One of the most important figures in twentieth century American music, Charles Mingus was a virtuoso bass player, accomplished pianist, bandleader and composer. Born on a military base in Nogales, Arizona in 1922 and raised in Watts, California, his earliest musical influences came from the church– choir and group singing– and from “hearing Duke Ellington over the radio when [he] was eight years old.” He studied double bass and composition in a formal way (five years with H. Rheinshagen, principal bassist of the New York Philharmonic, and compositional techniques with the legendary Lloyd Reese) while absorbing vernacular music from the great jazz masters, first-hand. His early professional experience, in the 40’s, found him touring with bands like Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory and Lionel Hampton.

Eventually he settled in New York where he played and recorded with the leading musicians of the 1950’s– Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Bud Powell, Art Tatum and Duke Ellington himself. One of the few bassists to do so, Mingus quickly developed as a leader of musicians. He was also an accomplished pianist who could have made a career playing that instrument. By the mid-50’s he had formed his own publishing and recording companies to protect and document his growing repertoire of original music. He also founded the “Jazz Workshop,” a group which enabled young composers to have their new works performed in concert and on recordings.

Mingus soon found himself at the forefront of the avant-garde. His recordings bear witness to the extraordinarily creative body of work that followed. They include: Pithecanthropus Erectus, The Clown, Tijuana Moods, Mingus Dynasty, Mingus Ah Um, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, Cumbia and Jazz Fusion, Let My Children Hear Music. He recorded over a hundred albums and wrote over three hundred scores.
Although he wrote his first concert piece, “Half-Mast Inhibition,” when he was seventeen years old, it was not recorded until twenty years later by a 22-piece orchestra with Gunther Schuller conducting. It was the presentation of “Revelations” which combined jazz and classical idioms, at the 1955 Brandeis Festival of the Creative Arts, that established him as one of the foremost jazz composers of his day.

In 1971 Mingus was awarded the Slee Chair of Music and spent a semester teaching composition at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In the same year his autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, was published by Knopf. In 1972 it appeared in a Bantam paperback and was reissued after his death, in 1980, by Viking/Penguin and again by Pantheon Books, in 1991. In 1972 he also re-signed with Columbia Records. His music was performed frequently by ballet companies, and Alvin Ailey choreographed an hour program called “The Mingus Dances” during a 1972 collaboration with the Robert Joffrey Ballet Company.

He toured extensively throughout Europe, Japan, Canada, South America and the United States until the end of 1977 when he was diagnosed as having a rare nerve disease, Amyotropic Lateral Sclerosis. He was confined to a wheelchair, and although he was no longer able to write music on paper or compose at the piano, his last works were sung into a tape recorder.

From the 1960’s until his death in 1979 at age 56, Mingus remained in the forefront of American music. When asked to comment on his accomplishments, Mingus said that his abilities as a bassist were the result of hard work but that his talent for composition came from God.

Mingus received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Smithsonian Institute, and the Guggenheim Foundation (two grants). He also received an honorary degree from Brandeis and an award from Yale University. At a memorial following Mingus’ death, Steve Schlesinger of the Guggenheim Foundation commented that Mingus was one of the few artists who received two grants and added: “I look forward to the day when we can transcend labels like jazz and acknowledge Charles Mingus as the major American composer that he is.” The New Yorker wrote: “For sheer melodic and rhythmic and structural originality, his compositions may equal anything written in western music in the twentieth century.”

He died in Mexico on January 5, 1979, and his ashes were scattered in the Ganges River in India. Both New York City and Washington, D.C. honored him posthumously with a “Charles Mingus Day.”

After his death, the National Endowment for the Arts provided grants for a Mingus foundation called “Let My Children Hear Music” which catalogued all of Mingus’ works. The microfilms of these works were then given to the Music Division of the New York Public Library where they are currently available for study and scholarship – a first for jazz. Repertory bands called the Mingus Dynasty, Mingus Orchestra and the Mingus Big Band continue to perform his music. Biographies of Charles Mingus include Mingus by Brian Priestley; Mingus/Mingus by Janet Coleman and Al Young and Myself When I Am Real, by Gene Santoro.

Mingus’ masterwork, “Epitaph,” a composition which is more than 4000 measures long and which requires two hours to perform, was discovered during the cataloguing process. With the help of a grant from the Ford Foundation, the score and instrumental parts were copied, and the piece itself was premiered by a 30-piece orchestra, conducted by Gunther Schuller, in a concert produced by Sue Mingus at Alice Tully Hall on June 3, 1989, ten years after Mingus’ death.

The New Yorker wrote that “Epitaph” represents the first advance in jazz composition since Duke Ellington’s “Black, Brown, and Beige,” which was written in 1943. The New York Times said it ranked with the “most memorable jazz events of the decade.” Convinced that it would never be performed in his lifetime, Mingus called his work “Epitaph,” declaring that he wrote it “for my tombstone.”

The Library of Congress was presented with the Charles Mingus Collection in 1993, including autographed manuscripts, photographs, literary manuscripts, correspondence, and tape recordings of interviews, broadcasts, recording sessions, and Mingus composing at the piano.

Reprinted from More than a Fake Book © 1991 Jazz Workshop, Inc.

Wikipedia entry

Charlie Rouse (April 6, 1924 – November 30, 1988) was an American hard bop tenor saxophonist and flautist. 

Charlie Rouse was in Thelonious Monk’s Quartet for over a decade (1959-1970) and, although somewhat taken for granted, was an important ingredient in Monk’s music. Rouse was always a modern player and he worked with Billy Eckstine’s orchestra (1944) and the first Dizzy Gillespie ig band (1945), making his recording debut with Tadd Dameron in 1947. Rouse popped up in a lot of important groups including Duke Ellington’s Orchestra (1949-1950), Count Basie’s octet (1950), on sessions with Clifford Brown in 1953, and with Oscar Pettiford’s sextet (1955). He co-led the Jazz Modes with Julius Watkins (1956-1959), and then joined Monk for a decade of extensive touring and recordings. In the 1970s he recorded a few albums as a leader, and in 1979 he became a member of Sphere. Charlie Rouse’s unique sound began to finally get some recognition during the 1980s. He participated on Carmen McRae’s classic Carmen Sings Monk album and his last recording was at a Monk tribute concert.

~ Scott Yanow, All Music Guide

Read the rest of this entry »

Bobby Few

Bobby Few was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in a family of musicians: his father always listened to jazz, his mother played violin and his uncle the trumpet.

He came from a very religious family (his grand father was a Baptist minister) which, without a shadow of a doubt, nourished his music spiritually.

Bobby Few was only 7 when he studied piano and later musical theory and composition at the Cleveland Institute of Music. He had two private teachers of splendid reputation.

At 16, he started playing in jazz clubs in Cleveland, his hometown.

One evening, he met Ella Fitzgerald who was so touched by his tender age that she encouraged him to pursue his path.

Soon after, Bobby Few created his own trio and played throughout the USA.

In the early 60’s, urged by Albert Ayler, Bobby Few went to New York. There, he made a first record with Booker Ervin “The In Between” (BLUE NOTE) then a second one with Albert Ayler intitled “Music Is The Healing Force of the Universe” (IMPULSE), both recently reedited.

He also played with Brook Benton, a rhythm and blues singer, with whom he toured the world. Later, Bobby Few became Benton’s musical director. Moreover, he played in the 60’s at the Playboy club where they had a marvellous experience.

Then, concert after concert, Bobby Few worked with many prestigious artists such as Archie Shepp, Kenny Clarke, Frank Wright, Joe Henderson, Woody Shaw, Sunny Murray, Roland Kirk, Nat Adderley, Frank Foster, David Murray, Bill Dixon, Albert Ayler or Steve Lacy with whom he toured the world from 1980 until 1992.

During his rich and fruitful career, Bobby Few also took part in more than 70 recordings: the latest untitled “Kindred Spirits”, produced by Box Holder Records (New York), will be released in April 2005.

Bobby Few has lived in Paris since 1969, a town where he found his artistic and intellectual equilibrium. Since 1993, he has directed his own trio and quintet.

His musical influences are deeply rooted in jazz with musicians such as Erroll Garner, Thelonious Monk, McCoy Tyner or Cecil Taylor… However classical music has also played an influential role. Few says: “Classical music is one of the avenues leading to jazz because it gives a direction in the harmonic progressions of jazz.”

Thus, Bobby Few’s music is therefore the fruit of his numerous musical experiences. He is motivated by eclecticism, new sounds and new musical colours. He has succeeded in making us understand that music is universal. Thanks to his music, he sends us a message of peace, altruism and spirituality: he unites all peoples, whatever their colour, culture or origin.

Jazzed in Cleveland – Pianist Bobby Few

Story filed January 28, 2004

He was one of Cleveland’s leading jazz pianists in the 1950s and ‘60s, and later, Bobby Few became one of the most respected and busiest pianists in Europe. After moving to Paris in the late 1960s, Few has performed on more than 50 jazz albums.

via Jazzed in Cleveland – Part 82 – Pianist Bobby Few.

Soul jazz was a development of hard bop which incorporated strong influences from blues, gospel and rhythm and blues in music for small groups, often the organ trio which featured the Hammond organ. Important soul jazz organists included Bill Doggett, Charles Earland, Richard “Groove” Holmes, Les McCann, “Brother” Jack McDuff, Jimmy McGriff, Lonnie Smith, Big John Patton, Don Patterson, Shirley Scott, Hank Marr, Reuben Wilson, Jimmy Smith and Johnny Hammond Smith.

Tenor saxophone and guitar were also important in soul jazz; soul jazz tenors include Gene Ammons, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Eddie Harris, Houston Person, and Stanley Turrentine; guitarists include Grant Green and George Benson. Other important contributors were Alto saxophonists Lou Donaldson and Hank Crawford, trumpeter Blue Mitchell, and drummer Idris Muhammed (ne Leo Morris). Unlike hard bop, soul jazz generally emphasized repetitive grooves, melodies, and melodic hooks.

Soul jazz was developed in the late 1950s, reaching public awareness with the release of The Cannonball Adderley Quintet in San Francisco, and was perhaps most popular in the mid-to-late 1960s, though many soul jazz performers, and elements of the music, remain popular. Although the term “soul jazz” contains the word “soul,” soul jazz is only a distant cousin to soul music, in that soul developed from gospel and R&B rather than from jazz.

Some well-known soul jazz recordings are Lee Morgan’s The Sidewinder (1963), Herbie Hancock’s Cantaloupe Island (1964) (which was popularized further when sampled by US3 on Cantaloop), Horace Silver’s Song for My Father (1964) (which was musically alluded to by Steely Dan with Rikki Don’t Lose That Number), Ramsey Lewis’sThe In Crowd (1965), and Cannonball Adderley’s Mercy, Mercy, Mercy (1966) (also popularized further when covered as a top 40 pop song by The Buckinghams).

The Soul Jazz vernacular was a major contributer to the evolution of Jazz-Funk in the 1970s.