Armwood Jazz Blog: May 2017

Tuesday, May 23, 2017

Celebrating the life of the late drummer Mickey Roker. Joe Pass, Milt Jackson, Ray Brown & Mickey Roker - Grooveyard

Mickey Roker, Dynamic Hard-Bop Drummer and Philly Jazz Institution, Dies at 84 | WBGO

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"Mickey Roker, a soulful and deeply propulsive drummer who carried a torch for literate hard-bop in the decades after its commercial peak, died on Monday in Philadelphia, where he was a local jazz institution. He was 84.

His death was confirmed by his daughter, Debra Roker, who cited natural causes but noted that he had lung cancer and diabetes, among other health issues.

Though he was never a household name like Max Roach or Art Blakey, who were more than a decade his senior, Roker was held in high regard as a modern jazz drummer for more than 40 years. He’s probably most widely known for his nearly decade-long association, in the 1970s, with trumpeter and bebop paragon Dizzy Gillespie.

Roker can be heard on a handful of Gillespie albums from that era, including Afro-Cuban Jazz Moods, with Machito (1975), and Carter, Gillespie Inc., with saxophonist Benny Carter (1976). His entry in The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz includes a glowing endorsement from Gillespie: ‘Once he sets a groove, whatever it is, you can go to Paris and come back and it's right there. You never have to worry about it.’

Roker also had a highly visible tenure with the Modern Jazz Quartet, which he joined in the early 1990s as a sub for, and then a successor to, its longtime drummer Connie Kay. Roker appears, anchoring a battery of guests, on A 40th Anniversary Celebration, released in ‘93. But his core contribution to the band was as a road warrior..."

(Via.). Mickey Roker, Dynamic Hard-Bop Drummer and Philly Jazz Institution, Dies at 84 | WBGO:

Thursday, May 18, 2017

Cécile McLorin Salvant’s Timeless Jazz - The New Yorker

Wynton Marsalis said, “You get a singer like this once in a generation or two.”

"On a Thursday evening a few months ago, a long line snaked along Seventh Avenue, outside the Village Vanguard, a cramped basement night club in Greenwich Village that jazz fans regard as a temple. The eight-thirty set was sold out, as were the ten-thirty set and nearly all the other shows that week. The people descending the club’s narrow steps had come to hear a twenty-seven-year-old singer named Cécile McLorin Salvant. In its sixty years as a jazz club, the Vanguard has headlined few women and fewer singers of either gender. But Salvant, virtually unknown two years earlier, had built an avid following, winning a Grammy and several awards from critics, who praised her singing as “singularly arresting” and “artistry of the highest class.”

Cécile McLorin Salvant’s Timeless Jazz - The New Yorker