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Akira Tana
Akira Tana (March 14, 1952) is an American jazz drummer. Biography Tana grew up in Palo Alto, graduating from Gunn High School in 1970. Tana then obtained a bachelor's degree from Harvard University in the social sciences, playing gigs on the side, then enrolled at the New England Conservatory of Music. There he performed in both classical and jazz idioms, playing with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and student ensembles as well as with musicians such as Helen Humes, Milt Jackson, Sonny Rollins, George Russell, and Sonny Stitt. Tana recorded frequently as a sideman in the 1980s, and began releasing albums as a leader in the 1990s. He formed a group, Tana Reid, with Rufus Reid, and added Kei Akagi on occasion to form the Asian-American Jazz Trio. Tana's performing and recording associations include Charles Aznavour, Ran Blake, Ray Bryant, Al Cohn, Chris Connor, Art Farmer, Carl Fontana, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Golson, Jim Hall, Jimmy Heath, Major Holley, Lena Horne, J.J. ...
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San Jose, California
San Jose, officially the City of San José ( ; ), is a cultural, commercial, and political center within Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area. With a city population of 997,368 and a metropolitan area population of 1.95 million, it is the most populous city in both the Bay Area and Northern California and the List of United States cities by population, 12th-most populous in the United States. Located in the center of the Santa Clara Valley on the southern shore of San Francisco Bay, San Jose covers an area of and is the county seat, seat of Santa Clara County, California, Santa Clara County. Before the Spanish colonization of the Americas, arrival of the Spanish, the area around San Jose was long inhabited by the Tamyen people, Tamien nation of the Ohlone people San Jose was founded on November 29, 1777, as the ''Pueblo de San José de Our Lady of Guadalupe, Guadalupe'', the first city founded in the Californias. It became a part of Mexico in 1821 after the Mexican Wa ...
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Al Cohn
Al Cohn (November 24, 1925 – February 15, 1988) was an American jazz saxophonist, arranger and composer. He came to prominence in the band of clarinetist Woody Herman and was known for his longtime musical partnership with fellow saxophonist Zoot Sims. Biography Alvin Gilbert Cohn was born in Brooklyn, New York. In addition to his work as a jazz tenor saxophonist, Cohn was widely respected as an arranger. His work included the Broadway productions of ''Raisin and ''Sophisticated Ladies'', and his arrangements of his own compositions were recorded by big bands led by Maynard Ferguson, Gerry Mulligan, Terry Gibbs and Bob Brookmeyer. Also, Cohn did arrangements for unreleased Linda Ronstadt recordings from the 1980s. Cohn also appeared on stage with Elvis Presley in June, 1972, as a member of the Joe Malin Orchestra at Madison Square Garden. Al Cohn died of liver cancer in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania in 1988. Cohn's first wife was singer Marilyn Moore. His son, Joe ...
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Spike Robinson
Henry Bertholf "Spike" Robinson (January 16, 1930 – October 29, 2001) was an American jazz tenor saxophonist. He began playing at age twelve, recording on several labels, including Discovery, Hep and Concord. However, he sought an engineering degree and followed that profession for nearly 30 years. In 1981 he returned to recording music. Early life Robinson was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin on January 16, 1930. Beginning on alto saxophone in his early years, Robinson soon discovered that it was hard to make a living playing the kind of music he wanted to play. Later life and career In 1948, Robinson joined the US Navy as a musician and by 1950 was based in the UK. He was soon regularly jamming at London's Club Eleven, Downbeat Club and Studio 51 with leading UK beboppers, including Tommy Pollard, Johnny Dankworth and Victor Feldman. He made a few records for Carlo Krahmer's Esquire label but eventually was transferred home and demobilized. Unhappy with the music scene in the ...
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James Moody (saxophonist)
James Moody (March 26, 1925 – December 9, 2010) was an American jazz saxophone and flute player and very occasional vocalist, playing predominantly in the bebop and hard bop styles. The annual James Moody Jazz Festival is held in Newark, New Jersey. Moody had an unexpected hit with " Moody's Mood for Love", a 1952 song written by Eddie Jefferson, which used as its melody an improvised solo that Moody had played on a 1949 recording of " I'm in the Mood for Love". Moody adopted the song as his own, recording it with Jefferson on his 1956 album '' Moody's Mood for Love'' and performing the song regularly in concert, often singing the vocals himself. Early life James Moody was born in Savannah, Georgia, United States, and was raised by his single mother, Ruby Hann Moody Watters. According to one reference, his absent father was a trumpeter in Tiny Bradshaw`s group. He had a brother, Louis Edward Watters. Growing up in Newark, New Jersey, he was attracted to the saxophone af ...
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Tete Montoliu
Vicenç Montoliu i Massana, better known as Tete Montoliu (28 March 1933 – 24 August 1997) was a Spanish jazz pianist from Catalonia, Spain. Born blind, he learnt braille music at age seven. His styles varied from hard bop, through Afro-Cuban, world fusion, to post bop. He recorded with Lionel Hampton in 1956 and played with saxophonist Roland Kirk in 1963. He also worked with leading American jazz musicians who toured in, or relocated to Europe including Kenny Dorham, Dexter Gordon, Ben Webster, Lucky Thompson, and Anthony Braxton. Tete Montoliu recorded two albums in the US, and recorded for Enja, SteepleChase Records, and Soul Note in Europe. Biography Montoliu was born blind, in the Eixample district of Barcelona, Spain, and died in the same city. He was the only son of Vicenç Montoliu (a professional musician) and Àngela Massana, a jazz enthusiast, who encouraged her son to study piano. Montoliu's earliest piano teaching took place under the tutelage of Enric Mas ...
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Warne Marsh
Warne Marion Marsh (October 26, 1927 – December 18, 1987) was an American tenor saxophonist. Born in Los Angeles, his playing first came to prominence in the 1950s as a protégé of pianist Lennie Tristano and earned attention in the 1970s as a member of Supersax. Biography Marsh came from an affluent artistic background: his father was Hollywood cinematographer Oliver T. Marsh (1892–1941), and his mother Elizabeth was a violinist. He was the nephew of actresses Mae Marsh and Marguerite Marsh and film editor Frances Marsh. He was tutored by Lennie Tristano. Marsh was often recorded in the company of other Cool School musicians, and remained one of the most faithful to the Tristano philosophy of improvisation – the faith in the purity of the long line, the avoidance of Lick (music), licks and emotional chain-pulling, the concentration on endlessly mining the same small body of jazz standards. While Marsh was a generally cool-toned player, the critic Scott Yanow notes that ...
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Lena Horne
Lena Mary Calhoun Horne (June 30, 1917 – May 9, 2010) was an American singer, actress, dancer and civil rights activist. Horne's career spanned more than seventy years and covered film, television and theatre. Horne joined the chorus of the Cotton Club at the age of sixteen and became a nightclub performer before moving on to Cinema of the United States, Hollywood and Broadway theatre, Broadway. A groundbreaking African-American performer, Horne advocated for civil rights and took part in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, March on Washington in August 1963. Later she returned to her roots as a nightclub performer and continued to work on television while releasing well-received record albums. She announced her retirement in March 1980, but the next year starred in a one-woman show, ''Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music'', which ran for more than 300 performances on Broadway. She then toured the country in the show, earning numerous awards and accolades. Horne continu ...
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Major Holley
Major "Mule" Holley Jr. (July 10, 1924 – October 25, 1990) was an American jazz upright bassist. Early life and education Holley was born in Detroit, Michigan, United States. He attended the prestigious Cass Technical High School in Detroit. Holley played violin and tuba when young. Career He started playing bass while serving in the Navy, playing in the Ships Company A Band at Camp Robert Smalls, which was led by Leonard Bowden and included Clark Terry, and several other musicians recruited from civilian dance bands.Floyd, Samuel A. “An Oral History: The Great Lakes Experience,” in ''The Black Experience in Music'' 11.1: (Spring 1983): pp. 41-61. In the latter half of the 1940s, he played with Dexter Gordon, Charlie Parker, and Ella Fitzgerald; in 1950 he and Oscar Peterson recorded duets, and he also played with Peterson and Charlie Smith as a trio. He was married to Minnie Walton (born Millicent Aitcheson). In the mid-1950s, he moved to England and worked at t ...
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Jimmy Heath
James Edward Heath (October 25, 1926 – January 19, 2020), nicknamed Little Bird, was an American jazz saxophonist, composer, arranger, and big band leader. He was the brother of bassist Percy Heath and drummer Albert Heath. Biography Heath was born in Philadelphia on October 25, 1926.[ Allmusic biography] His father, an auto mechanic, played the clarinet, performing on the weekends. His mother sang in a church choir. The family frequently played recordings of big band jazz groups around the house. Heath's sister was a pianist, while his brothers were bassist Percy Heath (older) and drummer Albert Heath (his youngest sibling). During World War II, Heath was rejected for the draft for being below the minimum weight. Heath originally played alto saxophone. He earned the nickname "Little Bird" after his work for Howard McGhee and Dizzy Gillespie in the late 1940s, during which his playing displayed influences from Charlie Parker (Parker's nickname was "Bird"). He then switched t ...
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Jim Hall (musician)
James Stanley Hall (December 4, 1930 – December 10, 2013) was an American jazz guitarist, composer and arranger. Biography Early life and education Born in Buffalo, New York, Hall moved with his family to Cleveland, Ohio, during his childhood. Hall's mother played the piano, his grandfather played violin, and his uncle played guitar.Hall, Devra "Sketches from PROS Folios: Jim Hall". Copyright 1988-2004. He began playing the guitar at the age of 10, when his mother gave him an instrument as a Christmas present. At 13 he heard Charlie Christian play on a Benny Goodman record, which he calls his "spiritual awakening". As a teenager in Cleveland, he performed professionally, and also took up the double bass. Hall's major influences since childhood were tenor saxophonists Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Paul Gonsalves, and Lucky Thompson. While he copied out solos by Charlie Christian, and later Barney Kessel, it was horn players from whom he took the lead. In 1955, Hall attended th ...
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Benny Golson
Benny Golson (January 25, 1929 – September 21, 2024) was an American bebop and hard bop jazz tenor saxophonist, composer, and arranger. He came to prominence with the big bands of Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie, more as a writer than a performer, before launching his solo career. Golson was known for co-founding and co-leading The Jazztet with trumpeter Art Farmer in 1959. From the late 1960s through the 1970s Golson was in demand as an arranger for film and television and thus was less active as a performer, but he and Farmer re-formed the Jazztet in 1982. Many of Golson's compositions have become jazz standards, including " I Remember Clifford", " Blues March", " Stablemates", " Whisper Not", "Along Came Betty", and "Killer Joe". He is regarded as "one of the most significant contributors" to the development of hard bop jazz, and was a recipient of a Grammy Trustees Award in 2021. Early life and education He was born Benny Golson in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Ja ...
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Dizzy Gillespie
John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie ( ; October 21, 1917 – January 6, 1993) was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, composer, educator and singer. He was a trumpet virtuoso and improvisation, improviser, building on the virtuosic style of Roy Eldridge but adding layers of Harmony, harmonic and rhythmic complexity previously unheard in jazz. His combination of musicianship, showmanship, and wit made him a leading popularizer of the new music called bebop. His beret and horn-rimmed spectacles, scat singing, bent horn, pouched cheeks, and light-hearted personality have made him an enduring icon. In the 1940s, Gillespie, with Charlie Parker, became a major figure in the development of bebop and modern jazz. He taught and influenced many other musicians, including trumpeters Miles Davis, Jon Faddis, Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, Arturo Sandoval, Lee Morgan, Chuck Mangione, and balladeer Johnny Hartman. He pioneered Afro-Cuban jazz and won several Grammy Awards. Scott Yanow wrote: "Di ...
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