Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Akua Allrich was born on July 11th in Washington, D.C., the child of a musical family with a home that held such a wealth of jazz recordings that she did not buy any albums until her second year in college. One of the first jazz albums she bought was John Coltrane’s Live at the Village Vanguard: The Master Takes.
Educated at Howard University, she obtained her BM in jazz vocals and a master’s degree in social work. She was taught, coached and mentored by talented musicians such as world-renowned singer Kehembe V. Eichelberger, singer/drummer Grady Tate, and pianist Charles Covington.
Her musical roots run deeply into blues, soul and rhythm and blues, with a clear grounding in jazz and pan-African music. She launched her independently produced album A Peace of Mine in 2010, which created a significant buzz with critics and music-lovers alike. She sings in many languages including Portuguese, French, Spanish, English, Xhosa, and Twi.
Vocalist, composer and teacher, Akua Allrich continues to electrify audiences and is likened to such legendary artists as Oscar Brown, Jr., Miriam Makeba and Nina Simone.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Brian Priestley was born on July 10, 1940 in Manchester, England and began studying music at the age of eight. In the 1960s he gained a degree in modern languages from Leeds University, while playing in student bands. In the mid-1960s, he began contributing to the jazz press and was responsible for entries in Jazz on Record: A Critical Guide to the First Fifty Years, 1917–1967.
In 1969 he moved to London, England and began playing piano with bands led by Tony Faulkner and Alan Cohen. Priestley helped transcribe Duke Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige, and Creole Rhapsody for Cohen. He formed his own Special Septet featuring Digby Fairweather and Don Rendell. His compositions include Blooz For Dook, The Whole Thing and Jamming With Jools, based on a live broadcast with Jools Holland.
As a broadcaster he worked on the BBC, London Jazz FM, and for BBC Radio London, and influenced the renewed interest in jazz in the 1980s. Priestley taught jazz piano at Goldsmiths College from 1977 until 1993, and has taught jazz history for various other universities and conservatoires over the years.
Priestley has also written biographies of Charles Mingus, John Coltrane and Charlie Parker, as well as the book Jazz on Record: A History. He co-authored The Rough Guide to Jazz, as well as contributing to several other reference books, and has compiled and/or annotated more than a hundred reissue compilations.
Writer, pianist and arranger Brian Priestley has lived in Tralee, Ireland since 2006 where he continues playing the piano and presents a show on Radio Kerry.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Sahib Shihab was born Edmund Gregory on June 23, 1925 in Savannah, Georgia. Schooled in New York from age 3, he first played alto saxophone professionally for Luther Henderson at 13. He studied at the Boston Conservatory, and played in and around New York with Art Blakey, Gigi Gryce, Benny Golson, Thelonious Monk, Oscar Pettiford, Dizzy Gillespie. He toured with the bands of Fletcher Henderson, Buddy Johnson, Roy Eldridge, Andy Kirk, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and the original 17 Messengers of Blakey.
During the late 1940s, Shihab played with Thelonious Monk, and on July 23, 1951 he recorded with Monk that was later issued on the album Genius of Modern Music: Volume 2. During the decade he recorded with Art Blakey, Kenny Dorham and Benny Golson. The invitation to play with Dizzy Gillespie’s big band saw his switch to baritone saxophone.
Between 1952 to 1955 he toured with Illinois Jacquet in Europe, as well as with Coleman Hawkins and Sarah Vaughn and toured with Dakota Stanton from 1956 to 1958. He was one of the musicians who showed up for the Art Kane photograph A Great Day In Harlem. Closing out the Fifteies he toured Europe with Quincy Jones, and subsequently settled in Scandinavia in 1960, married and raising a family. Shihab, disillusioned with racial politics in the United States, decided around this time to move to Europe.
As an educator he worked for Copenhagen Polytechnic and wrote scores for television, cinema and theatre. He composed and arranged for Swedish and Danish radio orchestras. He went on to perform with bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen and together with pianist Kenny Drew, he ran a publishing firm and record company. Through the Sixties he joined the Kenny Clarke/Francy Boland Big Band and remained a member of the band during its 12 years existence.
Returning to the United States in 1973 he toured with Quincy Jones and The Brothers Johnson. He returned to Copenhagen, Denmark three years later, where he produced albums for Metronome Records, along with Kenny Drew. The album is titled Brief Encounter, and features the voices of Debby Cameron and Richard Boone. At decade’s end he started a record company with Kenny Drew called Matrix and spent his remaining years between New York and Copenhagen, performed in partnership with Art Farmer and led his own jazz combo called Dues.
Hard bop baritone, alto, and soprano saxophonist and flautist, composer, arranger, producer and educator Sahib Shihab, who beginning of 1986 was a visiting artist at Rutgers University, died from cancer on October 24, 1989, in Nashville, Tennessee at age 64.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
John Hollenbeck was born June 19, 1968 in Binghamton, New York and earned degrees in percussion and jazz composition from the Eastman School of Music. He moved to New York City in the early 1990s. He has worked with Bob Brookmeyer, Fred Hersch, Tony Malaby, the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, Kenny Wheeler, Pablo Ziegler, and Meredith Monk.
In 1998, he composed The Shape of Spirit, a piece for wind ensemble on Mons Records. The following year he composed Processional and Desiderata for wind ensemble and orator. This composition, written for and featuring the voice and trombone of Bob Brookmeyer, was released on Challenge Records in 2001.
Hollenbeck went on to receive several commissions from the Bamberg Choir and the Windsbacher Knabenchor in Germany, Bang on a Can, the People’s Commissioning Fund, the IAJE Gil Evans Fellowship, and in addition he composed and performed the percussion score to the following Meredith Monk works: Magic Frequencies, Mercy and The Impermanence Project.
His 2000 debut release Static Still with Theo Bleckmanne began his recording as a leader and in 2001 his sophomore project No Images landed on Gary Giddins’ Village Voice Top Ten list. He has gone on to record nine more albums to date as a leader and nine albums with the Claudia Quintet.
Drummer John Hollenbeck, who was an eleven year professor of jazz drums and improvisation at the Jazz Institute Berlin and in 2015 joined the faculty of Schulich School of Music, continues to perform.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Collin Walcott was born on April 24, 1945 in New York City, New York. He studied violin and tympani in his youth, and studied percussion at Indiana University School of Music. After graduating in 1966, he went to the University of California, Los Angeles, and studied sitar under Ravi Shankar and tabla under Alla Rakha.
Walcott moved to New York and blended bop and oriental music with Tony Scott in 1967–69. Around 1970 he joined the Paul Winter Consort and co-founded the band Oregon. These groups, along with the trio Codona, which was founded in 1978, combined jazz improvisation and instrumentation with elements of a wide range of classical and ethnic music.
He played with Miles Davis on his 1972 album On the Corner, had three releases under his own name on ECM Records. He taught at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
Sitar and tabla player Collin Walcott was killed in a bus crash in Magdeburg, East Germany on November 8, 1984 while on a tour with Oregon.
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