Results for "bass, acoustic"

Michael Bisio

Michael Bisio invariably astounds audiences with the beauty of his tone and the intensity of his very personal musical language. His music has received 4 stars from DownBeat, Jazz Times states his music "resonates with intelligence, emotional depth and probing virtuosity." Journalist Paul DeBarros in Signal to Noise notes; "For years free improvisers have explored the tactile aspect of performance, in which the nature of the encounter between the player and the instrument becomes the subject of the music itself. Bisio is one of the few musicians that has managed to meld this high-concept sense of physicality with the soulful charge of jazz. His fiddle-high, scraped overtones create a tangled choir that is impossible to resist; his expressiveness with the bow is unmatched. Having whirled the listener into a transportive state, he gently shows them the way out..."

Sirone

Born: September 28, 1940

A renowned double bassist of exceptional talent Sirone, (Norris Sirone Jones) was a founder member of the Revolutionary Ensemble and remained with it throughout its six-year life. His memory is principally cherished by observers of the fine detail of jazz history, but his power, flexibility and musicality as an improviser entitle him to much more than a footnote. Back in 1971, three adventurous young US jazz musicians formed an uncompromising improvisational group called the Revolutionary Ensemble--a title that had resonances in the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the radical transformation of jazz making that had been ignited by Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor and John Coltrane. The work of the experimenters of that era is still evident in jazz today, in a freer and more collectively intuitive approach to playing that has become so familiar that hardly anyone blinks at it

Alan Silva

Born: January 22, 1939

A free jazz and improvisational musician, American composer/orchestral leader Alan Silva is a master of numerous instruments, among them the violin, cello, synthesizer, piano, and, especially, the double bass. His performances and recordings as a bassist, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, are legendary. During this period, he helped record some of the most explorative releases in improvised music, working with the likes of Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Sunny Murray, Bill Dixon, Frank Wright, Andrew Hill, and Jimmy Lyons. In 1969 he founded his own ensemble, the Celestial Communication Orchestra, organized sessions for smaller group settings, and tried his decidedly uncompromising, fresh approach to music on other instruments, most recently the keyboards. A British citizen prior to the age of 18, Alan Silva was born in Bermuda on January 22, 1939

Marcus Shelby

Marcus Shelby is a composer, arranger, band leader, bassist, and educator who currently lives in San Francisco, California. His work focuses on the history, present, and future of African American lives, social movements, and music education. In 1990, Marcus Shelby received the Charles Mingus Scholarship to attend Cal Arts and study composition with James Newton and bass with Charlie Haden. Currently, Shelby is an artist in residence with the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival and a new resident artist director for the San Francisco Jazz Festival 2019-2020. Shelby is also an artist in residence at the Healdsburg Jazz Festival where he is the music director of the 100 member Freedom Jazz Choir, youth choir, and youth music ensemble

Arvell Shaw

Born: September 15, 1923

Primarily recognized as Louis Armstrong’s bassist, Arvell Shaw must have been one of the last musicians to learn to play his instrument on the famed Mississippi riverboats. Taught trombone and tuba in high school, in his native St. Louis, he took up the double bass in 1942 while playing with the legendary Fate Marable, a bandleader who spent his life working on the paddle steamers. The omens were already good for Shaw, because Miles Davis, Clark Terry and Ernie Wilkins had also been in the high school band in St Louis. It was Terry who persuaded him to switch to bass. Leaving Marable to join the US Navy, Shaw played in several military bands throughout the Second World War (Clark Terry was in the first of them) Louis Armstrong took the young man into his big band when he left the navy. By the time Shaw left Armstrong for the first time in 1953 (he worked for the trumpeter off and on until Armstrong's death in 1971) he had become a virtuoso bassist, so good that Armstrong allowed him to take solos several times as long as those usually given to the instrument by other leaders. Armstrong had broken up his big band in 1949 when he realized that he could make more money with a seven-piece all-star band than with the 16-piece one

Avery Sharpe

Honesty. Clarity. Dignity. These are words that come to mind when you listen to the music of bassist-composer Avery Sharpe. In an age of ephemeral pop stars and flavor-of-the-month trends, Sharpe is a reminder of the lasting value of steadfast dedication and personal integrity. As the title of one of his tunes asserts, "Always Expect the Best of Yourself."

Sharpe was born in Valdosta, Georgia, on August 23, 1954. His first instrument was the piano. "I started playing when I was eight years old," he recalls. "My mother was a piano player in the Church of God in Christ, and she gave lessons to everybody in the family — I'm the sixth of eight children — but it didn't stick until it got to me." He moved on to accordion and then switched to electric bass in high school

Curly Russell

Born: March 19, 1917

Dillon "Curley" (aka "Curly") Russell was an American jazz double-bassist, who played bass on many bebop recordings. A member of the Tadd Dameron Sextet, in his heyday he was in demand for his ability to play at the rapid tempos typical of bebop, and appears on several key recordings of the period. He left the music business in the late 1950s. According to jazz historian Phil Schaap the classic bebop tune "Donna Lee", a contrafact on "Back Home Again In Indiana", was named after Curley's daughter. In 2002, she donated her father's bass to the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University.

Howard Rumsey

Born: November 7, 1917

Howard Rumsey was an American jazz double-bassist primarily known for his leadership of the Los Angeles group the Lighthouse All-Stars in the 1950s. In early 1949, Rumsey was in search of a playing job and came across the Lighthouse Club on Pier Avenue in Hermosa Beach, which he felt would be an ideal place to play music. The Lighthouse was built in 1934 as a restaurant named Verpilates. In 1940, the business changed hands, and under new ownership it was turned into a Polynesian-styled club named the Lighthouse, primarily serving merchant seamen. In 1948 the club was sold to John Levine. After convincing Levine to permit the playing of jazz in the club, Rumsey played his first show on Sunday 29 May 1949, to immediate success

Red Callender

Born: March 6, 1916

George Sylvester “Red” Callender was born in Haynesville, VA and at age 3 his family moved to Atlantic City, NJ. He first studied alto sax, then tuba, and then bass. After graduation in 1932, he moved to New York City. A tour of Canada and the west coast with Blanche Thompson and the Brownskin Models brought him to Los Angeles in 1936, where he remained. He played with a few local bands, and did arranging and teaching. Charles Mingus was one of his first students. His first recording date was in 1937 with Louis Armstrong, “Sunny Side of the Street” and “Once in a While.” By 1956 he had recorded over 5,000 sides, acquiring the distinction of being the most recorded bass player in the L

Israel "Cachao" Lopez

Born: September 14, 1918

Israel "Cachao" Lopez (born 1918 in Havana, Cuba), often known just as "Cachao" (pronounced kah- CHOW) is a Cuban mambo musician and composer, who has helped bring mambo music to popularity in the United States of America in the early 1950s. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and has been described as "the inventor of the mambo". He is considered a master of descarga (Latin jam sessions). Lopez played the acoustic bass with his late brother, multi- instrumentalist Orestes Lopez. The brothers composed literally thousands of songs together and were heavily influential on Cuban music from the 1930s to the 1950s