Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Mimi Fox was born on August 24, 1956 in New York City and started playing drums at nine and guitar when she was ten. She was inspired by the wide variety of music enjoyed by her family – show tunes, classical, Dixieland, Motown – and her own youthful inclination towards pop, folk, and R&B. By the time she was fourteen, she bought her first jazz album, John Coltrane’s classic Giant Steps, changing the course of her musical life. She began touring right out of high school and eventually settled in the San Francisco Bay area where she became a sought after player.
Mimi has released seven albums but her “Perpetually Hip” released in 2006 reached #23 on the Billboard “Top Jazz Albums” chart. This two-disc set contains standards and new tunes written by Fox, with one disc featuring solo recordings while the other is with a band composed of bassist Harvie S, drummer Billy Hart and pianist Xavier Davis.
As a composer, Mimi has received numerous grants, writing and performing original scores for orchestras, documentary films and dance projects. A dedicated educator and clinician, she is Chair of the Guitar Department, a faculty advisor and instructor at The Jazzschool for Musical Study and Performance in Berkeley, California and an Adjunct Professor at New York University. Guitarist Mimi Fox continues to compose, perform and tour.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Malachi Favors was born August 22, 1927 in Lexington, Mississippi. He began playing double bass at age fifteen and began performing professionally upon graduating high school. His early performances included work with Dizzy Gillespie and Freddie Hubbard. But by 1965, he was a founding member of the AACM – Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and a member of Muhal Richard Abrams’ Experimental Band.
Malachi was a protégé of Chicago bassist Wilbur Ware. His first known recording was a 1953 session with tenor saxophonist Paul Bascomb and four years later recorded with pianist Andrew Hill. He began working with Roscoe Mitchell in 1966 and this group eventually became the Art Ensemble of Chicago, for which he is most prominently known. Favors also worked outside the group, with artists including Sunny Murray, Archie Shepp and Dewey Redman.
Favors’ most notable records include “Natural and the Spiritual”, “Sightsong” andthe 1994 Roman Bunka collaboration and recording at the Berlin Jazz Fest of the German Critics Poll Winner album “Color Me Cairo”.
At some point in his career Malachi added the word “Maghostut” to his name and because of this he is commonly listed on recordings as Malachi Favors Maghostut.
Most associated musically with bebop, hard bop and particularly free jazz, Favors not only plays the double bass but electric bass, guitar, banjo, zither, gong and other instruments. Malachi Favors died of pancreatic cancer in Chicago, Illinois on January 30, 2004 at the age of 76.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Ron Escheté was born on August 19, 1948 in Houma, Louisiana and after receiving his first guitar at the age of 14, joined a quartet and was working clubs in Louisiana before he had even graduated from high school. His early influences were jazz masters Jim Hall, Howard Roberts and Wes Montgomery. He attended Loyola University where he majored in classical guitar and minored in flute, and studied with classical guitarist Paul Guma.
Shortly after Escheté left Loyola he was tapped to tour with Buddy Greco and while touring with Greco, he set his sites on the Los Angeles music scene. In 1970 Ron relocated to California, worked and recorded with vibraphonist Dave Pike. In 1975 he joined forces with pianist Gene Harris and quickly establish his reputation as a premier accompanist.
Over the decades, Escheté, who plays a seven-string guitar, has worked with jazz musicians and vocalists such as Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Diana Krall, Dizzy Gillespie, Milt Jackson, Ray Brown, Bill Cunliffe, Sam Most, Ernestine Anderson, Mort Weiss and many more.
No stranger to television, Escheté has appeared on the Tonight Show, the Merv Griffin Show and the Mike Douglas Show as well as playing nearly every notable jazz venue in Southern California including the Catalina Bar and Grill, The Jazz Bakery, Steamers, Donte’s, Carmelo’s, The Parisian Room and The Lighthouse to name a few.
Guitarist Ron Escheté, quintessential sideman and innovative leader with some 36 albums to his credit, continues to tour, perform and record as he currently heads his own trio with Todd Johnson on bass and Kendall Kay on drums.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Joe Beck was born on July 29, 1945 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and learned to play guitar as a child. Briefly delving into 60’s and 70s rock music he turned his attention to jazz and got initiated in the post bop, mainstream, fusion and soul jazz eras.
Beck began as a member of the Gil Evans orchestra and in 1970 released Rock Encounter for Polydor, followed by a release on Kudu and a record session with Esther Phillips – What a Diff’rence a Day Makes in 1975 on the same label.
By the 1980s Beck was recording several CD’s for the DMP/Digital Music Products label including co-billed work with the noted flautist Ali Ryerson. To fill out the sound he wanted to present — bass lines, harmony, and melody—in the duo setting with Ali, he developed what he called the “alto guitar”. He would go on to collaborate with Jimmy Bruno and John Abercrombie, and record with Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Buddy Rich, Duke Ellington, Paul Desmond, Maynard Ferguson, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Woody Herman, Stan Getz, Sergio Mendes, Laura Nyro, Paul Simon, Houston Person and the list goes non.
On July 22, 2008, guitarist Joe Beck passed away from lung cancer in Woodbury, Connecticut after a career spanning more than 30 years in jazz and nearly two-dozen albums.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Joel Harrison was born on July 27, 1957 in Washington D.C. In the Sixties he became enamored with the inventive guitarists such as Jimi Hendrix and John McLaughlin. By his twenties, after graduating from Bard College, he hitchhiked across America exploring the rich diversity contained between its coasts.
Joel’s musical style encompasses a melding of jazz, classical, country, rock and world influences as the composer, arranger, songwriter, vocalist and bandleader stretches from concert hall to jazz club and the occasional dive bar. Finding inspiration from music too often barred from admission into the jazz consciousness, he continues his exploration into the reinterpretations of Miles Davis, Charles Ives, Walt Whitman, Jack Kerouac and Hank Williams.
He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a two-time winner of the Jazz Composer’s Alliance Composition Competition, 1st Place at the Percussive Arts Society worldwide competition, and has received grants from Chamber Music America, Meet the Composer, the Flagler Cary Trust, NYSCA, and the Jerome Foundation.
With a string of albums under his belt in a variety of genres, guitarist Joel Harrison has played and recorded with an impressive list of collaborators that includes Christian Howes, Donny McCaslin, Nels Cline, David Binney, Norah Jones, Dave Liebman, Uri Caine, Jamey Haddad, and Dewey Redman. He continues to compose, record, perform and tour.
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