Saturday, March 31, 2012
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Monday, March 12, 2012
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Sunday, March 04, 2012
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Bluiett, All-Stars Laud Pianist Don Pullen at Hometown Tribute
The auditorium of the Jefferson Center in Roanoke, Va., was filled to full capacity during an uplifting 70th birthday concert tribute to hometown pianist Don Pullen. The all-star band was brought together by baritone saxophonist Hamiet Bluiett, a former musical partner of Pullen’s, and included James Carter on tenor saxophone and flute, Jason Moran on piano, Christian McBride on bass and Nasheet Waits on drums. Carter was his usual ebullient self and connected with the audience during his introductions and lively solos.
The enthusiastic crowd included members of Pullen’s family as well as his friends, who all reacted with delight to the two sets of Pullen compositions interpreted with great feeling and energy by all the soloists. Poet Nikki Giovanni read a composition in honor of Pullen, and video excerpts of the pianist in concert were also shown. Pullen’s piece “Big Alice” served as a spirited encore that brought the audience to its feet. At the concert’s close, the musicians gladly expressed their appreciation of Pullen, the audience, music and life in general.
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Tuesday, August 09, 2011
Snooky Young: Trumpeter regarded with reverence by his contemporaries - Obituaries, News - The Independent
Any bandleader who had Snooky Young in his band could relax, knowing that he'd filled the most difficult role in the band with the best that there was. Young spent four decades leading the trumpet sections in the bands of Jimmy Lunceford, Count Basie and Lionel Hampton. He was infallible, and earned the respect and affection of all his fellows.
"He was a hell of a trumpet player," said Buck Clayton, who sat beside him in Basie's band. Indeed he was, being unique among lead players in that he was also a splendid jazz soloist. "He's also a gentleman and very pleasant to work with," continued Clayton. "He has a good lip and he's one of the most dependable trumpet players in the business." Lead trumpeters are usually large and muscular men. Young was very small and, on the face of it, delicate. Many's the musician who, sitting next to him for the first time, has almost jumped from his seat at the sudden burst of power from Young's horn.
The laconic Count Basie, who in his autobiography didn't usually describe his sidemen by much more than the dates when they joined and left his band, became comparatively garrulous when Young's name came up. "He's very likeable and wonderful and dependable," said the Count.
Concert audiences don't alwaysrealise how important a good leadtrumpeter is, and consequently names like Conrad Gozzo, the Holy Grail, remained completely unknown to them. But the musicians themselves were aware and, had Young not been such a friendly and unassuming man, his comrades would have regarded him with hushed awe and reverence. As it was, he was just about the perfect jazz musician, whose life was long, happy and entirely distinguished.
Young's first fame came when he stepped out of the section to solo on Lunceford's classic recording of "Uptown Blues" in 1939 when he was 19. "It was different in those days," he said. "They usually had a lead, a growl and a get-off man in the trumpets, but today the lead is thrown about more. I don't think one man could play lead in every number in today's books. So much of what we play is upstairs that it would wear one man down."
The Lunceford band provided he music for the 1941 film melodrama Blues in the Night, which starred Elia Kazan and Jack Carson as musicians. "When Jack Carson jumped up and played a solo it was me playing the music," said Young.
Given the sobriquet "Snooky" by an aunt when he was a small child, Young was known to his musicians by his more obscure nickname, "Sack". Born in Dayton, Ohio, the third of seven children, he began his professional career as a child in the mid-1930ss, playing in his family's band, Young's Snappy Six. His father played saxophone and his mother played banjo and guitar. He and his brother played trumpets and his sister was the pianist. The family toured with a road show called "Brown Skin Models" and it became stranded when the review collapsed in the Deep South. It took the family six months to work its way back to Dayton.
When Louis Armstrong came to Dayton the theatre windows were left open because of the heat, and Young stood in the street and listened to "the most beautiful trumpet I ever heard. There are guys like Charlie Shavers and Clark Terry whose work I'm crazy about, but my main influence was Louis."
Still in school, Young joined the local Wilberforce Collegians, where he met another trumpet player, Gerald Wilson, who was to become a close friend for life. When Wilson joined the Lunceford band he recommended Young to the leader and, over the three years he was with the band, Young took trumpet solos on a dozen or so of the band's records. When the Second World War began the band fell apart as musicians, and went into the services. Young passed his medical to join the US Navy, but was never called up.
"Count Basie came through Dayton at a time when Buck Clayton was sick with his tonsils and he asked if I'd play in the band for a month until Buck was well. I think that was how I made my way with Basie, because he liked my playing. It was like night and day, those two bands," Young said, comparing Basie and Lunceford. "In fact, I had to learn how to play again when I went to the Basie band. Lunceford's was a two-beat band. Basie's was the band that first started to really swing."
Young was to return to work with the pianist for long periods over the next three decades, most prominently from 1957 when he stayed with Basie for five years. Similarly, after firstjoining Lionel Hampton's big band in 1942, he left and rejoined the vibraphone player several times over the ensuing years. In 1943 he dropped off when Hampton reached Los Angeles and joined bands led by Les Hite and Benny Carter.
"It's probably only because he's so valuable in the section," Carter said, "that Snooky hasn't received his due recognition as a soloist."
In 1957 Young became a founder member of the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis big band and also worked for Benny Goodman. Another Basie giant,the tenor saxophonist Frank Foster, who also died recently, pointed the finger in 1958 at last to give Young the prominence he deserved so well. Foster wrote "Who, Me?", a rampaging feature for Young's trumpet. It has all the exultant magnetism of the band at its best, with Young in his solo playing "lead, growl and get-off man" in one magnificent performance. It thrilled crowds in concerts across the US, Europe and Asia. As did his performance of the delicate ballad "Pensive Miss", written as a feature for him with the band by Neal Hefti.
Young came off the road when he left Basie in 1962 and became a studio musician in New York. When The Tonight Show band moved from New York to Los Angeles, he went with it. He stayed with the show from 1972 until 1992. In Los Angeles he enhanced the Basie-inspired Juggernaut, a big band led by Nat Pierce and Frankie Capp, and once again joined his friend Gerald Wilson when Young became the high-note player in Wilson's big band. He was a regular in many of the local jazz groups, notably the Clayton-Hamilton Orchestra and the blues package led by Jeannie and Jimmy Cheatham.
"He's one of the most precious human beings I have ever known," said Quincy Jones, topping off the praise for one of the most well-liked jazz musicians of all time.
STEVE VOCE
Eugene Edwards "Snooky" Young, trumpeter: born Dayton, Ohio 3 February 1919; married 1939 (two daughters, one son); died Los Angeles 10 May 2011.
Saturday, June 04, 2011
Ray Bryant, Jazz Pianist, Dies at 79 - NYTimes.com
Cover of Alone at MontreuxRay Bryant, Jazz Pianist, Dies at 79 - NYTimes.comBy NATE CHINEN
Ray Bryant, a jazz pianist whose sensitivity and easy authority made him a busy accompanist and a successful solo artist, beginning in the mid-1950s, died on Thursday. He was 79.
His wife of 20 years, Claude Bryant, said he died at New York Hospital Queens after a long illness. He lived in Jackson Heights, Queens.
Mr. Bryant had a firm touch and an unshakable sense of time, notably in his left hand, which he often used to build a bedrock vamp. Even in a bebop setting, he favored the ringing tonalities of the gospel church. And he was sumptuously at home with the blues, as a style and a sensibility but never as an affectation.
All of this contributed to his accomplishment as a solo pianist. His first solo piano album was “Alone With the Blues,” in 1958, and he went on to make a handful of others, including “Alone at Montreux,” “Solo Flight” and “Montreux ’77.” His most recent release, “In the Back Room,” was yet another solo album, recorded live at Rutgers University and released on the Evening Star label in 2008.
Raphael Homer Bryant was born on Dec. 24, 1931, in Philadelphia, and made his name in that city during its considerable postwar jazz boom. Along with his brother, Tommy, a bassist, he played in the house band at the Blue Note Club in Philadelphia, which had a steady flow of major talent dropping in from New York. (Charlie Parker and Miles Davis were among the musicians they played with there.) In short order Mr. Bryant had plenty of prominent sideman work, both with and without his brother.
One early measure of his ascent was the album “Meet Betty Carter and Ray Bryant,” released on Columbia in 1955. It was a splashy introduction for him as well as for Ms. Carter, the imposingly gifted jazz singer. It was soon followed by “The Ray Bryant Trio” (Prestige), an accomplished album that introduced Mr. Bryant’s composition “Blues Changes,” with its distinctive chord progression.
That song would become a staple of the jazz literature, if less of a proven standard than “Cubano Chant,” the sprightly Afro-Cuban fanfare that Mr. Bryant recorded under his own name and in bands led by the drummers Art Blakey, Art Taylor and Jo Jones.
Mr. Bryant had several hit songs early in his solo career, beginning with “Little Susie,” an original blues that he recorded both for the Signature label and for Columbia. In 1960 he reached No. 30 on the Billboard chart with a novelty song called “The Madison Time,” rushed into production to capitalize on a dance craze. (The song has had a durable afterlife, appearing on the soundtrack to the 1988 movie “Hairspray,” and in the recent Broadway musical production.) He later broke into the Top 100 with a cover of Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe,” released just a few months after the original, in 1967.
But Mr. Bryant’s legacy never rested on his chart success or his nimble response to popular trends. It can be discerned throughout his own discography and in some of his work as a sideman, notably with the singers Carmen McRae and Jimmy Rushing, and on albums like Dizzy Gillespie’s “Sonny Side Up,” on Verve. “After Hours,” a track on that album, begins with Mr. Bryant and his brother playing a textbook slow-drag blues.
Along with his wife, Mr. Bryant is survived by a son, Raphael Bryant Jr.; a daughter, Gina; three grandchildren; and two brothers, Leonard and Lynwood. Mr. Bryant’s sister, Vera Eubanks, is the mother of several prominent jazz musicians: Robin Eubanks, a trombonist; Kevin Eubanks, the guitarist and former bandleader on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno”; and Duane Eubanks, a trumpeter.
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Back during the mid and late seventies Ray Bryant used to play piano regularly at a restaurant around the corner from my apartment on 2nd Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan called Hanratty's. That restaurant has been gone for many years. Bryant was a funky two fisted pianist who had a winning combination of prodigious technique coupled with a soulful feeling. He will live on through his numerous recordings.
John H. Armwood
Back during the mid and late seventies Ray Bryant used to play piano regularly at a restaurant around the corner from my apartment on 2nd Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan called Hanratty's. That restaurant has been gone for many years. Bryant was a funky two fisted pianist who had a winning combination of prodigious technique coupled with a soulful feeling. He will live on through his numerous recordings.
John H. Armwood
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Roy Hargrove Quintet: Live At The Village Vanguard : NPR
Cover of Roy HargroveRoy Hargrove Quintet: Live At The Village Vanguard : NPRMay 25, 2011
There's no one standard model of jazz, but there are standards. There's a standard repertoire, for sure; also, standard conventions of instrumentation, group interaction, overall "sound." Trumpeter Roy Hargrove, when he commits to playing straight-ahead jazz, leads a quintet that is very comfortable with those standards. If you're new to jazz, it would seem distantly familiar, like how you might imagine jazz to be. If you aren't new to jazz, you might just find it proves how satisfying those standards remain, and how much room for self-expression is in them.
SET LIST
"The Lamp Is Low" (de Rose/Shefter)
"Hindsight" (Cedar Walton)
"After The Morning" (John Hicks)
"Book's Bossa" (Walter Booker)
"Mr. AT" (Walter Bolden)
"Rouge" (Hargrove)
"Never Let Me Go" (Livingston/Evans)
"Like That" (Hargrove)
"Strasbourg/St. Denis" (Hargrove)
"Bring It On Home To Me" (Sam Cooke)
It's what's made Roy Hargrove a star in the jazz world, and what allows the Roy Hargrove quintet to play two straight weeks at the world-famous Village Vanguard in New York City. WBGO and NPR Music will present a live on-air broadcast and live video webcast of the band's early performance on Wednesday, May 25.
Hargrove's current band is an argument for timelessness; for the idea that the elegance and sophistication of classic post-bebop jazz remains appealing today. On his latest quintet album, 2008's Earfood, it's argued well because Hargrove — aside from being a commanding trumpet player, fast or slow — has focused on writing and picking catchy songs. Not just frameworks for improvisations, but songs: tuneful, simple, grooving songs.
At the Vanguard, he started the set off with a number of tunes by mentors — Cedar Walton, Walter Booker, John Hicks — and standards. (He even took a vocal turn on "Never Let Me Go.") The second half brought more original compositions, including the signature "Strasbourg/St. Denis." Hargrove stood aside one peer, alto saxophonist Justin Robinson, and in front of a younger rhythm section — his working band.
Roy Hargrove is 41 now, decades after his talent was "discovered" at a Dallas, Texas, arts magnet high school by Wynton Marsalis. He became something of a teenage prodigy, touring Europe and Japan before age 17 and playing with jazz legends before he could legally drink. Hargrove's early studio efforts focused on his jazz playing — since then, he's also explored Afro-Cuban music with an ensemble called Crisol and started a funk and soul fusion band called the RH Factor. (He's also been tapped to play behind Erykah Badu, Common and D'Angelo as a sideman.)
But straight-ahead jazz is a core value for Hargrove, the swinging-and-having-fun kind. That sense of tradition, honored gracefully, was on display when his quintet performed at the Village Vanguard — a place he has regularly appeared since the early '90s.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Billy Bang, Jazz Violinist And Vietnam Veteran, Dies At 63 : A Blog Supreme : NPR
Billy Bang, Jazz Violinist And Vietnam Veteran, Dies At 63 : A Blog Supreme : NPR
Billy Bang, a violinist known for intense performances and a wide-ranging sensibility, died Monday night, his agent Jean-Pierre Leduc confirmed. Bang, who had been suffering from lung cancer, was 63.
Born William Walker in 1947, Bang was an important figure on the experimental jazz scene that blossomed in New York in the 1970s. But he gained wider recognition in the last decade for a series of recordings which drew on his military service during the Vietnam War.
His experiences in combat scarred him mentally, and he generally avoided speaking about them until Leduc encouraged him to create what would become 2001's Vietnam: The Aftermath. The album — and its successor, Vietnam: Reflections — received critical acclaim and proved cathartic for Bang.
"There used to be a time where I used to have dreams about it a lot and it's not as often now," he told Howard Mandel for NPR in 2004. "But for a very long time, I suffered a lot in my sleep. But to be honest, I think after I faced the ordeals of what I've gone through — after completing that music, and after rehearsing it, particularly after recording it — I've felt a lot lighter."
Bang grew up in New York City's South Bronx, and actually studied the violin as a teenager. He didn't like it.
"I didn't know what was going on," he told Tom Vitale for NPR in 1993. "I couldn't carry it back on my block. I lived on 117th Street. Can you imagine a little guy carrying a violin, and you talk about guys picking on you, man. I mean, they really did. I had to put the violin down, throw a couple of punches, get thrown at me, go upstairs. I hated to practice it. It sounded terrible."
Despite being offered a scholarship to a boarding preparatory school in New England, Bang never finished high school. He was drafted into the service and, as he told Mandel, he was thrown into combat two days after landing in Vietnam.
As a squad leader, he had to maintain intense focus in combat. There was no music in his life then.
"Only the music of machine guns," Bang told Mandel. "The rhythm of that is what I heard. The only instrument I had was an M-79, M-14 and a .45."
At least initially, the period after his service was hardly any better. In 2005, Bang told Roy Hurst of NPR's News and Notes that returning was a shock.
"When I came home from Vietnam — when I got off the airplane — the next thing I was on was the New York City subway, and that was extremely traumatic for me — I mean, just really destructive to my whole system," Bang said. "I couldn't take the sounds. I couldn't take the people all around. So I finally got home; I didn't want to come outside for a long time, which I didn't do. So my mother was coaxing me to come out and sort of — she was trying to help me to get back to some kind of normality. But I still criticize the United States government for not having a real bona fide re-entry program for veterans."
Bang's trauma led him to heavy drinking and drug use. He joined a Black Liberation group that drew on his wartime experience to help it buy guns. On one trip to a pawn shop, he saw a violin and that led him back to music. After discovering the way that free jazz artists like Leroy Jenkins and Ornette Coleman were using the instrument, he began taking his own study seriously. He moved from the South Bronx to the Lower East Side and immersed himself in the counterculture of likeminded artists.
Bang proved to be an active, passionate performer. Though he was associated with free improvisation, his concepts also came from more traditional jazz and Latin music, and he often incorporated that language into his playing. Tom Vitale's 1993 profile of Bang centered on his project paying tribute to pioneering jazz violinist Stuff Smith.
Dustin Ross/Courtesy of the artist
Billy Bang across the street from his house on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
By the new millennium, Billy Bang had already become a well-respected musician within the jazz world. He spent 10 years with an important group called the String Trio of New York, an improvising ensemble with his violin, guitarist James Emery and bassist John Lindberg.
The Vietnam albums proved to be more high-water marks for his career. Bang called up fellow musicians who had also served in Vietnam for the recording sessions, including conductor Butch Morris.
"It was quite heavy," Morris told Howard Mandel. "I've never seen so many grown men cry. It's not only how he brought this thematic stuff back — it's how he brought the experience back, the experience of being there, the experience of smelling, the experience of seeing, the experience of feeling, the experience of fear, the experience of joy, the experience — he brought back all these experiences. That's what was so frightening in the studio. He brought back the same experience that each of us had."
Billy Bang was scheduled to perform at the Rochester International Jazz Festival in June of this year. Last year, he released a well-received album called Prayer for Peace.
Friday, April 08, 2011
Randy Weston's African Rhythms Quartet featuring Lewis Nash
Cover of Randy WestonImmersed in African rhythmsBy Geoffrey Himes Friday, April 8, 2011
Most people agree that much of American music — blues, jazz, R&B, hip- hop and gospel — has its roots in Africa, but for many that formula is a vague, sentimental notion, rarely explored and little understood. For pianist Randy Weston, however, that linkage has been the central theme of his music for more than 50 years.
The 85-year-old pianist, who performs at the Kennedy Center on Saturday, has composed jazz suites about Africa, studied African history, collaborated with African musicians, performed across the continent and even lived in Morocco for five years.
“Everybody loves jazz and blues, all these rhythms, and it all comes from Africa,” Weston says. “Africa has always been a mystery, because there’s so little information about what it was like before the people from the north invaded, but you have to know something about Africa to know the human race, because that’s where it started. When I go to Africa, I don’t go as a teacher; I go as a student. I want to find out why I play the way I play.”
Weston is coming to town with a new album, “The Storyteller,” and a new book, “African Rhythms: The Autobiography of Randy Weston,” co-written by Rockville jazz writer Willard Jenkins. In the book, Weston describes how his fascination with Africa began with an unusual childhood. As a boy in the 1930s, when most Americans’ images of Africa came from Tarzan movies, he was reading books about ancient African kingdoms. His father was a fervent follower of Marcus Garvey, who advocated pride, unity and self-determination for the entire African diaspora.
“The way I was raised made me a much older person,” Weston says on the phone from his home in Brooklyn. “It made me realize that our civilization went back for centuries, that our history didn’t just begin with slavery. I wanted to know how my ancestors could come here in chains to pick cotton and still produce such incredible music. They suffered so much to make it possible for Randy Weston to play the piano, so I have to respect them. To deny them would be to disrespect their efforts.”
By 1960, Weston had recorded 10 albums and established himself as a worthy heir to the jazz-piano tradition of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk. But he hadn’t musically addressed his fascination with Africa. By that decade, however, the civil rights movement in the United States was gathering steam at the same time as the freedom movement in colonial Africa (17 nations would declare their independence that year).
So Weston composed a five-part suite, “Uhuru Afrika” (Swahili for “Freedom Africa”), with help from lyricist Langston Hughes and arranger Melba Liston. They recorded the piece with a 27-member big band that featured Freddie Hubbard, Yusef Lateef, Clark Terry, Kenny Burrell, Max Roach and actor-singer Brock Peters. It was a landmark recording that only whetted Weston’s appetite for further explorations of his African heritage.
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He joined a State Department-sponsored tour of Africa in 1961 and another in 1964, and in 1967 moved to Morocco.
“Everywhere I went, I always asked for the most traditional music and the oldest musicians,” Weston recalls. “Jazz is a very young music and America is a very young country, so to gain some perspective you have to go all the way back to where it came from. Like my father and mother, these old musicians have secrets we’ll never fully understand because they lived in a time before us. But we can always learn something from their experiences, so I try to be around the elders as much as possible.”
Willard Jenkins, a frequent contributor to Jazz Times and Downbeat magazines, recognized that Weston had an important story to tell.
“What drew me in Randy’s direction is that I’ve always felt that he’s been underappreciated, perhaps because he was out of the country during a crucial period of his development,” Jenkins says. “He was the only major jazz artist that I know of who actually lived in Africa. It was as if he were on a journey of self-discovery.”
The book is told in Weston’s voice, but it was Jenkins who guided the many interviews over nine years and molded the results into a narrative arc.
“I worked with Willard like I did with Melba [Liston],” Weston says. “He’d turn on the tape recorder, I’d go, ‘Blah, blah, blah,’ and he’d take it away and arrange it. It was the same with Melba; I’d play a piano piece and I’d say, ‘This might be a saxophone solo; this might be for trumpet,’ and she would take it away and arrange it. She had a way of hearing what I did, adding colors and making it sound like me.”
Weston’s album “The Storyteller” was recorded live in 2009 and released late last year. Because it was intended to complement the autobiography, it touches on several scenes from the book. It opens with a solo piano piece titled “Chano Pozo,” the Cuban drummer whose injection of African rhythms into Dizzy Gillespie’s band stimulated Weston’s interest in the roots of jazz. The album revisits such major Weston pieces as “African Sunrise,” “African Cookbook” and Weston’s most recorded composition, “Hi-Fly.” And its title reflects a lesson Weston learned from his time in Africa.
“In Western music,” he says, “to be a master all you have to do is play good — be a great pianist or a great saxophonist — but in Africa, to be a master you also have to be a healer, a naturalist and a storyteller.”
Now that he’s 85, Weston himself is one of those storytelling elders, though he laughingly scoffs at the notion, insisting, “I’m still a baby trying to understand the origin of music, the meaning of music.”
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Bea would prepare meals will she sold in expensively. Sometimes I would fall asleep there and Bea would wake me up for the long journey back to Staten Island. This was a special time in my life. The last time I saw Sam play was when Rob Gibson brought Dizzy to Atlanta in 1990 and Sam was in the band.