Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Naná Vasconcelos was born in Recife, Brazil on August 2, 1944. At age 12 he began playing his father’s guitar and joined the city’s marching band. His intense curiosity and inquisitive ear prompted him to listen to music from Brazil’s greatest composer Villa Lobos to Jimi Hendrix. He played with every imaginable musical configuration in Recife from orchestras to street bands until finally moved to Rio where he began performing with Milton Nascimento.

By 1970 Argentinean tenor, Gato Barbieri came through Rio and invited Nana to join his group and everywhere the played Nana created a sensation. After the tours end he settled in Paris where he made his first recording, “Africa Deus”. He returned to Brazil to record Amazonas, began an eight-year collaboration with guitarist Egberto Gismonti, returned to New York and formed the group “Cordona” with Don Cherry and Collin Walcott, while touring and recording with Pat Metheny.

Throughout his career he has worked with everyone from B.B. King to Jean Luc Ponty to the Talking Heads but has never become a studio musician. With over two-dozen albums as a leader, Nana has contributed special energies to another sixteen albums with such musicians as Walter Bishop Jr., Jan Gabarek, Pierre Favre and Danny Gottlieb that go well beyond the usual contributions of a percussionist.

A master all of Brazil’s percussion instruments, specializing in the berimbau and taking it far beyond its traditional uses, he currently leads his own group “Bushdance” and has developed a theatrically staged piece that explores the full, fascinating range of sounds and songs that lie in the heart of his music.

Nana Vasconcelos has performed at the Woodstock Jazz Festival, “Luz De Candeeiro” to the AIDS benefit compilation album Onda Sonora: Red Hot + Lisbon produced by the Red Hot Organization and was awarded the Best Percussionist Of The Year by the Down Beat Critics Poll for seven consecutive years, from 1984 to 1990. He continues to perform, record and tour.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Callen Radcliffe Tjader, Jr. a.k.a. Cal Tjader was born July 16, 1925 in St. Louis, Missouri to touring Swedish-American vaudevillians, a tap dancing father and pianist mother. At two, his parents settled in San Mateo, California, opened a dance studio where he received piano and tap instruction from his parents. Tapping alongside his father in the Bay area he landed a role in the film “The White of the Dark Cloud of Joy” tapping with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson.

Playing in a Dixieland band around the Bay area, at sixteen Cal entered and won a Gene Krupa solo contest but the win was dampened by Pearl Harbor. After serving in the Army, he enrolled at San Jose State College and under the G.I. Bill majoring in education. He later transferred to San Francisco State College, took timpani lessons, met Dave Brubeck who introduced him to Paul Desmond. The three formed the Dave Brubeck Octet with Tjader on drums and recorded one album.

Disbanding the octet, Tjader and Brubeck formed a trio that became a fixture in the San Francisco jazz scene. During this period he taught himself the vibraphone, alternating between it and the drums depending on the song. A diving accident in 1951 forced Brubeck’s trio to dissolve, however, Tjader continued trio work with bassist Jack Weeks and pianists John Marabuto or Vince Guaraldi, recording his first 10″ LP as a leader with them for Fantasy. He went on to work with George Shearing and continued recording for Fantasy.

After a gig at the Blackhawk Cal quit Shearing and in 1954 formed The Cal Tjader Modern Mambo Quintet that produced Mambo with Tjader. The Mambo craze reached its peak in the late 1950s, and his band opened the second Monterey Jazz Festival in 1959. The Sixties was his most prolific period and his biggest success was the 1964 album Soul Sauce, the title track, a Dizzy Gillespie composition.

The 70s were lean years suffering like most jazz artists due to rock and roll’s explosive growth. During his later years he cut what most consider his seminal work “Onda Va Bien”, roughly translated as The Good Life, earning him a Grammy for Best Latin Recording.

Just as he was born on tour, he died touring on the road with his band in Manila, succumbing from a heart attack on May 5, 1982. Cal Tjader, who 40 year career playing vibraphone, drums, bongos, congas, timpani and piano stands alongside Lionel Hampton and Milt Jackson as a vital influence and is linked with swinging freely between jazz and Latin music.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

He was born William Correa on February 28, 1934 in East Harlem, New York City but to the jazz and Latin music worlds he was simply known as Willie Bobo, a moniker given him by Mary Lou Williams after they recorded in the early 50’s.  Growing up in Spanish Harlem in New York City, he began playing bongos at age 14 and started performing a year later with Perez Prado. Over the next few years he studied with Mongo Santamaria while serving as his translator and at 19 joined Tito Puente for four years.

Willie became one of the great Latin percussionists of his time, a relentless swinger on the congas and timbales, a flamboyant showman onstage, and an engaging if modestly endowed singer. He also made serious inroads into the pop, R&B and straight jazz worlds, and he always said that his favorite song was Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Dindi.”

He worked with Cal Tjader, Herbie Mann and Santamaria with whom he recorded the evergreen Latin standard “Afro-Blue” but it was in 1963 that he made his first recording as a leader with Clark Terry and Joe Farrell. He went on to record with Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley, Herbie Hancock, Wes Montgomery, Chico Hamilton and Sonny Stitt. In 1969, he moved to Los Angeles where he led jazz and Latin jazz combos, appeared on Bill Cosby’s first comedy series in 1969.

He recorded on his own for Sussex, Blue Note, Verve and Columbia. One of his last appearances, only three months before his death, was at the 1983 Playboy Jazz Festival where he reunited with Santamaria for the first time in 15 years. Jazz percussionist and timbale master Willie Bobo, known for his Afro-Cuban and Latin jazz succumbed to cancer on September 15, 1983 at age 49.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Chano Pozo was born Luciano Pozo Gonales was born in Havana, Cuba on January 7, 1915 and Chano showed an early interest in drumming, gaining his musical background performing ably in Afro-Cuban religious ceremonies in which drumming was a key element.

Growing up in poverty in the foul and dangerous area of El Africa solar where even the police feared to tread, By 13 he was in reformatory learning to read and write, study auto repair and hone his already exceptional drumming skill. Upon his release and during a series of lackluster jobs he composed music. His reputation grew among the people each year for the compositions he wrote for carnival and he quickly became the most sought after rumbero in Cuba.

At the beginning of 1947 Pozo moved to New York City with the encouragement of Miguelito Valdes with who he recorded along with Arsenio Rodriguez, Carlos Vidal Bolado and Jose Mangual. By September he was a featured performer with Dizzy Gillespie’s Big Band at Carnegie Hall and subsequently on a European tour. Their most notable material was ‘Cubana Be, Cubana Bop, Tin Tin Deo and Manteca, the latter two co-written by Pozo.

A conguero, percussionist, singer, dancer and composer, Chano became one of the founding fathers of Latin jazz, which was essentially a blend of bebop and Cuban folk music. Chano Pozo, a hot-tempered Cuban, was  killed in a Harlem bar, a little more than a month shy of his 34^th birthday on December 2, 1948.

Chano Pozo: 1915-1948 / Drums, Percussion

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Don Elliott was born on October 21, 1926 in Somerville, New Jersey. He played mellophone in his high school band and played trumpet for an army band. After study at the University of Miami he added vibraphone to his arsenal of instruments.  He recorded with Terry Gibbs and Buddy Rich before forming his own band.

From 1953 to 1960 he won the Down Beat readers poll several times for “miscellaneous instrument-mellophone.” Known as the “Human Instrument”, Elliott additionally performed jazz as a vocalist, trombonist, flugelhornist and percussionist. He pioneered the art of multi-track recording, composed over 5000 jingles with a countless number being prize-winning advertising jingles, prepared film scores, recorded over 60 albums and built a thriving production company.

Don scored several Broadway productions, such as The Beast In Me and A Thunder Carnival, the latter of which he performed with the Don Elliott Quartet, provided one of the voices for the novelty jazz duo the Nutty Squirrels, and lent his vocal talents to such motion picture soundtracks as The Getaway, $ (Dollars), The Hot Rock and The Happy Hooker.

His album Calypso Jazz is considered by some jazz enthusiasts to be one of the definitive calypso jazz albums. He worked with Paul Desmond, Bill Taylor, Billy Eckstine, Bill Evans, Urbie Green, Michel Legrand, George Shearing and Mundell Lowe among others over his career. Multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, publisher and producer Don Elliott, who was a longtime associate of Quincy Jones, passed away of cancer in Weston, Connecticut on July 5, 1984.

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