Gil Melle’s Birthday. Patterns in Jazz, Discover something different!!!

Pattern's In Jazz

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Bobby Jaspar (20 February 1926 – 28 February 1963) was a cool jazz and hard bop saxophonist, flautist and composer born in Liège, Belgium. He was married to the jazz singer Blossom Dearie.

At a very young age, Jaspar learned to play piano and clarinet. Later, he took up the tenor sax and flute. With the “Bop Shots” band, he took his first steps in the jazz world. In 1950, Jaspar moved to Paris, playing and recording with the best musicians of the era. Here he met his future wife, Blossom Dearie.

In the mid-fifties Jaspar was persuaded to try his luck in the United States, where his reputation in jazz circles had preceded him. He played and recorded with the quintet of J. J. Johnson, with Kenny Burrell, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Donald Byrd and many others.

In 1961/1962, Jaspar returned to Europe for a year for a series of concerts and a number of recordings. With his colleague, Belgian guitarist René Thomas, he formed a successful quintet. In some sessions, this was expanded to a powerful sextet with American trumpeter Chet Baker. One of those sessions was immortalised on the record Chet Is Back, recorded in 1962.

In February 1963, he died from a heart attack, aged just 37.

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He is the most accomplished, improvisational, post bop jazz saxophonist, in todays modern jazz scene.

Happy Birthday to one of my favorite tenors!!

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On January 30th. in 2010,  Joe Lovano will be at the Singletary Center in Lexington, Ky.  tickets/info

Side Steps

I received this 5 disc boxed set for Christmas and haven’t stopped listening to it since. The remastering and quality of the music is superb!! The music here in opened up a part of his music I had not heard before, being only familiar with his more popular albums. This is definitely a side of the artist that must be heard if you count yourself as a fan. John Coltrane’s legendary Prestige recordings as a sideman to a host of jazz luminaries including Gene Ammons, Tadd Dameron, Red Garland, and Sonny Rollins. This 5-disc box set features 24-bit remastering from the original analog master tapes, a 72-page book with rare photographs, discography, and sessionography, insightful essays by noted music historian Ashley Kahn, interview transcript with Prestige founder Bob Weinstock, and fully reproduced original album cover artwork and notes. 10 albums are represented in this set, some in their entirety. This completes the Prestige label’s trilogy of John Coltrane. Check out “Fearless Leader” and “Interplay” the first 2 boxed sets in this trilogy.

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Thank you for following, and I wish everyone a happy and safe Holiday!!

To help you celebrate the Holiday NPR has several streams that you can listen to from Jingle Jams, to Paul Winters holiday concert.

My favorite is Jazz Piano Christmas, NPR invites great jazz keyboardists, revered giants and fresh new voices alike, to spin unique takes on holiday music, live in concert at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. This year, variety was the theme: The six pianists who took the stage — Eldar, Robert Glasper, Patricia Barber, Joe Sample, Ramsey Lewis and Dr. Billy Taylor — ranged in age from 22 to 88. You can also listen to past years programs, A Treat!!

Today is the 65th aniversary of the most recorded and most loved song, The Christmas Song”, commonly subtitled “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire“ or “Merry Christmas to You”, is a classic Christmas song written in 1944 by vocalist Mel Tormé and Bob Wells. According to Tormé, the song was written during a blistering hot summer. In an effort to “stay cool by thinking cool,” the most-performed (according to BMI) Christmas song was born.

John Patitucci is a Grammy winning jazz double bass and electric bass player of Italian descent and born in Brooklyn, New York. He began playing the electric bass at age ten, composing and performing at age 12, as well as the acoustic bass at 15, and the piano one year later. After moving west, he studied classical bass at San Francisco State University and Long Beach State University.

Patitucci has released twelve albums as a leader. In addition to his solo work, Patitucci has played on albums by B.B. King, Chick Corea, Joanne Brackeen, Harvest (a little-known Christian music group popular in the 1970s and 1980s), Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Michael Brecker, John Abercrombie, George Benson, Dizzy Gillespie, Was Not Was, Roby Duke, Dave Grusin, Natalie Cole, Bon Jovi, Queen Latifah, Sting, and Carly Simon.

As a performer, he has played with his own band, and with Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Stan Getz, Wynton Marsalis, Joshua Redman, Michael Brecker, Randy Brecker, Freddie Hubbard, and Tony Williams. He was selected to be the bassist for the GRP All-Star Big Band. Some of the many pop and Brazilian artists he has played with include Sting, Natalie Cole, Carole King, Astrud and Joao Gilberto, Airto Moreira and Flora Purim. Patitucci has worked with film composers such as Jerry Goldsmith, Ry Cooder, Henry Mancini, and John Williams.

Patitucci has led several projects of his own, in addition to playing with Chick Corea’s Elektric Band and Akoustic Band and on projects with Stan Getz, Freddie Hubbard, Danilo Pérez, and Roger Waters, among others. He now is active in Wayne Shorter’s popular quartet. The group won the Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Jazz Album for the album Beyond the Sound Barrier in 2006.

Buddy DeFranco began his professional career just as swing music and big bands many of which were led by clarinetists like Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman and Woody Herman were fading in popularity. While most jazz clarinet players did not adapt to this change, DeFranco successfully continued to play clarinet exclusively, and was one of the few bebop clarinetists.

In 1950, DeFranco spent a year with the famous Count Basie Septet. His small combo in the early 1950s included jazz modernist Sonny Clark on the piano and guitarist Tal Farlow. He was bandleader of the Glenn Miller Orchestra from 1966 to 1974. He has also performed with Gene Krupa, Charlie Barnet, Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson and many others, and has released dozens of albums as a leader.

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 Julius Watkins and John Graas was one of the first jazz French horn soloists. Julius Watkins won the Down Beat critics poll in 1960 and 1961 for “miscellaneous instrument” with French horn named as the instrument. Watkins recorded with numerous jazz greats, including John Coltrane, Freddie Hubbard, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis and Gil Evans, Phil Woods, Clark Terry, Johnny Griffin, Randy Weston, and the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra. He co-led, with Charlie Rouse, the group Les Jazz Modes from 1956 to 1959, and he toured with Quincy Jones and his band from 1959 to 1961.

John Graas had a short but busy career on the West Coast, known primarily as one of the first and best French horn players in jazz. Graas recorded a few albums under his own name, including French Horn Jazz (1953), Coup de Graas (1956), and Jazzmantics (1957). His “Jazz Chaconne No. 1″ was an example of his ambitious attempts to fuse jazz with classical music. It appeared on International Premiere in Jazz (1958) with his “Jazz Symphony No. 1″, which, despite its title, was far more classical than jazz.

Julius Watkins

John Graas

Cutting contests were a form of musical battles between various stride piano players between the 1920s and 1940s, and to a lesser extent in improvisatory competition on other jazz instruments during the swing era.

It was in the Central Avenue clubs that Wardell held his tenor battles with Dexter Gordon. These two were ideally matched: Wardell’s light sound and swift delivery were more than a match for Dexter’s big, blustering sound, and their tenor jousts became a kind of symbol for the Central Avenue scene. Gordon later recalled: “There’d be a lot of cats on the stand but by the end of the session it would wind up with Wardell and myself… His playing was very fluid, very clean… He had a lot of drive and a profusion of ideas”. Their fame began to spread, and Ross Russell managed to get them to simulate one of their battles on The Chase, which became Wardell’s first nationally-known recording and has been assessed as “one of the most exciting musical contests in the history of jazz”.

The success of The Chase was the break that Wardell needed, and he became increasingly prominent in public sessions in and around LA, including the “Just Jazz” series of jam sessions organised by the disc jockey Gene Norman. There were concerts at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium and the Shrine Auditorium and other venues. The session which included “Just You, Just Me” and “Sweet Georgia Brown” has some of Wardell’s best playing, but the only CD version of this is crudely abbreviated and cannot be recommended. (There have since been issued several unedited versions of these performances).

The Chase

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