JAZZMF.COM - Key Persons
Art Blakey, one of the top drummers in all of jazz history, began by studying the piano in school. He only took up the drums when the drummer with a band in which he was playing became ill.
Billy Root was born on March 6, 1934 in Philadelphia and came from a musical family. His earliest remembrance of jazz was in 1939 when his father, a drummer, took Billy to the Earle Theater in Philly to see all of the famous big bands, such as Ellington, Basie, Lunceford, and others.
Billy started playing the saxophone at age ten, and at age sixteen sat in for one week with "Hot Lips" Page. He went on the road with the Hal MacIntyre Orchestra, then returned to Philly one year later to work some smaller jazz clubs. Then he appeared at the Blue Note in Philly as a house tenor player and had his first gig with Clifford Brown and all of the big jazz stars including Roy Eldridge, J.J. Johnson, Sonny Stitt, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Art Blakey, Miles Davis and Kenny Dorham. He arrived in New York with Bennie Green in 1953 to play a featured show at the Apollo Theater. The orchestra leader was Earl Warren, lead alto player for the Count Basie Orchestra for many years. John Lewis, Paul Chambers, Osie Johnson, Ernie Royal, Howard McGhee, Thad Jones and Charlie Rouse were in the orchestra.
Billy played for Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Billy Eckstine, and went on to tour with the Ella Fitzgerald Show to the Royal Theatre in Baltimore, Maryland and the Howard Theater in Washington, D.C. He stayed with Bennie Green for approximately two years, then began work with the Red Rodney Quintet for two years.
Billy did a six month tour with Buddy Rich, and afterwards he brought a two tenor band into Birdland with Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis opposite Sarah Vaughan. Billy stayed in New York taking his own quintet into Birdland for one month.
Again returning to Philly, Billy worked the local jazz clubs until going on the road with Stan Kenton for one year. Following this stint, Billy played a small band job with Dizzy Gillespie. Two weeks later, he received a call from Dizzy asking him to join his big band. He stayed with Diz for one year, then returned to Philly again until joining the Stan Kenton Orchestra for another year.
In 1959, Billy premiered John Lewis's large orchestra work, "European Windows," as a soloist with members of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Billy then replaced Billy Mitchell with the Al Grey Quintet, playing major jazz clubs for about six months before playing both the Pittsburgh and Cincinnati Jazz Festivals. He then did a three month stint with the Harry James Orchestra.
Returning to Philly to his growing family, Billy decided not to travel anymore. He worked local club dates and studied flute, alto flute, clarinet and bass clarinet for seven years in preparation for a move to Las Vegas. During this time in Philly, Billy did two concerts in 1968 with the Philadelphia Orchestra: George Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue and An American In Paris, playing saxophone.
Arriving in Las Vegas in the spring of 1968, Billy began performing with the large showroom orchestras for production shows, and was accompanist for many stars including Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee, Juliet Prouse, to name a few.
Billy still makes his home in Las Vegas and recently has received offers to play jazz clubs and concerts out of state. He is currently planning a trip to Holland for March 1995 to play for the fortieth anniversary of the death of Charlie Parker. He will be performing with the Rein De Graaff Trio with Herb Geller and Rolf Erickson.
Billy is a jazz lecturer and is planning a series of lectures on the history of the saxophone as well as experiences on the road with name jazz artists, traveling through the South as a white musician with a black orchestra, and living in New York City's Harlem as a white jazz musician. Billy is one of the few living white jazz musicians who can share these experiences with other musicians as well as laymen who will find these lectures enlightening, and in some cases hard to believe.
While many musicians take a lifetime to master one instrument, Sam Rivers has turned himself into a one-man band with his proficiency on no less than six instruments. Besides his main work on the tenor saxophone, Sam devotes his time equally to the soprano sax, bass clarinet, piano, flute, and viola.
Donald Byrd was born December 9, 1932 in Detroit, the son of a musically inclined Methodist minister. After a brief stint at Wayne University, he joined the Air Force at the age of 18, where he played in service bands from 1951-54. After his discharge in 1955, he moved to New York where he was first heard as a member of George Wallington's quintet. In December of that year he joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, and from there he gigged around with Max Roach, and was subsequently signed to an exclusive recording contract with Blue Note Records. Considering the academic aspects of music as important as the professional, during this period he attended Columbia University, and ultimately earned his M.A. degree from the Manhattan School of Music.
His international reputation grew during the late 50's, when he spent several months playing at festivals in Belgium, and on the French Riviera. He gave performances through most of Scandinavia, and took part in two motion pictures in France and one in Germany. His continental appearances in recent years have included jazz festivals at Juan les Pins, France; Reckinghausen, Germany; Stockholm, Sweden; and Molde, Norway.
In August, after he completes his summer instruction, Byrd will be traveling to East Africa to gather information for a future seminar. It is here, in the "cradle of civilization," that Byrd feels much can be discovered about the ancient black man and his music. He was initially drawn to exploring this area by reports of cave etchings, possibly dated as far back as 5000 B.C., which show musicians playing an assortment of unique instruments.
His upcoming LP on Blue Note Records is a compilation of authentic African music, utilizing the dialect of several tribes. The most current albums by Donald Byrd, Blackjack, A New Perspective, and I'm Trying To Get Home, have been extremely successful in both their sales and critical reviews.
"There just aren't enough hours in the day" is an apt cliché for Donald Byrd, as he also has managed to cram the following activities into his busy schedule: hosting a regularly presented television show on N.E.T. (educational television), acting as a music consultant to Hampton Institute in Virginia, performing in a jazz festival in New Jersey on July 27 th with Blood, Sweat and Tears, coordinating jazz performances for students at Prince Tech in Hartford, Connecticut, and preparing a syllabus in Afro-American music courses for secondary and elementary schools in New York State.
As a future goal, Donald plans to begin attending law school at night in the fall. He feels that the most practical way of tracing the black man's history, besides through his music, is through law. Since there is practically no preserved documentation on the Negro prior to 1865, it is Byrd's opinion that much can be learned from studying the legal aspects of slavery, and other pre-Civil War court cases.
"My friends are convinced, with each new project I take on, or new cause I espouse, that I will work myself to an early grave…or, at least, a premature deterioration. However, I feel that the more active and diversified a man becomes, the more favorable opinion he can have of himself…and this, of course, puts him in a much better position to help others. Concerning my interest in African music and culture, I feel that even though the black man has been progressing during the past ten years, with an acute desire to learn his true heritage and history, there's still more. Now, I want every Negro man, woman and child in the nation to be able to say with dignity: ‘I'm black, and I'm proud.' A simple request."
Henry (Hank) Mobley has been called "The middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone."
That is to say, he is not to be compared (and this judgment is made in terms of size of sound as well as such values as fame, fortune and poll victories) with heavyweights like Coleman Hawkins or John Coltrane; nor is there any necessity to relate him to the tonal lightweights, headed by Stan Getz and the various artists of this school who came to prominence around the same time.
Hank is the middleweight champion because his sound, as he once put it himself, is "not a big sound, not a small sound, just a round sound" and because, while fads and fancies change, he has remained for some 15 years a consistently successful performer, working almost exclusively as a sideman except on records, and retaining a firm, loyal following.
Hank was born in Eastman, Georgia, July 7, 1930, but was raised in New Jersey. He studied with a private teacher. When he was 20 years old he played in Paul Gayten's orchestra. A year later he came to the attention of jazz fans and critics through an association with Max Roach that lasted off and on for two or three years.
After working with Dizzy Gillespie for six months in 1954, he began jobbing with Horace Silver later that year at Minton's Play House and other New York clubs. This group evolved into the Jazz Messengers, under the leadership of Art Blakey. Hank remained with Art and Horace until September, 1956, when he and Horace quit Art to join forces in the latter's new group.
During the next four years Hank was heard with Silver, Roach and Thelonious Monk, rejoining Blakey in 1959. During the next year or two he appeared at many of the special Monday night sessions at Birdland, worked with the British trumpeter Dizzy Reece, and was heard for a while with Miles Davis.
As critic Joe Goldberg once observed, Mobley is not a musician who can easily be classified or categorized: "Writers on jazz like to trot out such phrases as Hawkins-informed, Young-derived, Rollins-influenced and the like, and then, having formed their pigeon-hole, they proceed to drop the musician under discussion into it…Mobley, to be sure, is associated with East Coast musicians and material, but he has never had the so-called "hard bop" sound that is generally a part of the equipment of such tenor men." Mobley, Goldberg went on to point out, worked out a style of his own, unspectacularly but with unmistakable success.
Mobley has been a recording bandleader for Blue Note since 1960, when his first album, Soul Station, was received with critical acclaim. Sidemen on his dates have included Blakey, Silver, Wynton Kelly, Grant Green, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Milt Jackson and Donald Byrd. Hank has also recorded numerous Blue Note dates under the leadership of other musicians, including Jimmy Smith, Curtis Fuller, Johnny Griffin, Dizzy Reece, and of course Silver and Blakey.
Wess, Frank. Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program NEA Jazz Master interview. Interview by Molly Murphy, January 10, 2010. Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. http://www.smithsonianjazz.org/documents/oral_histories/Frank_Wess_Interview_Transcription.pdf.
Woody Shaw is a trumpeter, cornetist, flugelhornist, composer, arranger, bandleader, and eclectic original. "I consider myself from the straight-ahead school of jazz," says Woody, and if you've heard him in action, you know what he's talking about. Avant-gardists like Eric Dolphy (with whom he worked) and John Coltrane have made their mark on Shaw's distinctive style, but he has not forgotten his debt to the early modern masters like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. "I'm able to handle any kind of music," he says, "but I think that when jazz stops swinging, it's not jazz."
The music on Woody's latest Columbia album, Woody III - like the music on its predecessors, Rosewood and Stepping Stones - never stops swinging for an instant. And it reveals Shaw as a true triple-threat man - not only is he playing better than ever, but he wrote all but one of the LP's six selections and did all the arrangements.
The album's title has two meanings. Woody III refers not only to the fact that it's his third Columbia release, but also to the name of Woody's first child, Woody Louis Armstrong Shaw III, who was born shortly before the album was recorded. The three selections on the first side, performed by an impressive 12-piece ensemble, are designed to tell the musical story of three generations of Woody Shaws.
James Spaulding, alto saxophone and flute, is featured as guest soloist on Woody III, but at the core of most of the tracks is Shaw's strong, tight young band of Carter Jefferson on saxophones, Onaje Allan Gumbs on piano, Buster Williams or Clint Houston on bass and Victor Lewis on drums. "I think I've found musicians who can play it all," Woody said of his quintet at the time Stepping Stones, recorded live at New York's Village Vanguard, was released, and the critics agreed. Rafi Zabor of Musician magazine, for example, praised it as "everything modern jazz should be" and called Shaw "a state-of-the-art trumpeter with a state-of-the-art band."
Similar plaudits have been coming Woody's way for some time. Down Beat‘s Chuck Berg, in a five-star review of Rosewood, called him "one of today's leading contenders for the world's heavyweight trumpet crown." Whitney Balliett of The New Yorker has called him "a trumpeter of startling invention and intensity." The readers of Down Beat voted Woody trumpeter of the year and Rosewood jazz album of the year in that magazine's 1978 poll. And the members of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences nominated Rosewood for two Grammy awards. Shaw's legion of admirers is growing, and there's no reason to doubt that with the release of Woody III, it will continue to grow.
Woody Shaw was born on Christmas Eve in 1944 in Laurinburg, North Carolina, home of Dizzy Gillespie's alma mater, Laurinburg Institute. Woody's father, Woody Sr., was himself a Laurinburg alumnus and a member of the gospel group, the Diamond Jubilee Singers. When Woody was still a baby, the family moved to Newark, New Jersey, where Woody began studying trumpet at age 11 with Jerome Ziering.
Two years later he began his professional career, playing with Brady Hodge's Newark-based R&B orchestra. He worked with local acts like Alan Jackson and the Jive Five while in high school, where he made the All-City and All-State orchestras in 1959. Woody never finished high school, but he received valuable musical schooling through his work with local jazzmen like organist Larry Young and saxophonist Tyrone Washington. At 18, he got what he calls "the ultimate of my indoctrination" with Latin-jazz pioneer Willie Bobo at a club called the Blue Coronet in Brooklyn (among the other members of the band were Chick Corea and Joe Farrell).
Eric Dolphy heard Woody at the Blue Coronet and asked him to join his band. "Eric's music had a profound influence on me," he says of the late saxophonist. "He taught me a freer way to play and helped me find my own voice." Woody made his recording debut on Dolphy's Iron Man LP, and had been preparing to join him in Europe when Dolphy died in 1964. He went over anyway, settling in Paris, where he gained valuable experience playing with expatriate bebop greats Kenny Clarke and Bud Powell. He was also reunited with Larry Young, who played with him at Le Chat Qui Peche, a Paris nightclub, and also toured Belgium and Germany with him. The following year Horace Silver - whose trumpeter Carmell Jones, was himself moving to Europe - wrote to Shaw and asked him to come back to the U.S. and join his quintet.
After three very successful years with Silver, Woody spent the latter part of the sixties working and recording with McCoy Tyner, Chick Corea, Jackie McLean, Andrew Hill and others. The early seventies found Woody primarily on the West coast, where he worked in the bands of Herbie Hancock, Bobby Hutcherson, Joe Henderson and Art Blakey and made his recording debut as a leader with two albums on the Contemporary label. During these years Shaw wrote for almost every band with which he played. Two of his early compositions, "The Moontrane" and "Boo Ann's Grand," are considered by many to be jazz standards.
In 1973, Woody returned to the New York scene, having rejoined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. The following year he left Blakey to establish himself as a leader and began recording for Muse with a band he called the Concert Ensemble. In 1975, he joined the Louis Hayes-Junior Cook quintet, assuming co-leadership with drummer Hayes when saxophonist Cook left. The Hayes-Shaw group became the band Dexter Gordon used for his triumphant U.S. tour in 1976 (the results are documented on Dexter's first Columbia LP, Homecoming - recorded, like Stepping Stones and one selection on Woody III, at the Village Vanguard. Woody's association with Gordon continued through the great saxophonist's Sophisticated Giant LP, after which he committed himself to leading a group full-time.
In the last year or so, Shaw and his quintet - occasionally expanded to a sextet with the addition of a trombonist and a saxophonist-flutist - have toured extensively both in the U.S. and abroad, and Woody himself has performed in Cuba as part of an all-star jazz band. The world, in other words, has been served notice that Woody Shaw has arrived - a fact that Woody III forcefully helps to drive home.