Jazziversaries December 14th
Jerome Cooper (drums) 1946-2015 ::Jerome Cooper was an American free jazz musician. Known as a multi-dimensional drummer, Cooper played balafon, chirimia and electronic tonal activator in addition to trap drums.
Cooper studied with Oliver Coleman and Walter Dyett in the late 1950s and early 1960s, then studied at the American Conservatory and Loop College.
In 1968 he worked with Oscar Brown, Jr. and Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre in the U.S. but moved to Europe before the end of the decade, where he played with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Steve Lacy, Lou Bennett, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Alan Silva, Frank Wright, and Noah Howard.
After returning to the U.S. in 1971, he joined the Revolutionary Ensemble alongside Leroy Jenkins and Sirone, where he remained for several years and played piano, flute, and bugle in addition to drums. In the 1970s he also played with Sam Rivers, George Adams, Karl Berger, Andrew Hill, and Anthony Braxton. In the 1980s he worked again with McIntyre and with Cecil Taylor.
Cooper is noted for the style of his solos, which typically build steadily from slow beginnings and short rhythmic phrases.
Clark Terry (trumpet) 1920 -2015 :: Clark Terry was an American swing and bebop trumpeter, a pioneer of the flugelhorn in jazz, composer, educator, and NEA Jazz Masters inductee..
He played with Charlie Barnet (1947), Count Basie (1948–1951), Duke Ellington (1951–1959) and Quincy Jones (1960). Terry’s career in jazz spans more than seventy years and he is one of the most recorded of jazz musicians.
Terry’s years with Basie and Ellington in the late 1940s and 1950s established him as a world-class jazz artist. Blending the St. Louis tone with contemporary styles, Terry’s sound influenced a generation. During this period, he took part in many of Ellington’s suites and acquired a reputation for his wide range of styles (from swing to hard bop), technical proficiency, and good humor.
Terry influenced musicians including Miles Davis and Quincy Jones, both of whom acknowledged Clark’s influence during the early stages of their careers.
After leaving Ellington, Clark’s international recognition soared when he accepted an offer from the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) to become its first African-American staff musician. He appeared for ten years on The Tonight Show as a member of The Tonight Show Band, first led by Skitch Henderson and later by Doc Severinsen, where his unique “mumbling” scat singing led to a hit with “Mumbles”
Prompted early in his career by Dr. Billy Taylor, Clark and Milt Hinton bought instruments for and gave instruction to young hopefuls, which planted the seed that became Jazz Mobile in Harlem. This venture tugged at Terry’s greatest love: involving youth in the perpetuation of jazz.
Between global performances, he continued to share his jazz expertise and encourage students. Since 2000, Terry had hosted Clark Terry Jazz Festivals on land and sea, held his own jazz camps, and appeared in more than fifty jazz festivals on six continents.
Terry was one of the most prolifically recorded jazz musicians, having appeared on the results of 905 known recording sessions. In comparison, Louis Armstrong performed at 620 sessions, Harry “Sweets” Edison on 563, and Dizzy Gillespie on 501.
He was the recipient of the 2010 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Only four other trumpet players have received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award: Louis Armstrong (Terry’s mentor), Miles Davis (whom Terry mentored), Dizzy Gillespie (who often described Terry as the greatest jazz trumpet player on earth) and Benny Carter.
Budd Johnson (sax, tenor) 1910-1994 :: Budd Johnson was an American jazz saxophonist and clarinetist who worked extensively with, among others, Ben Webster, Benny Goodman, Big Joe Turner, Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Billie Holiday and, especially, Earl Hines.
Johnson initially played drums and piano before switching to tenor saxophone. In the 1920s he performed in Texas and parts of the Midwest, working with Jesse Stone among others.
Budd Johnson had his recording debut while working with Louis Armstrong’s band in 1932-1933 but he is more known for his work, over many years, with Earl Hines. It is contended that he and Billy Eckstine, Hines’ long-term collaborator, led Hines to hire “modernists” in the birth of bebop which came largely out of the Hines band.Johnson was also an early figure in the bebop era doing sessions with Coleman Hawkins in 1944.
In the 1950s he led his own group and did session work for Atlantic Records - he is the featured tenor saxophone soloist on Ruth Brown’s hit, “Teardrops from My Eyes”. In the mid-1960s he began working and recording again with Hines.
His association with Hines is his longest lasting and most significant.
In 1975 he began working with the New York Jazz Repertory Orchestra. He was inducted into the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame in 1993.
His grandson, Albert Johnson (aka Prodigy), is a member of the hip-hop duo Mobb Deep.
Phineas Newborn (piano) 1931-1989 :: Phineas Newborn, Jr. was an American jazz pianist, whose principal influences were Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson, and Bud Powell.
Newborn came from a musical family: his father, Phineas Newborn, Sr., was a blues musician and his younger brother, Calvin, a jazz guitarist.
Phineas studied piano as well as trumpet, and tenor and baritone saxophone.
Before moving on to work with Lionel Hampton, Charles Mingus, and others, Newborn first played in an R&B band led by his father on drums, with his brother Calvin on guitar, Tuff Green on bass, Ben Branch and future Hi Records star Willie Mitchell. The group was the house band at the now famous Plantation Inn Club in West Memphis, Arkansas, from 1947 to 1951, and recorded as B. B. King's band on his first recordings in 1949, as well as the Sun Records sessions in 1950.
They left West Memphis in 1951 to tour with Jackie Brenston as the “Delta Cats” in support of the record “Rocket 88”, recorded by Sam Phillips and considered by many to be the first ever rock & roll record (it was the first Billboard No. 1 record for Chess Records).
Among his earliest recordings, from the early 1950s, are those for Sun Records with blues harmonica player Big Walter Horton, We Three (as a trio with drummer Roy Haynes and bassist Paul Chambers), and his debut as a solo artist on RCA Victor, Phineas’ Rainbow.
From 1956 he began to perform in New York City, making his first album as a leader in that year. His trios and quartets at that time included Oscar Pettiford, Kenny Clarke, George Joyner and Philly Joe Jones.
He created enough interest internationally to work as a solo pianist in Stockholm in 1958 and in Rome the following year.
Subsequently moving to Los Angeles around 1960, he recorded a sequence of piano trio albums for the Contemporary label.
Newborn’s later career was intermittent due to ongoing health problems. This is most true of the period from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s when he faded from view, underappreciated and underrecorded. He made a partial comeback in the late 1970s and early 1980s, although this return apparently failed to benefit his financial situation.
According to jazz historian Nat Hentoff, Newborn’s plight spurred the 1989 founding of the Jazz Foundation of America, a group dedicated to helping with the medical bills and other financial needs of retired jazz greats.
Spike Jones (composer/Conductor) 1911-1965 :: Lindley Armstrong “Spike” Jones was an American musician and bandleader specializing in performing satirical arrangements of popular songs. Ballads and classical works receiving the Jones treatment would be punctuated with gunshots, whistles, cowbells, and outlandish vocals.
Through the 1940s and early 1950s, the band recorded under the title Spike Jones and his City Slickers and toured the United States and Canada under the title The Musical Depreciation Revue.
Jones’ father was a Southern Pacific railroad agent. Young Lindley Jones got his nickname by being so thin that he was compared to a railroad spike.
At age 11 he got his first set of drums. As a teenager he played in bands that he formed himself. A railroad restaurant chef taught him how to use pots and pans, forks, knives and spoons as musical instruments. Jones frequently played in theater pit orchestras.
In the 1930s he joined the Victor Young orchestra and got many offers to appear on radio shows, including Al Jolson’s Lifebuoy Program, Burns and Allen, and Bing Crosby’s Kraft Music Hall.
From 1937 to 1942, he was the percussionist for the John Scott Trotter Orchestra, which played on Bing Crosby’s first recording of White Christmas. Spike Jones was part of a backing band for songwriter Cindy Walker during her early recording career with Decca Records and Standard Transcriptions.
Her song “We’re Gonna Stomp Them City Slickers Down” provided the inspiration for the name of Jones’s future band, the City Slickers.
The City Slickers developed from the Feather Merchants, a band led by vocalist-clarinetist Del Porter, who took a back seat to Jones during the embryonic years of the group. They made experimental records for the Cinematone Corporation and performed publicly in Los Angeles, gaining a small following. The original members included vocalist-violinist Carl Grayson, banjoist Perry Botkin, trombonist King Jackson and pianist Stan Wrightsman.
The band signed a recording contract with RCA Victor in 1941 and recorded extensively for the company until 1955. They also starred in various radio programs (1945–1949) and television shows (1954–1961) on both NBC and CBS.
