Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Tamm E. Hunt was born into a musical family in New York City, New York on June 19, 1954. The niece of jazz and blues singer Hannah Sylvester and record company owner Benny Clark, she is the daughter of K.D. Searcy, a tap dancer who danced at the Apollo Theater with Tip Tap & Toe. Growing up around music when she heard Dakota Staton’s The Late Late Show, she knew early on that she wanted to sing jazz.

Despite that prophetic introduction, Hunt started out singing other styles of music. In her childhood she sang with a variety of R&B girl groups. She had some commercial success in the early ’80s singing disco, but then switched to jazz. Inspired by Betty Carter, Sarah Vaughan and pianist Dorothy Donegan, she has sung with such notables as alto saxophonist Gary Bartz, tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan, pianists Ronnie Matthews and Larry Willis, bassist Buster Williams, and drummer T.S. Monk among others.

She has performed throughout the U.S. in addition to Europe, Canada, and Japan. Hunt has thus far recorded one CD, Live @ Birdland, for her New Jazz Audience label. She founded the Harlem Jazz Foundation, and has written jazz education programs including Adopt a Kid 4 Jazz and Jazz 4 the Beginner.

She starred in and produced the off-Broadway show Billie Holiday: The Legend, and appeared in a short dramatic film with Bartz called A Jazz Story.  Moving to Baltimore, Maryland she has been an important force in the city’s jazz community, both as a singer and behind the scenes. Vocalist Tamm E. Hunt, who is also the executive/artistic director of the Maryland Center for the Preservation of Jazz & Blues, continues to sing, educate and promote jazz.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Attila Cornelius Zoller was born on June 13, 1927 in Visegrád, Hungary. As a child, he learned violin from his father, a professional violinist. While in school, he played flugelhorn and bass before landing on the guitar. Dropping out of school he played in jazz clubs in Budapest while Russia occupied Hungary. He fled Hungary on foot through the Austrian mountains with his guitar in 1948 as the Soviet Union was establishing communist military rule. Settling in Vienna, he became an Austrian citizen and started a jazz group with accordionist Vera Auer.

The mid-1950s saw Zoller moving to Germany and playing with Jutta Hipp and Hans Koller. When American jazz musicians passed through, such as Oscar Pettiford and Lee Konitz, they persuaded him to move to the United States. He moved to the states after receiving a scholarship to the Lenox School of Jazz. One of his teachers was guitarist Jim Hall and his roommate was Ornette Coleman, who got him interested in free jazz.

From 1962–1965, Zoller performed in a group with flautist Herbie Mann, then Lee Konitz and Albert Mangelsdorff. Over the years, he played and recorded with Benny Goodman, Stan Getz, Red Norvo, Jimmy Raney, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Shirley Scott, Cal Tjader, Jimi Hendrix, and in New York City jazz clubs in the 1960s with pianist Don Friedman.

During the Seventies he started the Attila Zoller Jazz Clinics in Vermont, later named the Vermont Jazz Center, where he taught until 1998. He invented a bi-directional pickup, designed strings and a signature guitar series. Between the years 1989 and 1998, he played more and more with the German vibraphonist Wolfgang Lackerschmid. They also did recordings together. He performed with Tommy Flanagan and George Mraz in New York City three weeks before his transition in Townshend, Vermont on January 25, 1998.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Erica Lindsay was born June 5, 1955 in San Francisco, California to parents who were both teachers and lived in Europe in the 1960s. She began her studies in composition with Mal Waldron in Munich, Germany when she was fifteen years old. She played clarinet, then alto and tenor saxophone. In 1973, she spent a year of study at the Berklee School of Music in Boston, Massachusetts and then went back to Europe, where she began her music career. She formed a local quartet and went on tour. Since 1980, she has lived in New York.

As a saxophonist she has worked with Melba Liston, Clifford Jordan, Dizzy Gillespie, McCoy Tyner, Reggie Workman, George Gruntz, and Pheeroan akLaff. Lindsay composed for theater, television, and dance productions and worked with poets and performance artists such as Carl Hancock Rux, Janice King, Janine Vega, Mikhail Horowitz and Nancy Ostrovsky. She leads her own quartet and is the co-leader of a quartet with Sumi Tonooka.

Erica’s 1989 debut album Dreamer was released on Candid Records, with contributions from Robin Eubanks, Howard Johnson, Francesca Tanksley, and Anthony Cox. The 1990s and 2000s saw her playing with Oliver Lake, Baikida Carroll, Howard Johnson, Jeff Siegel, Thurman Barker and the band Trace Elements. Their album Yes – Live at the Rosendale Cafe appeared in 2008.

Saxophonist Erica Lindsay is co-founder of the Artists Recording Collective recording label, a visiting Assistant Professor at Bard College and continues to perform and record.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Phillip Rista Nimmons was born on June 3, 1923 in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada. He studied clarinet at the Juilliard School and composition at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, Canada. In 1953 Nimmons formed the ensemble Nimmons ‘N’ Nine, which later he led during his weekly radio show on CBC radio. This ensemble eventually grew to 16 musicians in 1965 and was active intil 1980.

He joined the University of Toronto in 1973 and as an educator, Nimmons has made substantial contributions to the study of jazz. In 1960, Along with Oscar Peterson, he founded the Advanced School of Contemporary Music in Toronto, Canada. He was involved in the development of the jazz performance program at the University of Toronto.

Nimmons received the first Juno Award given in the Juno Awards jazz category, for his album Atlantic Suite. His composition The Torch was commissioned for the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Alberta, Canada and was performed at the Olympics by a big band led by Rob McConnell.

In 1993, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, received the Order of Ontario, the Jazz Education Hall of Fame honor, the Lifetime Achievement Award by SOCAN and the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award, Canada’s highest honour in the performing arts, for his lifetime contribution to popular music.

Clarinetist, composer, bandleader, and educator Phil Nimmons, known for playing in the free jazz and mainstream styles, has recorded seventeen albums as a leader and at 98 is still involved in music.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Billy Robinson was born on May 31, 1939, in Fort Worth, Texas. His jazz roots go back to his father’s nightclub where he played boogie-woogie piano as a child, and watched the adult musicians perform. At the beginning of his musical career he played with John Carter, Ornette Coleman, and Dewey Redman. Living and playing in San Francisco, California in the mid-1960s towards the end of the decade he relocated to New York City, where he collaborated with Charles Mingus in 1969.

During the late 1960s, Robinson converted to Islam and remained a practicing Muslim for the rest of his life. A move to Montreal, Canada is where he married his first wife in 1970. Short-lived, four years later  he married Suzanne Cyr and moved to Ottawa, Canada in 1978 and performed sporadically at the local level.

Following his recording debut on Archie Shepp’s Attica Blues, Billy released his first album titled Evolution’s Blend as a leader in 1972. Then in 1973 he played on the Sadik Hakim track Grey Cup Caper. From 1972 to 1998 he was a part of six recording sessions.

Tenor saxophonist, composer, educator and bandleader Billy Robinson, who was dubbed The Mystic by Freddie Hubbard, transitioned from a heart attack on August 11, 2005, in Ottawa, Ontario, at the age of 66.

Bestow upon an inquiring mind a dose of a Fort Worth saxophonist to motivate the perusal of the genius of jazz musicians worldwide whose gifts contribute to the canon…

Billy Robinson: 1939 ~2005 | Tenor Saxophone

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