Results for "Bill Summers"

Bill Summers

Born: June 27, 1948

The Billboard Music Award Winning and Multiple Grammy Award Nominee Bill Summers is New Orleans based Afro-Cuban jazz/Latin jazz percussionist, a multi-instrumentalist who plays primarily on conga drums. Summers is probably most well known due to his work with Los Hombres Calientes along with his friend and co-leader of the group, trumpeter Irvin Mayfield. However, despite this musical relationship, Summers has a much longer musical career than that, often working behind the scenes on film scores for various movies such as The Color Purple and the television miniseries Roots with Quincy Jones. He also played with Herbie Hancock during The Headhunters years, and is mentioned in passing by the liner notes of The Headhunters' 2003 release Evolution Revolution as contributing to that recording

Kosen Rufu

By Mike Clark

Label: Wide Hive Records
Released: 2023
Track listing: First Motion; Hat And Beard; MC’s Thing; Distance Between Leaves; Olivia; Bbq On Auseon; One For Mganga; Love Mingus; Signature; Luconchu’s Night Out; Apparition.

One For Mganga

November 15, 2023

Album: Kosen Rufu
By Mike Clark
Label: Wide Hive Records
Released: 2023
Duration: 04:48

James "Plunky" Branch: Afrobeat, Funk e Spiritual Jazz

by Angelo Leonardi
November 6, 2023

Da circa un decennio il jazz statunitense e britannico vede l'emergere di giovani protagonisti che spezzano i confini tra i generi “colti" e popolari, operando una sintesi sfaccettata tra le molte espressioni della black music. Un torrente tumultuoso che viene alimentato dalle spinte politico-identitarie della comunità afroamericana (la rinascita dell'Afrofuturismo, il movimento Black Lives Matter), che ...

JuJu: Message From Mozambique

by Chris May
March 17, 2023

There are many historic albums among the fifty or so titles released by the Strata-East label in the 1970s. But few have acquired the quasi-mythological stature of 1973's politically charged spiritual-jazz masterpiece Message From Mozambique by Bay Area tenor saxophonist Plunk Nkabinde and his band JuJu. The only disc to come close is Gil Scott-Heron and ...

Speakers In The House

Label: Ropeadope
Released: 2022
Track listing: Kongo Square; Rockin At The Mole House; HH 75; Over The Bar; Vaspurakan; Stoop; Actual Proof; Stop Watch.

The Headhunters: Speakers In The House

by Doug Collette
November 27, 2022

Herbie Hancock's Headhunters (Columbia, 1973) remains one of the seminal works of the jazz fusion era. The group's heavy emphasis on rhythm not only separated it from its guitar-oriented peers of the era, the Mahavishnu Orchestra and the middle-period Return to Forever, but also from Weather Report: grooves became increasingly more prominent as that band evolved, ...

The Headhunters

by Lawrence Peryer
November 26, 2022

Back in the early '70s, drummer Mike Clark and bassist Paul Jackson were best friends living in East Oakland, playing flatbed gigs at Black Panther rallies, and generally raising hell. Cooking was not their forte, so the barbecue joint next door became a hangout. Mrs. Jones (of Everett and Jones) asked them to write a song ...

The Headhunters: Speakers In The House

by Chris May
October 25, 2022

Although it appears to have been self-released in limited numbers in 2019, this Ropeadope release of Speakers In The House is effectively the Headhunters's first album since Platinum (Owl) in 2011. The band continues to be led and produced by its two Herbie Hancock-era members, percussionist Bill Summers and drummer Mike Clark, who together have kept ...

Herbie Hancock: An Essential Top Ten Albums

by Chris May
September 20, 2022

The title of Herbie Hancock's 1973 hit single “Chameleon," pulled from his jazz-funk monster Head Hunters (Columbia), was an apt one. Hancock had already undergone several transformations: from the blues-and-gospel-infused vibe of his Blue Note debut, Takin' Off (1962), to more experimentally inclined Blue Note albums in the mid-to-late 1960s, and on to his early 1970s ...