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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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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Jeremy Steig was born September 23, 1942 in New York City in Greenwich Village. He studied flute in his childhood but at nineteen a motorcycle accident left him paralyzed on side and for some years afterward, he played the flute with the help of a special mouthpiece.
Starting in mainstream jazz Jeremy recorded with Bill Evans and Denny Zeitlin and then became an early force in the jazz-rock fusion experiments of the late Sixties and early 70s. He record Energy with Warren Bernhardt, Eddie Gomez and Adrian Guiliary, with a reissue of additional material featuring Jan Hammer and Gomez.
He has played flute on Peter Walker’s Rainy Day Raga, has been sampled by the Beastie Boys, performed the role of The Pied Piper in the film Shrek Forever After. He has recorded 29 albums as a leader and has performed and/or recorded with Walter Bishop Jr., Tommy Bolin, Hank Crawford, Art, Farmer, Urbie Green, Idris Muhammad, Lalo Schifrin, Johnny Winter and Paul Winter.
Flautist Jeremy Steig, who plays the entire battery of the flute family of instruments from piccolo to bass flute continues to perform, record, compose and tour.
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William B. Lawsha, better known as Prince Lasha (pronounced “La-shay“), was born on September 10, 1929 in Fort Worth, Texas. He came of age studying and performing alongside fellow I.M. Terrell High School students John Carter, Ornette Coleman, Charles Moffett and Dewey Redman.
Lasha moved to California during the 1950s and by the Sixties he was active in the burgeoning free jazz movement, of which Ornette Coleman was a pioneer. Moving to Europe in 1966 his musical base was in Kensington, London and his album Insight was recorded, featuring local musicians including Bruce Cale, Dave Willis, Jeff Clyne, Rick Laird, Joe Oliver, David Snell, Mike Carr, Stan Tracey, John Mumford and Chris Bateson.
Prince returned to the U.S. in 1967, worked closely with saxophonist Sonny Simmons, recording two albums, The Cry and Firebirds for Contemporary Records. The latter album received five stars and an AMG Album Pick at Allmusic. He also appeared on two recordings with Eric Dolphy, Iron Man and Conversations, and Illumination! with the Elvin Jones/Jimmy Garrison Sextet featuring McCoy Tyner.
In the 1970s, Lasha and Simmons made additional recordings under the name Firebirds. In 2005, he recorded the album The Mystery of Prince Lasha with the Odean Pope Trio. He also recorded with Gene Ammons and Michael White.
Alto saxophonist, flautist and clarinetist Prince Lasha passed away on December 12, 2008 in Oakland, California.
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