Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Tubby Hayes was born Edward Brian Hayes on January 30, 1935 in London and started playing the violin at the age of 8, changed to the tenor at twelve and started playing professionally at fifteen. His early influences were Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins and Stan Getz. In 1951 he joined Kenny Baker and playing in the big bands of Ambrose, Vic Lewis and Jack Parnell.
Tubby led his own octet in 1956 and encourage by Victor Feldman he started playing the vibes in December of that year. Following his octet, Tubby co-led the Jazz Couriers with Ronnie Scott from ’57 to ’59 and toured Germany with Kurt Edelhagen. His international reputation grew rapidly and he was the first British contemporary to appear regularly in the U.S. at the Blue Note, the Boston Jazz Workshop and Shelly Manne’s Manne-Hole.
In 60’s London he led his own big bands, hosted his own TV show, sat in with Duke Ellington’s orchestra, and with Charles Mingus, Dave Brubeck and others. Tubby appeared in All Night Long, and with his own quintet in The Beauty Jungle and House of Horrors.
Hayes was a virtuoso musician on tenor and flute, an excellent vibist, and a composer/arranger of rare talent. He toured extensively through Europe playing the major festivals, such as Antibes, Lugano, Vienna and Berlin. He was one of the few Brits that recorded as a leader of all-American groups with Clark Terry, Roland Kirk and James Moody.
Plagued with heart trouble he underwent open-heart surgery in the late Sixties, putting him out of action until 1971. Working again was brief and while undergoing a second heart operation, Tubby Hayes died on June 8, 1973 in Hammersmith, London, England. He was just 38 years old.
More Posts: flute,saxophone,vibraphone
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Chip Shelton was born Clarence Elmo Shelton, Jr. on December 2, 1944 in Welch, West Virginia. He studied drums with his multi-instrumentalist record collector father from age 5 to 7. He studied piano from age 8 to 11 and clarinet from age 11 to14 and finally settled on flute. A well-rounded student he found time to participate in choir, dance and sports.
Shelton attended high school in Dayton, Ohio, followed by 3 years of pre-med at University of Cincinnati, experimenting with his own brand of self-taught improvisation on piano, clarinet, and saxophone. At age 20, he became more focused musically and while at Howard University he jammed with notables like Donny Hathaway, Sherry Winston, and Lloyd McNeil, and led his own straight-ahead jazz quintet, the “DMZ Revisited”.
At age 24 Chip moved to New York, studying and/or performed with Bill Barron, James Moody, Hank Mobley, Irene Reid, Jimmy Ponder, Frank Foster, Jimmy Heath, Frank Wess, Hubert Laws, Ernie Wilkins, Joe Newman, and many others around New York and New Jersey.
Chip Shelton has gone on to perform live alongside Greg Bandy, Peter Bernstein, Philip Harper, Herman Foster, Lou Donaldson, and TK Blue. In the 90s he would record for with Rise Up Label, Satellites Records, and performed with Louis Hayes, Bob Baldwin, Roy Ayers, Roy Merriwether, John Hicks, Lynn Seaton and numerous others. He has recorded nearly a dozen albums and continues to compose, perform and tour.
More Posts: flute
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Hubert Laws was born November 10, 1939 in the Studewood section of Houston, Texas, the second of eight children. He grew up across the street from a honky-tonk called Miss Mary’s Place where his grandfather played harmonica and his mother, a pianist, played gospel music. He began playing flute in high school after volunteering to substitute for the school orchestra’s regular flutist. Becoming adept at jazz improvisation he played in the Houston-area jazz group the Swingsters, which eventually evolved into the Modern Jazz Sextet, the Night Hawks, and The Crusaders. At age 15, he was a member of the early Jazz Crusaders while in Texas from 1954–60. Multi-talented, he also played classical music during those years.
A scholarship to Juilliard School of Music in 1960 saw him studying music in the classroom and with master flutist Julius Baker. Laws went on to play with both the New York Metropolitan Opera Orchestra (member) and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra during the years 1969–72. In 971 he recorded renditions of classical compositions by Fauré, Stravinsky, Debussy, and Bach on the CTI album Rite of Spring with strings and enlisted the talents of Airto Moreira, Jack DeJohnette, Bob James, and Ron Carter.
During his years at Juilliard he played flute with Mongo Santamaría and began recording as a bandleader for Atlantic in 1964, releasing the albums The Laws of Jazz, Flute By-Laws, and Laws Cause. He has worked with In the Seventies he can also be heard playing tenor saxophone on some recordings.
The 1980’s saw the minor hit Family on CBS Records getting played on many UK soul radio stations. In the 1990s Hubert resumed his career, recording with opera singers Kathleen Battle and Jessye Norman. His albums on the Music Masters Jazz label—My Time Will Come in 1990 and Storm Then Calm in 1994 show a return to his old form of his early 1970s albums.
Over the course of his career he also recorded with Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, Nancy Wilson, Quincy Jones, Paul McCartney, Paul Simon, Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Lena Horne, Leonard Bernstein, James Moody, Jaco Pastorius, Sérgio Mendes, Bob James, Carly Simon, George Benson, Clark Terry, Stevie Wonder, J. J. Johnson, The Rascals, Morcheeba Ashford & Simpson, Chet Baker, George Benson, Moondog, his brother Ronnie, Gil Scott-Heron, among others, and was a member of the New York Jazz Quartet. .
Laws has been honored with the Lifetime Achievement Awards from the National Flute Association and the National Endowment for the Arts in the field of jazz, as well as a recipient of the NEA Jazz Masters Award and three Grammy nominations. Flautist and tenor saxophonist Hubert Laws continues to compose, record and perform.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Ernie Watts was born Ernest James Watts on October 23, 1945 in Norfolk, Virginia. He began playing saxophone at thirteen, attended West Chester University and later matriculated through Berklee College of Music on a Downbeat scholarship. He toured with Buddy Rich in the mid-1960s, occupying one of the alto saxophone chairs along with Lou Marini.
Watts visited Africa on a US State Department tour with Oliver Nelson’s group, played tenor saxophone with the Tonight Show Band under Doc Severinsen for twenty years and was a featured soloist on many of Marvin Gaye’s original Motown albums during the 1970s. A first-call musician he has sat in on many other pop and R&B sessions during 25 years in the studios in Los Angeles.
By the mid-1980s Ernie decided to rededicate himself to jazz, recording and touring with German guitarist and composer Torsten de Winkel, drummer Steve Smith and keyboardist Tom Coster. He would join bassist Charlie Haden’s Quartet West, play saxophone on the Grease soundtrack, clarinet on The Color Purple and sax on the opening theme song of the popular 80s sitcom Night Court.
Watts has won two Grammy Awards as an instrumentalist, toured with the Rolling Stones, appeared in the 1982 film Let’s Spend The Night Together, was featured on Kurt Elling’s 2010 Grammy-winning album Dedicated To You, formed his own label Flying Dutchman Records, and tours Europe with his quartet.
With flute added to his instrument list, saxophonist Ernie Watts has released eighteen albums as a leader and nearly three dozen as a sideman working with Billy and Bobby Alessi, Paul Anka, Wilie Bobo, Brass Fever, Kenny Burrell, Donald Byrd, Stanley Clarke, Billy Cobham, Randy Crawford, Dizzy Gillespie, Bobby Hutcherson, Milt Jackson, Carol King, John Mayall, Blue Mitchell, New Stories, Lalo Schifrin and Gabor Szabo among others. He continues to perform record and tour.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Hamiet Bluiett was born on September 16, 1940 in Brooklyn a.k.a. Lovejoy, Illinois, that was founded as a free black refuge community in the 1830s. As a child, he studied piano, trumpet, and clarinet, but was attracted most strongly to the baritone saxophone from the age of ten. He began his musical career by playing the clarinet for barrelhouse dances in Brooklyn, Illinois, before joining the Navy band in 1961. He attended Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
Following his time in the Navy, he returned to the St. Louis area in the mid-1960s. In the late 1960s Bluiett co-founded the Black Artists’ Group (BAG) in St. Louis, Missouri, comprised of a collective dedicated to fostering creative work in theater, visual arts, dance, poetry, film, and music. He led the BAG big band during 1968 and 1969.
Bluiett moved to New York City in 1969 and joined the Charles Mingus Quintet and the Sam Rivers large ensemble. In 1976 he co-founded the World Saxophone Quartet with two other BAG members, Julius Hemphill and Oliver Lake. The group would quickly become jazz music’s most renowned saxophone quartet. He has remained a champion of the somewhat unwieldy baritone saxophone, organizing large groups of baritone saxophones.
In the 1980s, he also founded The Clarinet Family, a group of eight clarinetists playing clarinets of various sizes ranging from E-flat soprano to contrabass. Since the 1990s he has led a virtuosic quartet, the Bluiett Baritone Nation, made up entirely of baritone saxophones, with drum set accompaniment. His return to his hometown in 2002 affords him the opportunity to gig, perform with students from Neighborhood Music School in New Haven, Connecticut under the name of “Hamiet Bluiett and the Improvisational Youth Orchestra”. He has recorded over three-dozen albums and continues to perform, record and tour.
