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Jackie McLean
John Lenwood McLean (May 17, 1931 – March 31, 2006) was an American jazz alto saxophonist, composer, bandleader, and educator. He is one of the few musicians to be elected to the ''DownBeat'' Hall of Fame in the year of their death. Biography McLean was born in Harlem, New York City. His father, John Sr., played guitar in Tiny Bradshaw's orchestra. After his father's death in 1939, Jackie's musical education was continued by his godfather, his record-store-owning stepfather, and several noted teachers. He also received informal tutoring from neighbors Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, and Charlie Parker. During high school McLean played in a band with Kenny Drew, Sonny Rollins, and Andy Kirk, Jr. (the saxophonist son of Andy Kirk). Along with Rollins, McLean played on Miles Davis' '' Dig'' album when he was 20 years old. As a young man he also recorded with Gene Ammons, Charles Mingus (for '' Pithecanthropus Erectus''), George Wallington, and as a member of Art Blakey's Jazz ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
New York City
New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive with a respective county. The city is the geographical and demographic center of both the Northeast megalopolis and the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the United States by both population and urban area. New York is a global center of finance and commerce, culture, technology, entertainment and media, academics, and scientific output, the arts and fashion, and, as home to the headquarters of the United Nations, international diplomacy. With an estimated population in 2024 of 8,478,072 distributed over , the city is the most densely populated major city in the United States. New York City has more than double the population of Los Angeles, the nation's second-most populous city. [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kenny Drew
Kenneth Sidney "Kenny" Drew (August 28, 1928 – August 4, 1993) was an American-Danish jazz pianist. Biography Drew was born on August 28, 1928, in New York City, United States, and he received piano lessons from the age of five. Feather, Leonard, & Ira Gitler (2007). ''The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz'', Oxford University Press. He attended the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan. His first recording, in 1950, was with trumpeter Howard McGhee, and over the next two years Drew worked in bands led by Buddy DeFranco, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, and Charlie Parker, among others. After a brief period with his own trio in California, Drew returned to New York, playing with Dinah Washington, Johnny Griffin, Buddy Rich, and several others over the following few years. He led many recording sessions throughout the 1950s, and appears on John Coltrane's 1958 album '' Blue Train''. Drew was one of the American jazz musicians who settled in Europe around this period: he ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Blues
Blues is a music genre and musical form that originated among African Americans in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues has incorporated spiritual (music), spirituals, work songs, field hollers, Ring shout, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballad (music), ballads from the African-American culture. The blues form is ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll, and is characterized by the Call and response (music), call-and-response pattern, the blues scale, and specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues is the most common. Blue notes (or "worried notes"), usually thirds, fifths or sevenths flattened in Pitch (music), pitch, are also an essential part of the sound. Blues shuffle note, shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove (popular music), groove. Blues music is characterized by its lyrics, Bassline, bass lines, and Instrumentation (music), instrumen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Musical Pitch
Pitch is a perceptual property that allows sounds to be ordered on a frequency-related scale, or more commonly, pitch is the quality that makes it possible to judge sounds as "higher" and "lower" in the sense associated with musical melodies. Pitch is a major auditory attribute of musical tones, along with duration, loudness, and timbre. Pitch may be quantified as a frequency, but pitch is not a purely objective physical property; it is a subjective psychoacoustical attribute of sound. Historically, the study of pitch and pitch perception has been a central problem in psychoacoustics, and has been instrumental in forming and testing theories of sound representation, processing, and perception in the auditory system. Perception Pitch and frequency Pitch is an auditory sensation in which a listener assigns musical tones to relative positions on a musical scale based primarily on their perception of the frequency of vibration (audio frequency). Pitch is closely related to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Modal Jazz
Modal jazz is jazz that makes use of musical modes, often modulating among them to accompany the chords instead of relying on one tonal center used across the piece. Though exerting influence to the present, modal jazz was most popular in the 1950s and 1960s, as evidenced by the success of Miles Davis's 1958 composition "Milestones" and 1959 album '' Kind of Blue'', and John Coltrane's quartet from 1960 to 1965. Other performers of modal jazz include Chick Corea, Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Joe Henderson, Bobby Hutcherson, Pharoah Sanders, Woody Shaw, Wayne Shorter, McCoy Tyner, and Larry Young.Henry Martin, Keith Waters (2008). ''Essential Jazz: The First 100 Years'', pp. 178-79. . History In bebop as well as in hard bop, musicians use chords to provide the background for solos. A piece starts out with a theme that introduces a series of chords for the solos. These chords repeat throughout the whole piece, while the soloists play new, improvised themes over the repeated cho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Jazz Messengers
The Jazz Messengers were a jazz combo that existed for over thirty-five years beginning in the early 1950s as a collective, and ending when long-time leader and founding drummer Art Blakey died in 1990. Blakey led or co-led the group from the outset. "Art Blakey" and "Jazz Messengers" became synonymous over the years, though Blakey did lead non-Messenger recording sessions and played as a sideman for other groups throughout his career. The group evolved into a proving ground for young jazz talent. While veterans occasionally re-appeared in the group, by and large, each iteration of the Messengers included a lineup of new young players. Having the Messengers on one's resume was a rite of passage in the jazz world, and conveyed immediate bona fides. Many former members of the Jazz Messengers established careers as solo musicians, such as Lee Morgan, Benny Golson, Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, Bobby Timmons, Hank Mobley, Curtis Fuller, Cedar Walton, Billy Harper, Keith Jarret ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Art Blakey
Arthur Blakey (October 11, 1919 – October 16, 1990) was an American jazz drummer and bandleader. He was also known as Abdullah Ibn Buhaina after he converted to Islam for a short time in the late 1940s. Blakey made a name for himself in the 1940s in the big bands of Fletcher Henderson and Billy Eckstine. He then 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 which he led for the next 35 years. The group was formed as a collective of contemporaries, but over the years the band became known as an incubator for young talent, including Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, Lee Morgan, Benny Golson, Kenny Dorham, Hank Mobley, Donald Byrd, Jackie McLean, Johnny Griffin, Curtis Fuller, Chuck Mangione, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Cedar Walton, Woody Shaw, Terence Blanchard, and Wynton Marsalis. ''The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz'' calls the Jazz Messengers "the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Wallington
George Wallington (October 27, 1924 – February 15, 1993) was an American jazz pianist and composer. Born in Sicily, his career as a pianist began in the early 1940s, when he played with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker and contributed to the development of bebop. Following several years as a sideman during the late 1940s, he formed his own group, experimenting with trios and a string ensemble before settling upon a permanent quintet. During the 1950s, Wallington's quintet including rising stars Donald Byrd, Jackie McLean, and Phil Woods, but in 1960 he retired and moved to Florida to work for a family business. He returned to his previous career in the 1980s and made further recordings as a soloist before his death in 1993. Noted for his technique and mastery of the developing styles of modern jazz, his contributions to the genre have been described as "underrated." His compositions, however, became known through recordings by Woody Herman's band and Miles Davis. Early l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pithecanthropus Erectus (album)
''Pithecanthropus Erectus'' is a studio album by jazz composer and bassist Charles Mingus. It was released in August 1956 through Atlantic Records. Mingus noted that this was the first album where he taught arrangements to his musicians by ear instead of putting the chords and arrangements in writing. Music According to Mingus' liner notes, the title song is a ten-minute tone poem, depicting the rise of man from his hominid roots ('' Pithecanthropus erectus'') to an eventual downfall due to "his own failure to realize the inevitable emancipation of those he sought to enslave, and his greed in attempting to stand on a false security." The song's title refers to the Java Man fossil, which at the time of its discovery was the oldest human fossil ever found. Reception ''The Penguin Guide to Jazz'' gave it a maximum four-star rating and included it in its “core collection” of essential recordings, describing it as "One of the truly great modern jazz albums".Cook, Richard & Mort ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus Jr. (April 22, 1922 – January 5, 1979) was an American jazz Double bass, upright bassist, composer, bandleader, pianist, and author. A major proponent of collective Musical improvisation, improvisation, he is considered 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 greats such as Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Max Roach, and Eric Dolphy. Mingus's work ranged from advanced bebop and avant-garde jazz with small and midsize jazz ensemble, ensembles to pioneering the post-bop style on seminal recordings like ''Pithecanthropus Erectus (album), Pithecanthropus Erectus'' (1956) and ''Mingus Ah Um'' (1959) and progressive big band experiments such as ''The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady'' (1963). Mingus's compositions continue to be played by contemporary musicians ranging from the repertory bands Mingus Big Band, Mingus Dynasty (b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gene Ammons
Eugene "Jug" Ammons (April 14, 1925 – August 6, 1974), also known as "The Boss", was an American jazz tenor saxophonist. The son of boogie-woogie pianist Albert Ammons, Gene Ammons is remembered for his accessible music, steeped in soul and R&B. Biography Born in Chicago, Illinois, Ammons studied music with instructor Walter Dyett at DuSable High School. Ammons began to gain recognition while still at high school when in 1943, at the age of 18, he went on the road with trumpeter King Kolax's band. In 1944, he joined the band of Billy Eckstine (who bestowed on him the nickname "Jug" when straw hats ordered for the band did not fit), playing alongside Charlie Parker and later Dexter Gordon. Performances from this period include "Blowin' the Blues Away," featuring a saxophone duel between Ammons and Gordon. After 1947, when Eckstine became a solo performer, Ammons then led a group, including Miles Davis and Sonny Stitt, that performed at Chicago's Jumptown Club. In 1949, Ammons r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dig (Miles Davis Album)
''Dig'' is an album by Miles Davis on Prestige Records, catalogue number 7012. It features tracks from a 1951 session at Apex Studios. First released in the 12-inch LP format in 1956, the original album was later released as ''Diggin'' with the catalogue number PR 7281 and a different cover. ''Dig'' was reissued as a compact disc with additional tracks. After the '' Birth of the Cool'' recording sessions in 1949 and 1950, Davis almost immediately turned away from that sound in the early 1950s, instead exploring hard bop. ''Dig'' was also the jazz recording debut of saxophonist Jackie McLean, and was one of Sonny Rollins's earliest recordings; both men would go on to become major voices in jazz. Release history The material was originally released on two 10-inch LPs, except for "Denial", released on a 1954 7" (Prestige PREP 1361). "Dig" and "It's Only a Paper Moon" first appeared on '' The New Sounds'' (PRLP 124), as did "Conception" and " My Old Flame". "Bluing" and "Out o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
