Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Samuel Most was born on December 16, 1930 in Atlantic City, New Jersey and learned to play the flute, saxophone and piano. He began his career in music at the age of 18 with the bands of Tommy Dorsey, Shep Fields, Boyd Raeburn and Don Redman. He also performed many times with his older brother Abe, a clarinetist.
His first recording was at age 23, a single called Undercurrent Blues and the following year he was awarded Down Beat magazine’s “Critic’s New Star Award”. Between 1953 and 1958 Sam led and recorded sessions for the Prestige, Debut, Vanguard and Bethlehem record labels. He also worked as a session player for Chris Connor, Paul Quinichette and Teddy Wilson and was a member of the Buddy Rich band from 1959 to 1961. He would go on to work as a sideman with Clare Fischer, Lalo Schifrin and Louie Bellson.
Most resurfaced in the late 1970s and recorded six albums on the Xanadu label, was given a gift of an expensively carved flute by Frank Sinatra who had used it for breath control, and in the late Eighties recorded four albums, including Solo Flute with producer Fernando Gelbard of Liquidjazz.com. He was the guest of and played for the King of Thailand three times and was the subject of Edmond Goff’s 2001 documentary film Sam Most, Jazz Flutist.
Flautist and tenor saxophonist Sam Most, who according to jazz historian Leonard Feather, was probably the first great jazz flutist, passed away on June 13, 2013 from cancer, at the age of 82.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Vincent Herring was born November 19, 1964 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. His formal musical education began at age 11, when he started playing saxophone in school bands and studying privately at Dean Frederick’s School Of Music in Vallejo, California. At age 16, he entered California State University at Chico on a music scholarship.
A year later, Vincent auditioned for a spot in the United States Military Academy Band Jazz Knights playing lead alto saxophone. He made the move to West Point, served one enlisted tour, which turned out to be a steppingstone to the New York jazz scene.
He first began touring Europe and the United States with Lionel Hampton’s big band. Since that turning point in his career Herring has recorded and performed over 200 sessions as a sideman working with Nat Adderley, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, the Horace Silver Quintet, Jack DeJohnette’s Special Edition, Larry Coryell, Cedar Walton, Freddie Hubbard, Dizzy Gillespie, the Mingus Big Band, Nancy Wilson, the Roy Hargrove Big Band, Arthur Taylor, Dr. Billy Taylor, Carla Bley and the Phil Woods Sax Machine.
Vincent has been a special guest soloist with Wynton Marsalis and Lincoln Center as well as with Jon Faddis and the Carnegie Hall Big Band. As a leader he has recorded fifteen albums and taken bands to Japan and Europe, has appeared in nearly every major jazz festival in the world. Wearing his educator hat he gives clinics throughout Europe and the United States. He is currently performing with the Cannonball Legacy Band, which plays in jazz festivals, jazz clubs and occasionally small towns for benefit concerts.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Seldon Powell was born on November 15, 1928 in Lawrenceville, Virginia. A classically trained saxophonist and flautist who studied at Juilliard in New York City, he went on to work briefly with Tab Smith in 1949 before joining and recording with Lucky Millinder the following year. For the next two years he would spend in the military and upon discharge became a studio musician.
A solid musician with the ability to move between genres from big band to hard bop to soul jazz and R&B, over a forty year career he would record four albums as a leader between 1956 and 1973 and another 60 album sessions as a sideman with Clark Terry, Johnny Hammond Smith, Buddy Rich, Louis Bellson, Neal Hefti, Billy Ver Planck, Sy Oliver,, Erskine Hawkins, Ahmed Abdul-Malik, Richard “Groove” Holmes, Gato Barbieri, Dizzy Gillespie, Gerry Mulligan,Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, roland Hana, Osie Johnson, Freddie Green, Gus Johnson, Sonny Stitt, Friedrich Gulda, Art Farmer, Cal Tjader, Billy Taylor, Ernie Wilkins, Panama Francis, Teri Thornton, Jimmy Forrest, Charlie Byrd, Oliver Nelson and the list goes on.
He recorded for Epic, Roost, Savoy, RCA, United Artists, Lion, Riverside, EmArcy, Golden Crest, Candid, ABC, New Jazz, Impulse, Solid State, Verve, 20th Century, Atlantic, and Sesac record labels. Tenor saxophonist and flautist who concentrated in the swing, progressive and soul jazz, big band and rhythm & blues genres passed away on January 25, 1997 in Hempstead, New York.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Herb Geller was born Herbert Arnold Geller on November 2, 1928 in Los Angeles, California. His initial exposure to was from his mother who played piano accompanying silent films at a Hollywood theater. At the age of 8, he was presented with an alto saxophone and two years later started clarinet. He went to Dorsey High School, joined the school band with Eric Dolphy and Vi Redd. At the age of 14, after hearing Benny Carter live in performance, he decided to pursue a career a music career playing his original instrument of study.
By age sixteen Geller had his first professional engagement in the band of jazz violinist Joe Venuti. A short time later he discovered Charlie Parker and Johnny Hodges and along with Carter became important idols for him. A move to New York City in 1949 saw him performing in the bands of Jack Fina with Paul Desmond, Claude Thornhill, Jerry Wald and Lucky Millinder. It was during this time he met hi future wife and musical partner Lorraine Walsh.
After three years in New York, Herb joined the Billy May orchestra in 1952 and, following an engagement in Los Angeles, returned there to live. He worked and recorded with Shorty Rogers, Maynard Ferguson, Bill Holman, Shelly Manne, Marty Paich, Barney Kessell, Andre Previn, Quincy Jones, Wardell Gray, Jack Sheldon, and Chet Baker. He recorded three album as a leader for Emarcy plus some with Dinah Washington, Max Roach, Clifford Brown, Clark Terry, and Kenny Drew.
In 1955 he won the “New Star Award” from Down Beat Magazine, worked in the bands of Louis Bellson and Benny Goodman, played bossa nova in Beazil and sailed to Europe and played in Paris with Kenny Clarke, Kenny Drew, Martial Solal, Rene Thomas and toured with a French radio show, Musique Aux Champs-Elysées. He would go on to work with the RIAS Big Band in Berlin, play lead alto and arrange for the NDR Big Band in Hamburg and for twenty0eight years made the city his home. During this period her performed with Don Byas, Joe Pass, Sloide Hampton, Bill Evans, Red Mitchell, Art Farmer, Georgie Fame, Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald, Baden Powell, Peter Herbolzheimer and George Gruntz.
He composed for two musicals Playing Jazz, a musical autobiography and Josie B, based upon the life of Josephine Baker, taught at the Hochschule fur Muzik, and wrote a method of improvisation called crossover, was knighted, and awarded the Louis Armstrong Gedachtnispreis. Alto saxophonist Herb Geller who also played clarinet, flute, oboe, English horn and passed away of pneumonia in a hospital in Hamburg, Germany, aged 85, on December 19, 2013.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Brian Robert Jackson was born October 11, 1952 in Brooklyn, New York to a New York State parole officer and librarian at the Ford Foundation. Spending the first two years of his life in Bedford-Stuyvesant and later stayed with his uncle in Flatbush until his parents separated when he was five. Then with his mother they moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn until she remarried in 1968.
Jackson studied music in Fort Greene with his mother’s childhood teacher, Hepzibah Ross with whom he took lessons for seven years. From 1965-1969 Jackson attended Brooklyn’s Erasmus Hall High, where he met other musicians and began to form bands on the outside while participating in school music programs.
Brian met Gil Scott-Heron while the two were attending Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. They began a decade-long writing, producing, and recording partnership with Jackson composed most of the music that he and Scott-Heron together performed and recorded. In 1973, the two released their first album together, Pieces of A Man with bassist Ron Carter. Tey would go on to record the landmark albums Free Will and Winter In America. His biggest hit was with Scott-Heron, 1974’s The Bottle. By 1979, they had recorded ten albums, with other unreleased material surfacing on subsequent Scott-Heron releases following their 1980 split.
He remained active in the 1980s and 1990s, switching to R&B to work with Earth, Wind & Fire, Stevie Wonder, Will Downing, Gwen Guthrie, Kool & The Gang and Janis Siegel. Enlisting guest appearances by Gil and Roy Ayers, he recorded his first solo album Gotta Play in 2000. Pianist and flutist Brian Jackson is still actively performing and recording.
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