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The JAZZ thread...




Jimmie Noone & His Apex Club Orchestra - "St Louis Blues" - 1929
Clarinet - Jimmie Noone / Alto sax - Joe Poston
3m 36s
 
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Lil Hardin / Mae Barnes = The Pearls / Heebie Jeebies

This is from 1962, I believe, and Lil Hardin was almost 65 in this clip.
 
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Pharoah Sanders (October 13, 1940 - September 24, 2022)
by Michael J. West • Sept. 24, 2022 • JazzTimes
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Mr. Sanders in a recording studio in 1968. He made his first album as a leader, “Pharoah,” in 1964, shortly before he began working with John Coltrane.

Pharoah Sanders, a pioneering tenor saxophonist and composer who became synonymous with the spiritual jazz aesthetic, died September 24 at a hospital in Los Angeles, California. He was three weeks shy of his 82nd birthday.

Sanders’ record label, Luaka Bop, announced via Instagram that Sanders had passed away, dying “peacefully surrounded by loving family and friends.” Cause of death was not disclosed.

A pillar of jazz’s avant-garde, Sanders broke through as a frontline partner with John Coltrane, joining the latter’s band in 1965 and remaining with him until Coltrane’s death in 1967. He then collaborated with Coltrane’s widow Alice, and with Sun Ra, Don Cherry, and the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, before establishing himself as a leader with his epic 1969 recording “The Creator Has a Master Plan.” He came to be widely regarded as Coltrane’s heir.

But Sanders also charted his own path. He cultivated one of the most distinctive tenor saxophone sounds in jazz: both rich and coarse, loaded with overblowing and split tones, prone to violent, shrieking outbursts. When the free and spiritual jazz he had learned from Coltrane lost favor with jazz audiences, however, Sanders experimented with funk and R&B, modal jazz, and straight-ahead bebop and hard bop. In the process he reinvented his improvisational approach, becoming mellower and more thoughtful.

Still, spirituality and Coltrane remained touchstones throughout his career. After Coltrane, Sanders came to epitomize the possibilities of human and artistic relationship with the divine. Saxophonist Albert Ayler succinctly summarized Sanders’ place in that pantheon: “Coltrane was the Father. Pharoah was the Son. I was the Holy Ghost.”

Although he never ceased performing, Sanders faded in and out of focus within the jazz world. He had regained prominence in 2021, however, with the release of Promises: a collaboration with electronic artist Floating Points and the London Symphony Orchestra.

“Sometimes, when I’m playing, I want to do something, but I feel like, if I did, it wouldn’t sound right,” Sanders told The New Yorker in 2020 of his explorations. “So I’m always trying to make something that might sound bad sound beautiful in some way. I’m a person who just starts playing anything I want to play, and make it turn out to be maybe some beautiful music.”

Farrell Lee Sanders was born October 13, 1940 in Little Rock, Arkansas. His father, Jesse, worked for the Little Rock city transit system; his mother, Bertha, worked in a school cafeteria (and later as a maid). As a child, Sanders played drums in the church; when a fellow parishioner died, Sanders bought the deceased man’s clarinet for $17 and took up that instrument. Once he started at Scipio Jones High School in north Little Rock, he switched to alto saxophone, then to tenor. His music teacher introduced Sanders to jazz, and the student proved so talented at music that when the teacher left, Sanders effectively took over as (unpaid) band director.

Matriculating in 1959 to Oakland City College, Sanders soon dropped out and devoted himself to playing jazz. He met Coltrane while in Oakland, and by 1962 had decided to move to New York—where he promptly found himself homeless. “I didn’t have nowhere to stay,” he explained to The New Yorker. “I used to work a few jobs here and there, earn five dollars, buy some food, buy some pizza. I had no money at all. I used to give blood and make fifteen dollars or ten dollars or whatever. … I could pick up a few little weekend [musical] jobs. You had to do something to survive.”

His salvation, such as it was, came from Sun Ra, the bandleader and composer who had recently relocated his Arkestra to New York. Ra hired Sanders, gave him a place to live, and gave him the nickname of “Pharoah” (a corruption of his given name, Farrell). After about a year in the Arkestra, John Coltrane invited Sanders to join his new band. The two shared instrument and front line, playing in different styles but clearly influencing each other.

With Sanders coming to prominence, ESP-Disk’ Records issued his 1964 debut recording session as Pharoah’s First. It was not successful; however, it helped enable him to record a second album, Tauhid, in 1966. The album wasn’t released until after Coltrane’s sudden death in 1967, establishing Sanders as an artist in his own right. It wasn’t until 1969’s Karma, however—with its centerpiece “The Creator Has a Master Plan”—that Sanders really broke through as a leader. The album also served as a breakthrough for his collaborators, vocalist Leon Thomas and pianist Lonnie Liston Smith, and led to a series of important albums on the Impulse! label, including Jewels of Thought, Thembi, and Black Unity.

Sanders took an unsubtle commercial turn with Love Will Find a Way, a 1977 collaboration with R&B vocalist Phyllis Hyman. By 1980’s Journey to the One, he had returned to his most successful milieu, though he would dip toes into bebop and hard bop in the 1980s. The 1990s featured a few exploratory highlights for Sanders—notably The Trance of Seven Colors, a 1994 performance with Moroccan Gnawa musicians—but he was increasingly disillusioned with the business side of music, and recordings after 2000 became rare. He continued performing and touring, however, and made appearances instead on recordings by David Murray, Kenny Garrett, and Tisziji Munoz. The 2021 release of Promises with Floating Points and the LSO was hailed as a triumph, earning spots on many critics’ best-of lists.

Sanders is survived by a son, saxophonist Tomoki Sanders, and a daughter, Naomi Sanders. Further information on survivors was not available at press time.
 
Ramsey Lewis (May 27, 1935 - September 12, 2022)
by Peter Keepnews | Sept. 12, 2022 | The New York Times

Ramsey Lewis, a jazz pianist who unexpectedly became a pop star when his recording of “The ‘In’ Crowd” reached the Top 10 in 1965 — and who remained musically active for more than a half century after that — died on Monday at his home in Chicago. He was 87.

His death was announced on his website. No cause was given.
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The jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis in performance in Brooklyn in 2017. He began his career as a teenager and continued performing and recording into his 80s.

Mr. Lewis, who had been leading his own group since 1956, had recorded with the revered drummer Max Roach and was well known in jazz circles but little known elsewhere when he and his trio (Eldee Young on bass and Redd Holt on drums) recorded a live album at the Bohemian Caverns in Washington in May 1965. The album included a version of “The ‘In’ Crowd,” which had been a hit for the R&B singer Dobie Gray just a few months earlier, and which was released as a single.

Instrumental records were a rarity on the pop charts at the time, jazz records even more so. But its infectious groove, Mr. Lewis’s bluesy piano work and the ecstatic crowd reaction helped make the Ramsey Lewis Trio’s rendition of “The ‘In’ Crowd” a staple on radio stations and jukeboxes across the country. It reached No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 — eight points higher than the Dobie Gray original had reached.

Two more singles in a similar vein quickly followed: covers of “Hang On Sloopy,” which had been a No. 1 hit for the McCoys in 1965, and the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night.” “The ‘In’ Crowd” won Mr. Lewis the first of his three Grammy Awards. (The others were for the 1966 album track “Hold It Right There” and a 1973 rerecording of “Hang On Sloopy.”)

Mr. Young and Mr. Holt left in 1966 to form their own group and had hit singles of their own. Mr. Lewis carried on with Cleveland Eaton on bass and Maurice White, later a founder of Earth, Wind & Fire, on drums. That trio had a Top 40 hit in 1966 with a version of the spiritual “Wade in the Water.”

That record proved to be the end of Mr. Lewis’s career as a purveyor of Top 40 singles, but it was far from the end of his career as a jazz musician. Over the years he would record scores of albums, in contexts ranging from trios to orchestras to collaborations with his fellow pianist Billy Taylor and the singer Nancy Wilson, and he was a constant presence on the Billboard jazz chart.

There was always more to Mr. Lewis than his soulful hits suggested; he was a virtuoso with a thorough grasp of the harmonic complexity of modern jazz and a smooth touch reminiscent of earlier jazz pianists like Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson. But his success on the pop and R&B charts — where he returned in 1974 with “Sun Goddess,” an album partly written and produced by Mr. White and featuring members of Earth, Wind & Fire, on which Mr. Lewis played electric keyboards — led some jazz purists to view him with skepticism.

That skepticism was long gone by 2007, when the National Endowment for the Arts named him a Jazz Master, the nation’s highest honor for a jazz musician.

Commenting on the perceived conflict between “jazz as entertainment and jazz as art” in a 2007 interview with DownBeat magazine, Mr. Lewis noted, “Count Basie and Duke Ellington’s playing was for dancers, but something happened where jazz entertainment came to be looked down upon by musicians.” He himself, he said in another interview, had “always had a broad outlook. If it was good music, I could dig it.”

In announcing his Jazz Master honor, the N.E.A. pointed to Mr. Lewis’s eclecticism, praising him for a style “that springs from his early gospel experience, his classical training and a deep love of jazz.” It also acknowledged him as “an ambassador for jazz,” citing his work both in academia (he had taught jazz studies at Roosevelt University in Chicago) and in the media: In the 1990s he began hosting a syndicated weekly radio program, “Legends of Jazz With Ramsey Lewis,” and in 2006 he hosted a public television series of the same name, which featured live performances by Dave Brubeck, Chick Corea, Pat Metheny, Tony Bennett and many others.

At around this time he also began composing large-scale orchestral works. His “Proclamation of Hope,” written to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, was commissioned by the Ravinia Festival in Illinois, where he was artistic director of the jazz series, and performed there by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2009.

Mr. Lewis found the challenge of composing that work daunting, he told The Associated Press, until he “threw away the thought of Tchaikovsky and others and sat at the piano and started improvising.” As a result, he said, “I was able to compose from my spirit rather than from my intellect.”

In 1995, Mr. Lewis formed Urban Knights, an all-star ensemble with an ever-changing lineup of musicians who, as he himself had long done, straddled the worlds of jazz and R&B. The group, whose lineup at various times included the saxophonists Grover Washington Jr., Gerald Albright and Dave Koz, released seven albums, the most recent in 2019.

Ramsey Emmanuel Lewis Jr. was born on May 27, 1935, in Chicago, one of three children of Pauline and Ramsey Lewis. His father worked as a maintenance man.

Ramsey began taking piano lessons when he was 4 — he recalled his teacher telling him, “Listen with your inner ear” and “Make the piano sing” — and was soon playing piano at the church where his father, who encouraged his interest in jazz, was choir director.

He attended DePaul University in Chicago but did not graduate; his career as a professional musician had already begun before he enrolled. While still a student at Wells High School, he had joined a local seven-piece jazz band, the Clefs. When four members of the band were drafted, Mr. Lewis, Mr. Holt and Mr. Young became the Ramsey Lewis Trio.

The trio signed with Argo Records, a subsidiary of the Chicago-based blues label Chess, and released their first album, “Ramsey Lewis and His Gentle-Men of Swing,” in 1956. The trio became a fixture on the Chicago nightclub scene, and many other albums followed, as did engagements at Birdland and the Village Vanguard in New York City and at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island. But the group remained relatively unheralded beyond Chicago.

That changed with “The ‘In’ Crowd.”

Mr. Lewis is survived by his wife, Janet; his daughters, Denise Jeffries and Dawn Allain; his sons, Kendall, Frayne and Bobby Lewis; 17 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. His sons Ramsey Lewis III and Kevyn Lewis died before him.

During the pandemic, Mr. Lewis presented a monthly series of livestream performances. An album drawn from those performances, “The Beatles Songbook,” is slated for release in November.

While in lockdown he also wrote a memoir, “Gentleman of Jazz,” in collaboration with Aaron Cohen. It is scheduled for publication next year.
 

The Rhythm Aces / Jazz Battle

Jabbo Smith trumpet / Omer Simeon clarinet / Cassino Simpson piano / Ikey Robinson banjo

Chicago, January 29, 1929

2m 39s
 
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Cherry Wainer & Don Storer feat. Ernestine Anderson / Moanin' / 1967

3m 2s

Wainer and Storer are fine, I guess, but I'm posting this for Ernestine. Fabulous vocal performance from her.
 


Duke Ellington and his orchestra / It Don't Mean A Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)

2m 45s
 

Johnny Dodds / After You've Gone

3m 20s

Johnny Dodds - clarinet / Baby Dodds - drums / Bud Scott - banjo
 
I just found the most beautiful jazz cover of a Michael Jackson song. Performed by Enrico Rava a highly regarded Italian trumpeteer. He made a tribute album in 2012 It is not on youtube but you can find it on spotify.

I listened to the first track “ speechless” (yes he covered that song) it is breathtaking imo, I haven’t checked out the rest yet but I am very curious!

Enrico Rava - On The Dancefloor

1 Speechless
2 They Don’t Care About Us
3 Thriller
4 Privacy
5 Smile
6 I Just Can‘t Stop Loving You/ Smooth Criminal
7 Little Susie
8 Blood On The Dancefloor
9 HIStory

I mean excuse me but WHAT AN AMAZING TRACKLIST!

I found more tribute albums one by a folk artist, 2 other jazz tributes. Quick looks all gave the albums positive reviews! I also found a 1982 punk cover of DSTYGE, I will share more titles when I have more time.

I’m gonna tag some people who might be interested in this
@DuranDuran, @wonderouzmj, @DangerousGal91, @zinniabooklover, @staywild23, @Agonum
 
filmandmusic said:
I just found the most beautiful jazz cover of a Michael Jackson song. Performed by Enrico Rava a highly regarded Italian trumpeteer. He made a tribute album in 2012 It is not on youtube but you can find it on spotify.

I listened to the first track “ speechless” (yes he covered that song) it is breathtaking imo, I haven’t checked out the rest yet but I am very curious!

Enrico Rava - On The Dancefloor

1 Speechless
2 They Don’t Care About Us
3 Thriller
4 Privacy
5 Smile
6 I Just Can‘t Stop Loving You/ Smooth Criminal
7 Little Susie
8 Blood On The Dancefloor
9 HIStory

I mean excuse me but WHAT AN AMAZING TRACKLIST!

I found more tribute albums one by a folk artist, 2 other jazz tributes. Quick looks all gave the albums positive reviews! I also found a 1982 punk cover of DSTYGE, I will share more titles when I have more time.

I’m gonna tag some people who might be interested in this
@DuranDuran, @wonderouzmj, @DangerousGal91, @zinniabooklover, @staywild23, @Agonum
Click to expand...
Gonna have to check out that Rava album now…
 
Have just listened to a few Rava tracks, and I quite enjoy what I’m hearing so far! A lovely rendition of Little Susie, that.


Also found this live video, which feature tracks not on the album (which is also live, btw).
 
@Agonum
Gave little Susie a go. Simply amazing, Michael would have loved this tribute. It is real jazz, not some wannabe stuff, epic!
Enrico Rava is old school, been making jazz albums since the 70s.

I’m so happy to find out tributes came in from all genres. So far I got a country MJ tribute, a metal tribute, 3 jazz tributes,Andre Rieu played some MJ songs on his violin for a few years after his death, including an opera version of earth song, I have a Latin tribute, a reggae tribute. So awesome!

Also I remember in the 90s Brazilian legendary icon Caetano Veloso covered black or white and billie jean live
 
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