Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Grady Tate was born January 14, 1932 in Durham, North Carolina who began singing at age four, drums at five. However music was not in his immediate future as he earned a degree from North Carolina Central University with a degree in English literature/drama, a minor in psychology and taught English and speech in Washington, DC. Fortunately for the jazz world his desire to pursue an acting career lead him to New York City and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and once in New York his reputation as an outstanding musician resulted in work with Quincy Jones.
Grady Tate’s drumming helped to define a particular hard bop, soul jazz and organ trio sound during the mid 1960’s and beyond. His slick, layered and intense sound is instantly recognizable for its understated style in which he integrates his trademark subtle nuances with sharp, crisp “on top of the beat” timing (in comparison to playing slightly before, or slightly after the beat). The Grady Tate sound can be heard prominently on the many classic Jimmy Smith and Wes Montgomery albums recorded on the Verve label in the 1960s.
He has been a member of the New York Jazz Quartet, the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson for six years, and his most widely heard vocal performances are the songs “I Got Six”, “Naughty Number Nine”, and “Fireworks” from Multiplication Rock and America Rock part of the Schoolhouse Rock series.
Grady Tate’s popularity as choice sideman of accomplished musicians is due to his remarkable intuitiveness and ability to make any style of music swing tastefully, and his interpretation of many different genres of music, in which he creates his own unique style of jazz led him to work with a host of talent, the short list including Lionel Hampton, Sarah Vaughan, Jimmy Smith, Grant Green, Stanley Turrentine, Lena Horne, Astrud Gilberto, Ella Fitzgerald, Cal Tjader, Bill Evans and Stan Getz.
Grady Tate, baritone vocalist and drummer has been on the faculty of Howard University since 1989.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Born Kenneth Spearman Clarke on January 9, 1914 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Kenny Clarke grew up in a musical family, studied multiple instruments, including vibes and trombone, as well as music theory and composition while still in high school. As a teenager he played in the bands of Leroy Bradley and Roy Eldridge. He later toured around the Midwest for several years with the Jeter-Pillars band that also featured bassist Jimmy Blanton and guitarist Charlie Christian. By 1935, he was more frequently in New York, where he eventually moved and worked in groups led by Edgar Hayes and Lonnie Smith.
While working in the bands of Edgar Hayes and Roy Eldridge, Clarke started developing the rhythmic concepts that would later define his contribution to the music. He began experimenting with moving the time-keeping role from the combination of snare drum or hi-hat and bass drum to embellished quarter notes on the ride cymbal, the familiar “ding-ding-da-ding” pattern, which Clarke is often credited with inventing. One of these passages, a combination of a rim shot on the snare followed directly by a bass drum accent, earned Clarke his nickname, “Klook”, which was short for “Klook-mop”, in imitation of the sound this combination produced. This nickname was enshrined in “Oop Bop Sh’Bam”, recorded by Dizzy Gillespie in 1946 with Clarke on drums, where the scat lyric to the bebop tune goes “oop bop sh’bam a klook a mop.”
Clarke himself claimed that these stylistic elements were already in place by the time he put together the famous house band at Minton’s Playhouse, which hosted Monk, Parker, Gillespie, Russell, saxophonist Don Byas and many others while serving as the incubator of the emerging small group sound. While playing at Minton’s, Clarke made many recordings, most notably as the house drummer for Savoy Records. When the musicians from the Minton’s band moved to different projects, Clarke began working with a young pianist and composer John Lewis and vibraphonist Milt Jackson, and with the addition of bassist Ray Brown they formed the Modern Jazz Quartet or MJQ. The group pioneered what would later be called chamber jazz or third stream, referring to its incorporation of classical and baroque aesthetics as an alternative to hard bop.
Clarke stayed with the MJQ until 1955, relocating in Paris in 1956. As soon as he moved to Paris, he regularly worked with visiting American musicians in, as well as forming a working trio, known as “The Bosses”, with Bud Powell also a Paris resident and Pierre Michelot. In 1961 along with pianist Francy Boland, Kenny formed a regular big band “The Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland Big Band that lasted eleven years and featured leading European and expatriate American musicians, such as Johnny Griffin and Ronnie Scott.
Drummer Kenny Clarke continued recording and playing with both visiting U.S. musicians along with his regular French band mates until his death on January 26, 1985 in Montreuil-sous-bois. In 1988 he was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame and his innovation set the stage for the development of the bebop combo, which relied heavily on improvised exchanges between drummer and soloist to propel the music forward.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Sam Woodyard was born January 7, 1925 in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He learned to play the drums by teaching himself, with no instruction. He began playing locally around Newark, New Jersey area in the 1940s. Sam gigged with Paul Gayten in an R&B group, moving on in the early 50s to play with Joe Holiday, Roy Eldridge, and Milt Buckner. It was in 1955 that Woodyard would join Duke Ellington’s orchestra, remaining the ensemble’s drummer until 1966.
After his time with Ellington, Sam played behind Ella Fitzgerald prior to moving to Los Angeles, California. In the 1970s he played less due to health problems, but recorded with Buddy Rich and toured with Claude Bolling. In 1983 he played in a band with Teddy Wilson, Buddy Tate and Slam Stewart. His last recording was on Steve Lacy’s 1988 album “The Door”.
A little more than a month after this recording was completed, drummer Sam Woodyard passed away on September 20, 1988 in Paris, France.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Lewis Nash was born December 30, 1958.Growing up in Phoenix, Arizona he was encouraged into jazz by his high school band teacher. By the age of 18, the drummer was a first call sideman for visiting musicians to Phoenix, and received the call to move to New York and join Betty Carter’s band at the age of 22.
he became a highly in-demand sideman during this period, and since his tenure with Carter, has gone on to record and tour with some of the most important and highly regarded jazz musicians of all time. Among them were Tommy Flanagan, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Stitt, Oscar Peterson, Sonny Rollins, Ron Carter, Hank Jones, Nancy Wilson, McCoy Tyner, Wynton Marsalis, Joe Williams and the list goes on and on.
A renowned master stylist, particularly in be-bop and post-bop styles, Nash is at home in a wide range of stylistic territory, including funk, free, and Latin based jazz styles. He is known for his seemingly endless depth of melodic vocabulary, drawing from all eras of jazz percussion, while adding his own unmistakably identifiable approach to the construction of his comping figures and soloing. His versatility has made him one of the foremost brush stylists of his generation.
Nash is also passionate and dedicated to jazz education, and has fostered the careers of a long list of younger players. He is in high demand as a clinician and educator at schools, workshops and major educational jazz festivals worldwide. He formed his own group in the late 1990s and currently leads several groups of varying instrumentation, from duo to septet, as well as a member of Blue Note 7.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Edmund Leonard Thigpen was born on December 28, 1930 in Chicago, Illinois but was raised in Los Angeles, California where he attended the same high school, Thomas Jefferson, as fellow jazz greats Dexter Gordon, Art Farmer and Chico Hamilton. He majored in sociology at Los Angeles City College, left for East St. Louis to pursue music while living with his father, also a drummer, who played with Andy Kirk’s Clouds of Joy.
Ed first worked professionally in New York City with the Cootie Williams orchestra in 1951 at the Savoy Ballroom, during this decade he played with musicians such as Dinah Washington, Gil Melle, Oscar Pettiford, Eddie Vinson, Paul Quinichette, Charlie Rouse, Lennie Tristano, Jutta Hipp, Johnny Hodges, Dorothy Ashby, Bud Powell and Billy Taylor.
In 1959 he replaced guitarist Herb Ellis in the Oscar Peterson Trio in Toronto, Canada, recorded with Teddy Edwards-Howard McGhee in 1961, led his own 1966 session “Out of the Storm” for Verve, and went on tour with Ella Fitzgerald for five years beginning in 1967.
A move to Copenhagen in 1974 saw Thigpen collaborating with several other American expatriate jazz musicians who over the past two decades had settled in the city such as Kenny Drew, Ernie Wilkins, Thad Jones, along with native Danes Mads Vinding, Niels-Henning Orsted Pederson, Alex Riel and Sven Asmussen. He also worked with visiting musicians Clark Terry, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Milt Jackson and Monty Alexander.
Ed Thigpen, a drummer with over 50 albums to his credit as a leader and sideman, passed away peacefully after a brief period in Copenhagen’s Hvidovre Hospital on January 13, 2010 at the age of 80.
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