral history about Buddy Bolden, facts about his life continue to be lost amongst colorful myth. Stories about him being a barber by trade or that he published a scandal sheet called The Cricket have been repeated in print despite being debunked decades earlier.
Bolden suffered an episode of acute alcoholic psychosis in 1907 at the age of 30. With the full diagnosis of dementia praecox, he was admitted to the Louisiana State Insane Asylum at Jackson, where he spent the rest of his life until November 4, 1931 at age 54.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Don Cherry was born Donald Eugene Cherry on November 18, 1936 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. His father, trumpeter and club owner moved the family to Watts in Los Angeles, California when he was four. He would skip high school at Fremont to play with the swing band at Jefferson High, resulting in his transfer to reform school at Jacob Riis, where he first met drummer Billy Higgins.
By the early 50s Cherry was playing with jazz musicians in Los Angeles, sometimes acting as pianist in Art Farmer’s group. While trumpeter Clifford Brown was in L. A. he would informally mentor him. He became well known in 1958 when he performed and recorded with Ornette Coleman quintet. He co-led The Avant-Garde session with John Coltrane replacing Coleman, toured with Sonny Rollins, joined the New York Contemporary Five and recorded with Albert Ayler and George Russell.
Don’s first recording as a leader was Complete Communion for Blue Note in 1965 with Ed Blackwell and Gato Barbieri. He would begin leaning toward funk/fusion and play sparse jazz during his Scandinavia years. He would go on to play with Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, Carla Bley, Lou Reed, and Sun Ra, and then ventured into developing world fusion music incorporating Middle Eastern, African and Indian into his playing.
Cherry appeared on the Red Hot Organization’s compilation CD, Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool, was inducted into the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame, played piano, pocket trumpet, cornet, flugelhorn and bugle. He recorded some two-dozen albums as a leader and some 48 as a sideman. Don Cherry died on October 19, 1995 at age 58 from liver cancer in Málaga, Spain.
