YVONNICK PRENÉ QUINTET
Yvonnick Prené was already playing the harmonica professionally by the age of 17 in Parisian jazz clubs. He later earned a master’s degree in music at the Sorbonne University in Paris, in 2011 and while still enrolled, he moved to New York City, receiving multiple scholarships at the City College of New York, Columbia University and at The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music.
Prené has worked with top artists like Pasquale Grasso, Peter Bernstein, Kevin Hays, Bill Stewart, and many others.
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Three Wishes
The Baroness asked Larry Adler, if three wishes were grantable, what would they be and he replied this:
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“I don’t know there is anything I want that badly. I live very much in the present and so my wishes are pretty damn well gratified. I’d like to write a show. Because all I’ve written so far are film scores, and you can’t tell by them if you’re a good composer or not. Even though one of my film scores got an Academy Award ~ my first film score, in fact! But you only really know when you write a show, and the music carries the show, and has an independent life outside the show. Gershwin is a good example of that..””And help a chick. You know: We have a common understanding.”
- “I’d like to be the best father it’s possible to be.”
- “I’d like to be emotionally where I am chronologically. Chronologically, I’m forty-eight. Emotionally, I’m nineteen ~ if I am nineteen!”
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Jolyon Hunter was born on December 1, 1926 in Ealing, London, England and moved with his actor parents to America in 1935. He studied the French horn at two military schools before switching to trumpet. By 1943 he returned home to Britain and attended the Royal College of Music before joining the war effort in the British Army.
In 1950 Jo left Army service and joined the Kenny Graham Afro Cubists, working with them off and on until 1957. Departing the group, he then worked for a short time with Roy Fox, followed by a five year residence with the Jack Parnell Big Band. He went on to play with Oscar Rabin, replacing Jimmy Deuchar.
Moving to Brighton, he worked with local bands and was an active freelancer on both trumpet and piano. In his later years he worked on cruise ships and played harmonica. Trumpeter and pianist Jo Hunter, who also played pianist and harmonica, passed away on August 14, 2016 at the age of 89.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Samuel Carthorne Rivers was born September 25, 1923 in Enid, Oklahoma, the son of a gospel musician who sung with the Fisk Jubilee Singers and the Silverstone Quartet which exposed a young Sam to music at an early age. By 1947 he was in Boston studying Alan Hovhaness at the Boston Conservatory.
Active in jazz since the early 1950s, by the end of the decade he was performing with then 13 year-old drummer Tony Williams. In the mid Sixties he held a short-lived tenure with Miles Davis, producing the album Miles In Tokyo. He went on to sign with Blue Note leading four dates, his first being Fuschia Swing Song and contributing many more as a sideman.
A multi-instrumentalist, Rivers who plays soprano and tenor saxophones, bass clarinet, flute, harmonica and piano, is also a composer. Rooted in bebop and equally adept at free jazz he has performed and recorded with the likes of Quincy Jones, Herb Pomeroy, Tadd Dameron, Jaki Byard, Freddie Hubbard, Herbie Hancock, Andrew Hill, Larry Young and many others.
The 70s saw the rise of the loft era and Rivers ran RivBea in New York’s NoHo district where numerous performance lofts emerged. He continued to perform and record for a variety of labels including several albums for Impulse Records, two big band albums for RCA Victor, and joined Dizzy Gillespie’s band near the end of the trumpeter’s life.
With a thorough command of music theory, orchestration and composition, Rivers has been an influential and prominent artist in jazz music. He performs regularly with his RivBea Orchestra and Trio and is currently recording new works. Sam Rivers, who played soprano and tenor saxophones, bass clarinet, flute, harmonica and piano in the avant-garde and free jazz arenas, passed away on December 26, 2011 in Orlando, Florida at age 88.
Put A Dose In Your Pocket
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Jean-Baptiste Frédéric Isidor Baron Thielemans was born on April 29, 1922 in Brussels, Belgium. Known to the world as Toots, he began his musical training on accordion at age three. Not playing harmonica until he was seventeen, Toots original reputation was made as a guitarist greatly influenced by Django Reinhardt. By 1949 he was sharing the Paris Jazz Festival bandstand with Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Max Roach and Sidney Bechet for a jam session. That same year he began touring Europe with Benny Goodman and making his recording debut with Zoot Sims.
Moving to the US in 1952 he joined Charlie Parker’s All-Stars and worked with Miles Davis and Dinah Washington. He played and recorded with names like Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, George Shearing, Quincy Jones, Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans, Paul Simon, Billy Joel, The Happenings, Astrud Gilberto, Shirley Horn, Elis Regina and others.
His composition “Bluesette”, recorded in 1962, where he introduced whistling and guitar in unison, has become a jazz standard. Norman Gimbel later penned the lyrics and the tune became a worldwide hit for several singers and is still highly requested.
His trademark harmonica playing and whistling has been heard in movie scores, television series and commercials. He has been a proponent of world music releasing a French flavored album Chez Toots and the two-volume Brasil Project. He has received honorary doctorates, made a baron by King Albert II of Belgium, and in 2008 became a NEA Jazz Master.
Apart from his popularity as an accomplished musician, he is well liked for his modesty and kind demeanor. The composer and musician continued to play and record until he passed away on August 22, 2016 in Braine-l’Alleud, Belgium. He is credited with single-handedly introducing the chromatic harmonica as a jazz instrument in the Fifties, playing with the dexterity of a saxophone.
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