1.
Philadelphia
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In 1682, William Penn, an English Quaker, founded the city to serve as capital of the Pennsylvania Colony. Philadelphia was one of the capitals in the Revolutionary War. In the 19th century, Philadelphia became an industrial center. It became a destination for African-Americans in the Great Migration. The areas many universities and colleges make Philadelphia a top international study destination, as the city has evolved into an educational, with a gross domestic product of $388 billion, Philadelphia ranks ninth among world cities and fourth in the nation. Philadelphia is the center of activity in Pennsylvania and is home to seven Fortune 1000 companies. The Philadelphia skyline is growing, with a market of almost 81,900 commercial properties in 2016 including several prominent skyscrapers. The city is known for its arts, culture, and rich history, Philadelphia has more outdoor sculptures and murals than any other American city. Fairmount Park, when combined with the adjacent Wissahickon Valley Park in the watershed, is one of the largest contiguous urban park areas in the United States. The 67 National Historic Landmarks in the city helped account for the $10 billion generated by tourism, Philadelphia is the only World Heritage City in the United States. Before Europeans arrived, the Philadelphia area was home to the Lenape Indians in the village of Shackamaxon, the Lenape are a Native American tribe and First Nations band government. They are also called Delaware Indians and their territory was along the Delaware River watershed, western Long Island. Most Lenape were pushed out of their Delaware homeland during the 18th century by expanding European colonies, Lenape communities were weakened by newly introduced diseases, mainly smallpox, and violent conflict with Europeans. Iroquois people occasionally fought the Lenape, surviving Lenape moved west into the upper Ohio River basin. The American Revolutionary War and United States independence pushed them further west, in the 1860s, the United States government sent most Lenape remaining in the eastern United States to the Indian Territory under the Indian removal policy. In the 21st century, most Lenape now reside in the US state of Oklahoma, with communities living also in Wisconsin, Ontario. The Dutch considered the entire Delaware River valley to be part of their New Netherland colony, in 1638, Swedish settlers led by renegade Dutch established the colony of New Sweden at Fort Christina and quickly spread out in the valley. In 1644, New Sweden supported the Susquehannocks in their defeat of the English colony of Maryland
2.
Jazz
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Jazz is a music genre that originated amongst African Americans in New Orleans, United States, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and developed from roots in Blues and Ragtime. Since the 1920s jazz age, jazz has become recognized as a form of musical expression. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, call and response vocals, polyrhythms, Jazz has roots in West African cultural and musical expression, and in African-American music traditions including blues and ragtime, as well as European military band music. Although the foundation of jazz is deeply rooted within the Black experience of the United States, different cultures have contributed their own experience, intellectuals around the world have hailed jazz as one of Americas original art forms. As jazz spread around the world, it drew on different national, regional, and local musical cultures, New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass-band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. In the 1930s, heavily arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz, bebop emerged in the 1940s, shifting jazz from danceable popular music toward a more challenging musicians music which was played at faster tempos and used more chord-based improvisation. Cool jazz developed in the end of the 1940s, introducing calmer, smoother sounds and long, modal jazz developed in the late 1950s, using the mode, or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation. Jazz-rock fusion appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, combining jazz improvisation with rock rhythms, electric instruments. In the early 1980s, a form of jazz fusion called smooth jazz became successful. Other styles and genres abound in the 2000s, such as Latin, the question of the origin of the word jazz has resulted in considerable research, and its history is well documented. It is believed to be related to jasm, a term dating back to 1860 meaning pep. The use of the word in a context was documented as early as 1915 in the Chicago Daily Tribune. Its first documented use in a context in New Orleans was in a November 14,1916 Times-Picayune article about jas bands. In an interview with NPR, musician Eubie Blake offered his recollections of the slang connotations of the term, saying, When Broadway picked it up. That was dirty, and if you knew what it was, the American Dialect Society named it the Word of the Twentieth Century. Jazz has proved to be difficult to define, since it encompasses such a wide range of music spanning a period of over 100 years. Attempts have been made to define jazz from the perspective of other musical traditions, in the opinion of Robert Christgau, most of us would say that inventing meaning while letting loose is the essence and promise of jazz. As Duke Ellington, one of jazzs most famous figures, said, although jazz is considered highly difficult to define, at least in part because it contains so many varied subgenres, improvisation is consistently regarded as being one of its key elements
3.
Art Blakey
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Arthur Art Blakey was an American jazz drummer and bandleader. He was known as Abdullah Ibn Buhaina after he became a Muslim, Blakey made a name for himself in the 1940s in the big bands of Fletcher Henderson and Billy Eckstine. He worked with bebop musicians Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, in the mid-1950s Horace Silver and Blakey formed the Jazz Messengers, a group that the drummer was associated with for the next 35 years. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz calls the Jazz Messengers the archetypal hard bop group of the late 50s and he was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame, the Grammy Hall of Fame, and was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005. He was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1991, Blakey was born on October 11,1919 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to a single mother, who died shortly after his birth. According to Leslie Gourses biography, the mother figure was Annie Peron. The stories related by family and friends, and by Blakey himself, are contradictory as to how long he spent with the Peron family, equally clouded by contradiction are stories of Blakeys early music career. He switched from piano to drums at a date in the early 1930s. An oft-quoted account of the event states that Blakey was forced at gunpoint to move from piano to drums by a club owner, the veracity of this story is called into question in the Gourse biography, as Blakey himself gives other accounts in addition to this one. The style Blakey assumed was the swing style of Chick Webb, Sid Catlett. From 1939-44, Blakey played with fellow Pittsburgh native Mary Lou Williams, while sources differ on the timing, most agree that he traveled to New York with Williams in 1942 before joining Henderson a year later. While playing in Hendersons band, Blakey got into a scuffle with Georgia police and he then led his own band at the Tic Toc Club in Boston for a short time. From 1944-47, Blakey worked with Billy Eckstines big band, after the Eckstine band broke up, Blakey states that he traveled to Africa for a time, In 1947, after the Eckstine band broke up, we -- took a trip to Africa. I was supposed to stay three months and I stayed two years because I wanted to live among the people and find out just how they lived. Blakey is known to have recorded in 1947,1948 and 1949, Blakey toured with Buddy DeFranco from 1951 to 1953 in a band that also included Kenny Drew. On December 17,1947, Blakey led a group known as Art Blakeys Messengers in his first recording session as a leader, the records were released as 78 rpm records at the time, and two of the songs were released on the New Sounds 10 LP compilation. The octet included Kenny Dorham, Sahib Shihab, Musa Kaleem, around the same time, or 1949 he led a big band called Seventeen Messengers. The band proved to be unstable and broke up soon after
4.
John Coltrane
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John William Coltrane, also known as Trane, was an American jazz saxophonist and composer. Working in the bebop and hard bop idioms early in his career and he led at least fifty recording sessions during his career, and appeared as a sideman on many albums by other musicians, including trumpeter Miles Davis and pianist Thelonious Monk. As his career progressed, Coltrane and his music took on a spiritual dimension. Coltrane influenced innumerable musicians, and remains one of the most significant saxophonists in music history and he received many posthumous awards and recognitions, including canonization by the African Orthodox Church as Saint John William Coltrane and a special Pulitzer Prize in 2007. His second wife was pianist Alice Coltrane and their son Ravi Coltrane is also a saxophonist, Coltrane was born in his parents apartment at 200 Hamlet Avenue, Hamlet, North Carolina on September 23,1926. His father was John R. Coltrane and his mother was Alice Blair and he grew up in High Point, North Carolina, attending William Penn High School. Beginning in December 1938 Coltranes aunt, grandparents, and father all died within a few months of one another, leaving John to be raised by his mother, in June 1943 he moved to Philadelphia. In September of that year his mother bought him his first saxophone, Coltrane played the clarinet and the alto horn in a community band before taking up the alto saxophone during high school. He had his first professional gigs in early to mid-1945 – a cocktail lounge trio, with piano and guitar. To avoid being drafted by the Army, Coltrane enlisted in the Navy on August 6,1945, by the time he got to Hawaii, in late 1945, the Navy was already rapidly downsizing. As the Melody Masters was a band, however, Coltrane was treated merely as a guest performer to avoid alerting superior officers of his participation in the band. He continued to other duties when not playing with the band, including kitchen. By the end of his service, he had assumed a role in the band. His first recordings, a session in Hawaii with Navy musicians. Coltrane played alto saxophone on a selection of standards and bebop tunes. In Philadelphia after the war, he studied theory with guitarist and composer Dennis Sandole. Originally an altoist, in 1947 Coltrane also began playing saxophone with the Eddie Vinson Band. Coltrane later referred to point in his life as a time when a wider area of listening opened up for me
5.
Wayne Shorter
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Wayne Shorter is an American jazz saxophonist and composer. Many of Shorters compositions have become standards, and his output has earned worldwide recognition, critical praise. Shorter first came to prominence in the late 1950s as a member of. In the 1960s, he went on to join Miles Daviss Second Great Quintet and he has recorded over 20 albums as a bandleader. Shorter has won 10 Grammy Awards, the New York Times has described Shorter as probably jazzs greatest living small-group composer and a contender for greatest living improviser. In 2017, he was awarded the Polar Music Prize, Wayne Shorter was born in Newark, New Jersey, and attended Newark Arts High School, from which he graduated in 1952. He loved music, being encouraged by his father to take up the clarinet as a teenager, after graduating from New York University in 1956, Shorter spent two years in the U. S. Army, during which time he played briefly with Horace Silver. After his discharge, he played with Maynard Ferguson, in his youth Shorter had acquired the nickname Mr. Gone, which later became an album title for Weather Report. In 1959, Shorter joined Art Blakey and he stayed with Blakey for five years, and eventually became the bands musical director. When John Coltrane left Miles Davis band in 1960 to pursue his own group, Coltrane proposed Shorter as a replacement, Davis went with Sonny Stitt on tenor, followed by a revolving door of Hank Mobley, George Coleman, and Sam Rivers. In 1964 Davis persuaded Shorter to leave Blakey and join his quintet alongside Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and he composed extensively for Davis, on some albums, he provided half of the compositions. Hancock said of Shorters tenure in the group, The master writer to me, Wayne was one of the few people who brought music to Miles that didnt get changed. Davis said, Wayne is a real composer and he writes scores, write the parts for everybody just as he wants them to sound. Wayne also brought in a kind of curiosity about working with musical rules. If they didnt work, then he broke them, but with musical sense, he understood that freedom in music was the ability to know the rules in order to them to your own satisfaction. Shorter remained in Daviss band after the breakup of the quintet in 1968, playing on early jazz recordings including In a Silent Way. His last live dates and studio recordings with Davis were in 1970, until 1968, he played tenor saxophone exclusively. The final album on which he played tenor in the sequence of Davis albums was Filles de Kilimanjaro
6.
Montclair, New Jersey
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Montclair is a township in Essex County, New Jersey, United States. As of 2010, it was the 60th-most-populous municipality in New Jersey, Montclair was first formed as a township on April 15,1868, from portions of Bloomfield Township, so that a second railroad could be built to Montclair. After a referendum held on February 21,1894, Montclair was reincorporated as a town and it derives its name from the French mont clair, meaning clear mountain or bright mountain. According to the United States Census Bureau, the township has an area of 6.315 square miles. Montclair is on the east side of the First Mountain of the Watchung Mountains, some higher locations in the township provide excellent views of the surrounding area and of the New York City skyline about 12 miles away. Named localities in the township include Frog Hollow, Montclair Heights, South End, Upper Montclair, Montclair citizens use two main ZIP codes. The central and southern parts of the township are designated 07042, Upper Montclair lies north of Watchung Avenue and has a separate ZIP code,07043. Because the ZIP codes do not exactly match municipal boundaries, a few homes near the borders with neighboring towns fall into the ZIP codes for those communities. A few homes in some adjoining municipalities use one of the two ZIP codes assigned to Montclair, as does HackensackUMC Mountainside, whose campus straddles the border with Glen Ridge, small areas in the southeast of the township fall into the Glen Ridge ZIP code 07028. Yantacaw and Toneys brooks are dammed in parks to create ponds, wigwam, Nishuane, and Toneys brooks flow into the Second River, and the others flow into the Third River. Montclair lies just north of the northernmost extent of the Rahway River watershed, the southern border of Montclair is a straight line between Eagle Rock, on the ridge of the First Watchung Mountain, and the point where Orange Road crosses Nishuane Brook. The eastern border is roughly a line between that point and a point just southwest of where Broad Street crosses the Third River. The western border runs roughly along the ridge of the First Watchung Mountain between Eagle Rock and the Essex County/Passaic County border, the northern border is the border between those two counties. Montclair has a climate, with warm-to-hot, humid summers and cool to cold winters. January tends to be the coldest month, with high temperatures in the upper 30s Fahrenheit. July, the warmest month, features high temperatures in the mid-80s and lows in the 70s, from April to June and from September to early November, Montclair experiences temperatures from the lower 60s to the lower 70s. Montclair gets approximately 50 inches of rain per year, above the United States average of 39 inches, snowfall is common from December to early March, and totals about 30 inches annually. The number of each year in Montclair with any measurable precipitation is 90
7.
Pharoah Sanders
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Pharoah Sanders is an American jazz saxophonist. Saxophonist Ornette Coleman once described him as probably the best tenor player in the world, emerging from John Coltranes groups of the mid-1960s, Sanders is known for his overblowing, harmonic, and multiphonic techniques on the saxophone, as well as his use of sheets of sound. Sanders is an important figure in the development of jazz, Albert Ayler famously said, Trane was the Father, Pharoah was the Son. Pharoah Sanders was born Farrell Sanders on October 13,1940 in Little Rock and his mother worked as a cook in a school cafeteria, and his father worked for the City of Little Rock. An only child, Sanders began his career accompanying church hymns on clarinet. His initial artistic accomplishments were in art, but when he was at Scipio Jones High School in North Little Rock, the band director, Jimmy Cannon, was also a saxophone player and introduced Sanders to jazz. When Cannon left Scipio Jones High School, Sanders took over as the director until a permanent director could be found. During the late 1950s, Sanders would often sneak into African-American clubs in downtown Little Rock to play with acts that were passing through. At the time, Little Rock was part of the route through Memphis, Tennessee. Sanders found himself limited by the segregation and the R&B. After finishing high school in 1959, Sanders moved to Oakland, California and he briefly attended Oakland Junior College and studied art and music. Once outside the Jim Crow South, Sanders could play in black and white clubs. His Arkansas connection stuck with him in the Bay Area with the nickname of “Little Rock. ”It was also during this time that he met, Pharoah Sanders began his professional career playing tenor saxophone in Oakland, California. He moved to New York City in 1961 after playing with rhythm and he received his nickname Pharoah from bandleader Sun Ra, with whom he was performing. After moving to New York, Sanders had been destitute, He was often living on the streets, under stairs, where ever he could find to stay, his clothes in tatters. Sun Ra gave him a place to stay, bought him a new pair of pants with yellow stripes, encouraged him to use the name Pharoah. Sanders came to prominence playing with John Coltranes band, starting in 1965, as Coltrane began adopting the avant-garde jazz of Albert Ayler, Sun Ra. Sanders first performed with Coltrane on Ascension, then on their dual-tenor recording Meditations, after this Sanders joined Coltranes final quintet, usually performing very lengthy, dissonant solos
8.
Archie Shepp
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Archie Shepp is an American jazz saxophonist. Shepp was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, but raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Shepp studied drama at Goddard College from 1955 to 1959, but he eventually turned to music professionally. He played in a Latin jazz band for a time before joining the band of avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor. Shepps first recording under his own name, Archie Shepp - Bill Dixon Quartet, was released on Savoy Records in 1962, further links to Coleman came with the establishment of the New York Contemporary Five, which included Don Cherry. John Coltranes admiration led to recordings for Impulse, Shepp participated in the sessions for Coltranes A Love Supreme in late 1964, but none of the takes he participated in were included on the final LP release. In 1965, Shepp released Fire Music, which included the first signs of his political consciousness. The Magic of Ju-Ju defined Shepps sound for the few years, freeform avant-garde saxophone lines coupled with rhythms. Shepp was invited to perform in Algiers for the 1969 Pan-African Cultural Festival of the Organization for African Unity, along with Dave Burrell, Sunny Murray and this ensemble then recorded several sessions in Paris at the BYG Actuel studios. Shepp continued to experiment into the new decade, at times including harmonica players. With 1972s Attica Blues and The Cry of My People, he spoke out for civil rights, Shepp also writes for theater, his works include The Communist and Lady Day, A Musical Tragedy. Both were produced by Robert Kalfin at the Chelsea Theater Center, in 1971, Shepp was recruited to the University of Massachusetts Amherst by Randolph Bromery, beginning a 30-year career as a professor of music. Shepps first two courses were entitled Revolutionary Concepts in African-American Music and Black Musician in the Theater, Shepp was also a professor of African-American Studies at SUNY in Buffalo, New York. In the late 1970s and beyond, Shepps career went between various old territories and various new ones, since the early 1990s, he has often played with the French trumpeter Eric Le Lann. Shepp is featured in the 1981 documentary film Imagine the Sound, in which he discusses and performs his music, Shepp also appears in Mystery, Mr. Ra, a 1984 French documentary about Sun Ra. The film also includes footage of Shepp playing with Sun Ras Arkestra, in 1993, he worked with Michel Herr to create the original score for the film Just Friends. In 2002, Shepp appeared on the Red Hot Organizations tribute album to Fela Kuti, Shepp appeared on a track entitled No Agreement alongside Res, Tony Allen, Ray Lema, Baaba Maal, and Positive Black Soul. In 2004 Archie Shepp founded his own label, Archieball. The label is located in Paris, France, and features collaborations with Jacques Coursil, Monica Passos, Bernard Lubat, official homepage Stewart Smith, Archie Shepp interview, Summerhall, July 31,2012
9.
Roy Haynes
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Roy Owen Haynes is an American jazz drummer and group leader. Haynes is among the most recorded drummers in jazz, and in a career lasting more than 70 years has played in a range of styles ranging from swing and bebop to jazz fusion. He has an expressive, personal style and is known to foster a deep engagement in his bandmates. He has also led his own groups, some performing under the name Hip Ensemble and his most recent recordings as a leader are Fountain of Youth and Whereas, both of which have been nominated for a Grammy Award. He continues to perform worldwide and was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1999 and his son Graham Haynes is a cornetist, his son Craig Haynes and grandson Marcus Gilmore are both drummers. Born in the Roxbury section of Boston, Massachusetts, Haynes made his debut in 1944 at the age of seventeen in his native Boston. Haynes began his professional career in 1945. From 1947 to 1949 he worked with saxophonist Lester Young, and he also recorded at the time with pianist Bud Powell and saxophonists Wardell Gray and Stan Getz. From 1953 to 1958 he toured with singer Sarah Vaughan and also recorded with her, in 2008 Haynes appeared in Grand Theft Auto IV as himself radio station JNR. A3 CD/1 DVD boxed set entitled A Life in Time - The Roy Haynes Story was released by Dreyfus Jazz in October 2007. The set chronicles highlights from Haynes career from 1949 to 2006, including recordings with Parker, Vaughan, Davis, Monk, Corea, Metheny and his own Hip Ensemble and Fountain of Youth quartet. The set was listed by The New Yorker Magazine as one of the Best Boxed Sets of 2007, wKCR-FM, New York, surveyed Hayness career in 301 hours of programming, January 11–23,2009. On April 21,2016, at the age of 91, Haynes performed drums on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, accompanied by Jon Batiste, Haynes extracted the rhythmic qualities from melodies and created unique new drum and cymbal patterns in an idiosyncratic, now instantly recognizable style. Rather than using cymbals strictly for effect, Haynes brought them to the forefront of his rhythmic approach. He also established a distinctively crisp and rapid-fire sound on the snare, Haynes endorses Yamaha drums, pedals and hardware, Zildjian cymbals and Remo drumheads. He also uses his Zildjian Roy Haynes signature drumstick and has a Yamaha Roy Haynes signature snare drum, in the past, he endorsed Ludwig and Slingerland and he has been photographed playing Latin Percussion, notably congas. Haynes had used Paiste flat rides in the past, thus indicating he may have endorsed Paiste at some stage, esquire named Roy Haynes one of the Best Dressed Men in America in 1960, along with Fred Astaire, Clark Gable and Cary Grant. He was inducted into the Down Beat Magazine Hall of Fame in 2004, on October 9,2010, Roy Haynes was awarded the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundations BNY Mellon Jazz Living Legacy Award at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC
10.
Yusef Lateef
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Yusef Abdul Lateef was an American jazz multi-instrumentalist, composer and prominent figure among the Ahmadiyya Community in America, in 1950. He is known for having been an innovator in the blending of jazz with Eastern music, peter Keepnews, in his New York Times obituary of Lateef, wrote that the musician played world music before world music had a name. Along with his record label YAL Records, Lateef owned Fana Music, Lateef published his own work through Fana, which includes Yusef Lateefs Flute Book of the Blues and many of his own orchestral compositions. Lateef was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee and his family moved, in 1923, to Lorain, Ohio, and again in 1925, to Detroit, Michigan, where his father changed the familys name to Evans. Lateef was a proficient saxophonist by the time of his graduation from school at the age of 18. The first instrument he bought was a saxophone but after a year he switched to the tenor saxophone. In 1949, he was invited by Dizzy Gillespie to tour with his orchestra, in 1950, Lateef returned to Detroit and began his studies in composition and flute at Wayne State University. It was during this period that he converted to Islam as a member of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community and he twice made the pilgrimage to Mecca. In 2005, Nicolas Humbert & Werner Penzel, directors of Step Across The Border, filmed Brother Yusef, musicians such as Wilbur Harden, bassist Herman Wright, drummer Frank Gant, and pianist Hugh Lawson were among his collaborators during this period. By 1961, with the recording of Into Something and Eastern Sounds, even his use of the western oboe sounds exotic in this context, it is not a standard jazz instrument. Indeed, the tunes themselves are a mixture of standards, blues. Lateef made numerous contributions to other albums including his time as a member of saxophonist Cannonball Adderleys Quintet during 1962–64. Lateefs sound has been claimed to have been an influence on the saxophonist John Coltrane. For a time Lateef was signed to Coltranes label, Impulse and he had a regular working group during this period, with trumpeter Richard Williams and Mike Nock on piano. In the late 1960s he began to incorporate contemporary soul and gospel phrasing into his music, still with a strong blues underlay, on such as Detroit. Lateef expressed a dislike of the jazz and jazz musician as musical generalizations. As is so often the case with such generalizations, the use of terms do understate the breadth of his sound. For example, in the 1980s, Lateef experimented with new-age, in 1960, Lateef again returned to school, studying flute at the Manhattan School of Music in New York City
11.
Herbie Mann
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Herbert Jay Solomon, known by his stage name Herbie Mann, was an American jazz flautist and important early practitioner of world music. Early in his career, he played tenor saxophone and clarinet. His most popular single was Hijack, which was a Billboard No.1 dance hit for three weeks in 1975, Mann emphasized the groove approach in his music. Mann felt that from his repertoire, the epitome of a record was Memphis Underground or Push Push. Herbie Mann was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish parents, Solomon, who was of Russian descent, and Ruth Rose Solomon, who was born in Bukovina, Austria-Hungary but immigrated to the United States with her family at the age of 6. Both of his parents were dancers and singers, as well as dance instructors later in life and he attended Lincoln High School in Brighton Beach. His first professional performance was playing the Catskills resorts at age 15, in the 1950s Mann was primarily a bop flutist, playing in combos with artists such as Phil Woods, occasionally playing bass clarinet, tenor saxophone and solo flute. Mann was a pioneer of the fusion of jazz and world music. In 1959, following a State Department sponsored tour of Africa, in 1961 Mann toured Brazil, returning to the United States to record with Brazilian musicians, including Antonio Carlos Jobim and guitarist Baden Powell. These albums helped popularize bossa nova in the US and Europe and he often worked with Brazilian themes. In the mid-1960s Mann hired a young Chick Corea to play in some of his bands, in the late 1970s and early 1980s Mann played duets at New York Citys The Bottom Line and Village Gate clubs, with Sarod virtuoso Vasant Rai. and Bernard Purdie. In this period Mann had a number of pop hits — rare for a jazz musician, according to a 1998 interview Mann had made at least 25 albums that were on the Billboard 200 pop charts, success denied most of his jazz peers. Mann provided the music for the 1978 National Film Board of Canada animated short Afterlife, in the early 1970s he founded his own label, Embryo Records, distributed by Cotillion Records, a division of Atlantic Records. He later set up Kokopelli Records after difficulty with established labels, in 1996, Mann collaborated with Stereolab on the song One Note Samba/Surfboard for the AIDS-Benefit album Red Hot + Rio produced by the Red Hot Organization. Mann also played horns on the Bee Gees album Spirits Having Flown and he died in his home in Pecos, New Mexico, leaving his wife, Susan Janeal Arison, and four children, Paul Mann, Claudia Mann, Laura Mann-Lepik and Geoffrey Mann. Bio Further discography and biography National Public Radios Jazz Profiles, Herbie Mann Herbie Mann Official Website
12.
Thelonious Monk
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Thelonious Sphere Monk was an American jazz pianist and composer. Monk is the second most-recorded jazz composer after Duke Ellington, which is remarkable as Ellington composed more than a thousand pieces. He was renowned for his style in suits, hats. Monk is one of five musicians to have been featured on the cover of Time, after Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck. Thelonious Sphere Monk was born two years after his sister Marion on October 10,1917, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina and his badly written birth certificate misspelled his first name as Thelious or Thelius. It also did not list his name, taken from his maternal grandfather. A brother, Thomas, was born in January 1920, in 1922, the family moved to 243 West 63rd Street, in Manhattan, New York City. Monk started playing the piano at the age of six, and was largely self-taught and he attended Stuyvesant High School but did not graduate. He toured with an evangelist in his teens, playing the church organ, in the early to mid-1940s, Monk was the house pianist at Mintons Playhouse, a Manhattan nightclub. Much of Monks style was developed during his time at Mintons, Monk is believed to be the pianist featured on recordings Jerry Newman made around 1941 at the club. Monks style at this time was described as hard-swinging, with the addition of runs in the style of Art Tatum. Monks stated influences included Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, in the documentary Thelonious Monk, Straight, No Chaser, it is stated that Monk lived in the same neighborhood in New York City as Johnson and knew him as a teenager. So, the worked out a music that was hard to steal. Ill say this for the leeches, though, they tried, ive seen them in Mintons busily writing on their shirt cuffs or scribbling on the tablecloth. And even our own guys, Im afraid, did not give Monk the credit he had coming, why, they even stole his idea of the beret and bop glasses. In 1944 Monk made his first studio recordings with the Coleman Hawkins Quartet, Hawkins was one of the earliest established jazz musicians to promote Monk, and the pianist later returned the favor by inviting Hawkins to join him on a 1957 session with John Coltrane. Monk made his first recordings as leader for Blue Note in 1947, Monk married Nellie Smith the same year, and in 1949 the couple had a son, T. S. Monk, who became a jazz drummer. A daughter, Barbara, was born in 1953 and died in 1984 from cancer, in August 1951, New York City police searched a parked car occupied by Monk and friend Bud Powell
