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Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra
The Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra was a jazz big band formed by trumpeter Thad Jones and drummer Mel Lewis in New York in 1965.Lisik/Allen. 50 Years at the Village Vanguard:Thad Jone, Mel Lewis and the Village Vanguard Orchestra. Sky Deck Music, 2017. pp. 8-9 The band performed for twelve years in its original incarnation, including a 1972 tour of the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War. The collaboration ended in 1978 with Jones suddenly moving to Copenhagen, Denmark, after which the band became the Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra. Since the death of Lewis in 1990 it has been known as the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra. They have maintained a Monday-night residency at the Village Vanguard jazz club in New York for five decades.Wong, Herb. ''The Village Vanguard Jazz Orchestra'', Jazz Education Journal, Nov./Dec. 2003, Vol. 36, #3, pp. 42-46. The band won Grammy Awards for the album '' Live in Munich'' in 1978 and for the album ''Monday Night Live at the Village Vanguard'' in 2 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major form of musical expression in traditional and popular music. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, complex chords, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. Jazz has roots in European harmony and African rhythmic rituals. As jazz spread around the world, it drew on national, regional, and local musical cultures, which gave rise to different styles. New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. But jazz did not begin as a single musical tradition in New Orleans or elsewhere. In the 1930s, arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz (a hard-swinging, bluesy, improvisationa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Live In Munich (The Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra Album)
''Live in Munich'' is an album by The Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra that won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Big Band in 1979.LA Times, "The Envelope" awards database. 1978 Grammy Awardlink Accessed 2008 April 19. Track listing Personnel * Thad Jones – flugelhorn * Mel Lewis – drums * Earl Gardner – trumpet * Frank Gordon – trumpet * Lynn Nicholson – trumpet * Al Porcino – trumpet * Clifford Adams – trombone * Billy Campbell – trombone * Earl McIntyre – trombone * John Mosca – trombone * Pepper Adams – saxophone * Jerry Dodgion – saxophone, flute * Greg Herbert – saxophone, flute, clarinet * Larry Schneider – saxophone, flute, clarinet * Ed Xiques – saxophone, flute * Harold Danko – piano * Bob Bowman – double bass References External links * Allmusic AllMusic (previously known as All Music Guide and AMG) is an American online music database. It catalogs more than three million album entries and 30 million ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Maria Schneider (musician)
Maria Lynn Schneider (born November 27, 1960) is an American composer and jazz orchestra leader who has won multiple Grammy Awards. Biography Born in Windom, Minnesota, Schneider studied music theory and composition at the University of Minnesota, graduating in 1983, then earned a master's degree in Music in 1985 from the Eastman School of Music, studying for one year as well at the University of Miami. After leaving Eastman, she was hired by Gil Evans as his copyist and assistant. She collaborated with Evans for the next few years, working with him on music for a tour with Sting and assisting him as he scored the film ''The Color of Money''. Before she became one of the most acclaimed composers and bandleaders of her generation, Schneider received an NEA Apprenticeship Grant to study with Bob Brookmeyer in 1985. In 1988, Schneider formed her first band in collaboration with her then-husband, jazz trombonist John Fedchock, and that group appeared at Visiones in Greenwich Vill ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Benny Goodman
Benjamin David Goodman (May 30, 1909 – June 13, 1986) was an American clarinetist and bandleader known as the "King of Swing". From 1936 until the mid-1940s, Goodman led one of the most popular swing big bands in the United States. His concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City on January 16, 1938, is described by critic Bruce Eder as "the single most important jazz or popular music concert in history: jazz's 'coming out' party to the world of 'respectable' music." Goodman's bands started the careers of many jazz musicians. During an era of racial segregation, he led one of the first integrated jazz groups, his quartet and quintet. He performed nearly to the end of his life while exploring an interest in classical music. Early years Goodman was the ninth of twelve children born to poor Jewish emigrants from the Russian Empire. His father, David Goodman (1873–1926), came to the United States in 1892 from Warsaw in partitioned Poland and became a tailor. His mother, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gerald Wilson
Gerald Stanley Wilson (September 4, 1918 – September 8, 2014) was an American jazz trumpeter, big band bandleader, composer, arranger, and educator. Born in Mississippi, he was based in Los Angeles from the early 1940s. In addition to being a band leader, Wilson wrote arrangements for Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, Ray Charles, Julie London, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Carter, Lionel Hampton, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, and Nancy Wilson. Early life Wilson was born in Shelby, Mississippi, and at the age of 16 moved to Detroit, Michigan, where he graduated from Cass Technical High School (one of his classmates was saxophonist Wardell Gray).Peter Vacher"Gerald Wilson obituary" ''The Guardian'', 15 September 2014. He joined the Jimmie Lunceford orchestra in 1939, replacing its trumpeter and arranger, Sy Oliver. While with Lunceford, Wilson contributed songs to the band, including "Hi Spook" and "Yard-dog Mazurka", the first influenced by Ellington's recording o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Terry Gibbs
Terry Gibbs (born Julius Gubenko; October 13, 1924) is an American jazz vibraphonist and band leader. He has performed or recorded with Tommy Dorsey, Chubby Jackson,Theroux, Gary"Gibbs, Terry".''Grove Music Online''. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 8 December 2022. Buddy Rich, Woody Herman, Benny Goodman, Alice Coltrane, Louie Bellson, Charlie Shavers, Mel Tormé, Buddy DeFranco, and others. Gibbs also worked in film and TV studios in Los Angeles. Biography On being discharged from the armed forces, where he played drums in military bands, Gibbs worked in New York with Bill De Arango and recorded with Tiny Kahn in Aaron Sachs’s quintet (1946). In the 1950–1951 season, Gibbs was a popular guest on '' Star Time'' on the DuMont Television Network. Thereafter, he was a regular in 1953–1954 on NBC's ''Judge for Yourself''. In the late 1950s, he appeared on NBC's ''The Steve Allen Show'', on which he regularly played lively vibraphone duets with the entertainer and compose ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stan Kenton
Stanley Newcomb Kenton (December 15, 1911 – August 25, 1979) was an American popular music and jazz artist. As a pianist, composer, arranger and band leader, he led an innovative and influential jazz orchestra for almost four decades. Though Kenton had several pop hits from the early 1940s into the 1960s, his music was always forward-looking. Kenton was also a pioneer in the field of jazz education, creating the Stan Kenton Jazz Camp in 1959 at Indiana University.Sparke, Michael. ''Stan Kenton: This is an Orchestra.'' UNT Press (2010). . Early life Stan Kenton was born on December 15, 1911, in Wichita, Kansas; he had two sisters (Beulah and Erma Mae) born three and eight years after him. His parents, Floyd and Stella Kenton, moved the family to Colorado, and in 1924, to the Greater Los Angeles Area, settling in suburban Bell, California. Kenton attended Bell High School; his high-school yearbook picture has the prophetic notation "Old Man Jazz". Kenton started learning pian ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alvino Rey
Alvin McBurney (July 1, 1908 – February 24, 2004), known by his stage name Alvino Rey, was an American jazz guitarist and bandleader. Career Alvin McBurney was born in Oakland, California, United States, but grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. Early in life he had a knack for music and electronics. When he was eight, he built his first radio, and within a couple years he was one of the youngest ham radio operators in the country. In his teens, he was given a banjo as a birthday present. His professional career began in 1927 when he got a job playing banjo with Cleveland bandleader Ev Jones. During the following year, he became a member of the Phil Spitalny Orchestra. He switched from banjo to guitar, then changed his name to Alvino Rey to take advantage of the popularity of Latin music in New York City at the time. From 1932 to 1938 he was a member of Horace Heidt and His Musical Knights. He drew attention to himself and the band when he started playing steel guitar. The Gibson corpor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Boyd Raeburn
Boyd Albert Raeburn (October 27, 1913 – August 2, 1966) was an American jazz bandleader and bass saxophonist. Career He was born in Faith, South Dakota, United States. Raeburn attended the University of Chicago, where he led a campus band. He gained his earliest experience as a commercial bandleader at Chicago's World Fair (1933–1934). For the rest of the decade, he worked in dance bands, sometimes leading them. In the next decade, the group passed through swing before becoming identified with the bop school. His later big band, which was active c. 1944-1947, performed arrangements that were often comparable to those used by Woody Herman and the "progressive jazz" of Stan Kenton during the same period. The compositions arranged by George Handy were the most contemporary, utilizing dissonance somewhat in the manner of Igor Stravinsky. Johnny Richards joined in 1947, following Handy and stayed for a year writing 50 compsoitions. Later life and death Raeburn's second wife w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Count Basie Orchestra
The Count Basie Orchestra is a 16 to 18 piece big band, one of the most prominent jazz performing groups of the swing era, founded by Count Basie in 1935 and recording regularly from 1936. Despite a brief disbandment at the beginning of the 1950s, the band survived long past the Big Band era itself and the death of Basie in 1984. It continues under the direction of trumpeter Scotty Barnhart. Originally including such musicians as Buck Clayton and Lester Young in the line-up, the band in the 1950s and 1960s made use of the work of such arrangers as Neal Hefti and featured musicians such as Thad Jones and Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis. Its recordings of this era included collaborations with singers such as Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. History Early years Count Basie arrived in Kansas City, Missouri in 1927, playing on the Theater Owners Bookers Association (TOBA) circuit. After playing with Walter Page's Blue Devils, in 1929 he joined rival band leader Bennie Moten's band. Upon ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus Jr. (April 22, 1922 – January 5, 1979) was an American jazz upright bassist, pianist, composer, bandleader, and author. A major proponent of collective improvisation, he is considered to be one of the greatest jazz musicians and composers in history,See the 1998 documentary ''Triumph of the Underdog'' with a career spanning three decades and collaborations with other jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Herbie Hancock. Mingus' compositions continue to be played by contemporary musicians ranging from the repertory bands Mingus Big Band, Mingus Dynasty, and Mingus Orchestra, to the high school students who play the charts and compete in the Charles Mingus High School Competition. In 1993, the Library of Congress acquired Mingus' collected papers—including scores, sound recordings, correspondence and photos—in what they described as "the most important acquisition of a manuscript collection relating to jaz ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Territory Bands
Territory bands were dance bands that crisscrossed specific regions of the United States from the 1920s through the 1960s. Beginning in the 1920s, the bands typically had 8 to 12 musicians. These bands typically played one-nighters, six or seven nights a week at venues like VFW halls, Elks Lodges, Lions Clubs, hotel ballrooms, and the like. Francis Davis, jazz critic for ''The Village Voice'', likened territory bands to "the Top 40 cover bands (of the 1970s and 1980s) of their day, typically relying on stock arrangements of other ensembles' hits." He said, "many historians give much credit to territory bands for popularizing modern ballroom dancing that began during the World War I era with the influence of Vernon and Irene Castle." Territory bands helped disseminate popular music—which included swing, jazz, sweet dance music, or any combination thereof—bringing it to remote gin mills and dance halls that were otherwise ignored by national booking agents representing ge ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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