Daily Dose Of Jazz…

John Bishop was born in Seattle, Washington on April 5, 1956 and raised in Germany, Washington, DC, San Antonio, Texas and Eugene, Oregon. He started playing drums at 9 in Washington, DC with the Patriots drum corps and performed regularly throughout high school and college in Oregon, studying with Mel Brown and Charles Dowd. Attending the University of Oregon, he later transferred to the jazz program at North Texas State University.

Moving to Seattle in 1981 he had an extended engagement with the band Glider and never left. An unusually creative and fertile scene at the time, the city offered performances with top touring artists and the opportunity to create long and substantial musical relationships with inspired Northwest musicians. 1983, saw Bishop helping to form the fusion group Blue Sky, which released two national Top 10 albums and toured throughout the west coast and Canada over the next 9 years.

He was a twenty-year member of the piano trio New Stories with pianist Marc Seales and bassist Doug Miller, releasing 4 CDs of their own, 6 with the late be-bop saxophonist Don Lanphere, and Song for the Geese with Mark Murphy. They were a house trio for 17 years at Bud Shank’s Pt. Townsend Jazz Festival, headlined the 1993 JVC Jazz Festival in Vladivostok, Russia, appeared in concert with Tom Harrell, Julian Priester, Charles McPherson, Vincent Herring, Nick Brignola, Conte Condoli, Bobby Shew and Larry Coryell.

They regularly appeared around the country by themselves or touring with Mark Murphy, Ernie Watts or Don Lanphere. He has performed in concerts and clubs with Lee Konitz, Slide Hampton, Benny Golson, George Cables, Kenny Werner, Bobby Hutcherson, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Sonny Fortune, Herb Ellis, Buddy DeFranco, Bobby McFerrin, Joe Locke, Jerry Bergonzi, Carla Bley, Steve Swallow, Larry Coryell, and countless others.

John has taught drums privately for forty years, was on the faculty at the University of Washington from 2005-2009, regularly holds drum and jazz workshops throughout the country with the Hal Galper Trio, and co-founded The Reality Book, a web-based, HD Video Play-Along education system for jazz musicians of all levels.

Drummer, educator, record label owner, graphic designer, and festival presenter John Bishop continues to perform, record, tour and educate. has been one of the primary voices in Northwest Jazz for over 35 years. He’s appeared on more than 100 albums, was inducted into the Seattle Jazz Hall of Fame in 2008, and was named a “Jazz Hero” by the Jazz Journalists Association in 2019.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Lenny Tristano was born Leonard Joseph Tristano on March 19, 1919 in Chicago, Illinois, the second of four brothers. He started on the family’s player piano at the age of two or three. He had classical piano lessons when he was eight, Born with weak eyesight, and then with measles, by the age of nine or ten, he was totally blind. He attended the Illinois School for the Blind in Jacksonville, Florida for a decade around 1928. During his school days, he played several other instruments, including trumpet, guitar, saxophones, and drums and by eleven, he had his first gigs, playing clarinet in a brothel.

Back in Chicago, Tristano got his bachelor’s degree in music from the American Conservatory of Music but left before completing his master’s degree, moving to New York City in 1946. He played saxophone and piano with leading bebop musicians, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Max Roach among others. He formed his own small bands, which soon displayed some of his early interests – contrapuntal interaction of instruments, harmonic flexibility, and rhythmic complexity. His 1949 quintet recorded the first free group improvisations, that continued in 1951, with the first overdubbed, improvised jazz recordings.

He started teaching music, with an emphasis on improvisation, in the early 1940s, and by the mid-1950s was concentrating on teaching instead of performing. He taught in a structured and disciplined manner, which was unusual in jazz education when he began. His educational role over three decades meant that he exerted an influence on jazz through his students, including saxophonists Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh.

Through the Fifties to the Sixties he would go on to record for the New Jazz label which would become Prestige Records, and Atlantic Records, he founded his own label Jazz Records, create his own recording studio, tour throughout Europe, played A Journey Through Jazz, a five-week engagement at Birdland, s well as other New York City jazz haunts. His last public performance in the United States was in 1968 but continued teaching into the Seventies.

Having a series of illnesses in the 1970s, including eye pain and emphysema from smoking for most of his life, on November 18, 1978 pianist, composer, arranger, and jazz improvisation educator Lennie Tristano passed away from a heart attack at home in Jamaica, New York.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Ray Ellington was born Henry Pitts Brown on March 17, 1916 at 155 Kennington Road, Kennington, London, England, the youngest of four children. His father, a Black music-hall comedian, and entertainer, his mother a Russian Jew. When his father died when he was four years old, he was brought up as an Orthodox Jew and attended the South London Jewish School before entering show business at the age of twelve, when he appeared in an acting role on the London stage.

His first break came in 1937 when he replaced Joe Daniels in Harry Roy and His Orchestra as the band’s drummer. His vocal talents were put to good use too, from the time of his first session when he recorded Swing for Sale. Ellington was called up in 1940, joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) as a physical training instructor where he served throughout the war. He played in various service bands including RAF Blue Eagles.

After demobilisation, Ellington resumed his career, fronting his own group, playing at The Bag O’Nails club. Early in 1947, he rejoined the Harry Roy band for a few months. The Ray Ellington Quartet was formed in the same year, specializing in jazz, while experimenting with many other genres. His musical style was heavily influenced by the comedic jump blues of Louis Jordan. His band was one of the first in the UK to feature the stripped-back guitar/bass/drums/piano format that became the basis of rock and roll, as well as being one of the first groups in Britain to prominently feature the electric and amplified guitar of Lauderic Caton. The other members of his quartet were pianist Dick Katz and bassist Coleridge Goode until 1955 when the players changed.

Vocalist, drummer and bandleader Ray Ellington passed away from cancer on February 27, 1985.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Roy Brooks was born on March 9, 1938 in Detroit, Michigan and drummed since childhood, his earliest experiences of music coming through his mother, who sang in church. He was an outstanding varsity basketball player as a teenager and was offered a scholarship to the Detroit Institute of Technology; he attended the school for three semesters and then dropped out to tour with Yusef Lateef.

After time with Lateef and Barry Harris, he played with Beans Bowles and with the Four Tops in Las Vegas. He played with Horace Silver from 1959 to 1964, including on the album Song for My Father; in 1963 he released his first album as a leader. Following this he freelanced in New York City through the 1960s and early 1970s, playing three years with Lateef again in 1967, Sonny Stitt, Lee Morgan, Dexter Gordon, Chet Baker, Junior Cook, Blue Mitchell, Charles McPherson, Pharoah Sanders in 1970, Wes Montgomery, Dollar Brand, Jackie McLean, James Moody from 1970 to 1972, Charles Mingus in 1972 and ‘73, and Milt Jackson.

His 1970 album The Free Slave featured Cecil McBee and Woody Shaw. Later in 1970, he joined Max Roach’s ensemble M’Boom, and in 1972 put together the ensemble The Artistic Truth. Brooks’s performances often included unusual instruments such as the musical saw and drums with vacuum tubes set up so as to regulate the pitch.

Suffering mental disorders he began to acquire a reputation for bizarre behavior on and off stage, and by 1975 he left New York City for Detroit where he took lithium to help regulate his behavior.  By the 1980s he returned to The Artistic Truth and gigged regularly in Detroit with Kenny Cox, Harold McKinney, and Wendell Harrison. With those three he co-founded M.U.S.I.C. (Musicians United to Save Indigenous Culture) and later founded the Aboriginal Percussion Choir, an ensemble devoted to the use of non-Western percussion instruments. He used his basement as a practice and learning space, working with children as well as accomplished musicians.

The 1990s saw Detroit’s jazz scene wane and Roy stopped taking his medication, began breaking down at gigs, and in 1994 was institutionalized for three weeks. A couple of violently threatening incidents with neighbors landed him in Marquette Prison from 1997 to 2004, followed by placement in a nursing home. Drummer Roy Brooks passed away on November 15, 2005.

He recorded nearly four-dozen albums as a sideman and seven albums as a leader, his last being Roy Brooks & the Improvisational Sphere, recorded by Charles Jazzrenegade Wood on September 3, 1999, Live at Lelli’s, a well known Italian restaurant in Detroit. This is the solely available recording of the three-day performance released posthumously in 2011 by Italian label Sagittarius A-Star. The Improvisational Sphere was Roy Brooks: Drums, Marimba, Steel Drum, Keyboard; Amina Claudine Myers: Hammond B-3 Organ and Vocals; Ray Mantilla: Congas, Bells, Percussion; Jerry LeDuff: Tabla, Cuica, Shekere, Berimbau, Percussion; and Rodney Rich: Guitar.

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Three Wishes

Jimmy Cobb is asked of his three wishes by Baroness Pannonica and he responded by saying: 

1. “That the musicians would get as much money as they’re supposed to get when they work.”
2. “Good health for me, or some sh*t like that, forever. I wish to be an old man and play through all of it.”
3. “Straighten the world out.”

*Excerpt from Three Wishes: An Intimate Look at Jazz Greats ~ Compiled and Photographed by Pannonica de Koenigswarter

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