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Daniel Duke

Daniel LaCour Duke is a critically acclaimed bassist and composer who has performed with some high profile musicians throughout his career, including Vincent Herring, Louis Hayes, and Mulgrew MIller. Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Duke’s parents were both classical piano teachers. His father also worked as a solo jazz pianist. When offered a job at a well regarded music school, the family moved to St. Paul, Minnesota where Daniel began learning the violin as a child. Throughout his childhood, he was exposed to jazz, second line and Cajun music on frequent visits to his mother’s family in New Orleans. As a teenager he started playing bass, and by the time he turned 18, he was working regularly as a professional bassist with jazz, rock, and salsa bands in Minneapolis.

In 2012 Duke moved to New York after attending William Paterson University in New Jersey. He began working full time as an acoustic bassist, initially supplementing his income by playing on the West 4th Street subway platform and in Washington Square Park. He made many connections in the New York City jazz scene, and after a year he was performing almost nightly at restaurants, bars, and jazz clubs.    

Over the years, Duke has cultivated a performance resume that includes Birdland Jazz Club, Dizzy’s, most of the major jazz venues in New York, and others across the United States. He has had numerous residencies at the West Village mainstays Small’s and Mezzrow, including with renowned pianists Sacha Perry, Michael Kanan, and Davis Whitfield. In 2019, he performed weekly at Smoke Jazz Club in Manhattan with saxophonist Nicole Glover, including a two-night run with George Cables as a special guest in 2020. This collaboration culminated in Glover's critically acclaimed album Strange Lands (Savant 2021), which went on to spend 26 weeks on the JazzWeek charts, as well as 11 weeks in the top 50. Duke composed the number one single from the album (“Hive Queen”), and co-wrote several compositions with Glover, including the title track.

Duke currently lives in the Bronx and maintains a full schedule of performances. He plays at theaters and jazz listening rooms across the United States and internationally, accompanying high level acts like Jane Monheit, Isaac Mizrahi and the Anderson brothers. In New York, he continues to be a sought after bassist for a wide variety of musicians, and his recorded body of work ranges from the experimental to the traditional. Duke has also contributed as a composer and arranger on numerous albums and served as the musical director on the 2019 release Blue Heaven (Cellar Live).

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Album Review

Jon De Lucia: The Brubeck Octet Project

Read "The Brubeck Octet Project" reviewed by Jack Bowers


Having formed his jazz octet in 2016 for a project at City College of New York, where he was then teaching, Brooklyn-based alto saxophonist Jon De Lucia had to find new music to keep it going--a search that led him to the archives at Mills College, which housed many of Dave Brubeck's original handwritten charts among the papers of the octet's tenor saxophonist and arranger, Dave Van Kriedt. Eight years later, after extensive research, much hard work ...

6
Album Review

Jon De Lucia: The Brubeck Octet Project

Read "The Brubeck Octet Project" reviewed by Chris May


Synchronicity is a wondrous thing. Item: At around the same time that Albert Ayler was developing his sound in the U.S.A., the Ethiopian tenor saxophonist Getatchew Mekurya was forging a strikingly similar one in Addis Ababa. Neither player had heard the other, and Mekurya had never heard any jazz at all. Feel the Force? Rewind a decade or so and we encounter another space/time portal, this one connecting the U.S.A.'s East Coast and West Coast. In New ...

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For Trio Works Sol:

"As perfectly inventive, intuitive, conversational and emotionally impactful as jazz trio dates get"   -Jonathan Widran (JWVibe)

For Strange Lands:

"This superb album... It's familiar but refreshingly freaky" -Chris Pearson (Times UK)

 

Jimmy Blanton
bass, acoustic
Paul Chambers
bass, acoustic

Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

The Brubeck Octet...

Museum Clausum
2024

buy

Trio Works Sol

Joe Wittman
2023

buy

Strange Lands

Savant Records
2021

buy

Blue Heaven

Cellar Music Group
2019

buy

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