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Results for "Chris Mosey"
Lester Young: 100 Years - Forever Young
by Chris Mosey
In October 1944, Lester Young, one of the most influential saxophonists in jazz, was inducted into the US army. In the 15 months that followed he was subjected to blatant racial prejudice then court martialed for possession of marijuana and alcohol and sentenced to a year in a detention barracks. He returned to civilian life severely ...
Hans Backenroth: Bassic Instinct
by Chris Mosey
Attempts to free the double-bass from its role as purely a rhythm instrument began in 1939, when Jimmy Blanton, a young bassist from St. Louis, joined the Duke Ellington Orchestra. For the next two years, until Blanton's tragic death from tuberculosis, he and Duke did things with the instrument that had never been done before. The ...
Bernt Rosengren: I'm Flying
by Chris Mosey
Once one of the young lions of the Swedish modern jazz movement, saxophonist Bernt Rosengren is now, at the age of 73, one of its elder statesmen. With I'm Flying, which he and his fellow musicians financed themselves, he has won--for the fifth time--Sweden's annual Golden Record (Gyllene Skivan) award. Rosengren, a shy, diffident man who ...
Peter Asplund: Asplund Meets Bernstein
by Chris Mosey
This reverent but highly accessible and creative tribute to Leonard Bernstein, by Swedish trumpeter Peter Asplund, will undoubtedly be a leading contender for his homeland's next Golden Record (Gyllene Skivan) award. It's the most important jazz album to emerge from the Nordic Area in a good long while. Asplund's collaboration with Mats Hålling--a ...
Vittorio Gennari: Melodies
by Chris Mosey
Altoist Vittorio Gennari is scarcely a household word among jazz fans in his native Italy, let alone the wider world. Arriving on the scene late in life, after a long career playing in dance bands, Gennari was in his seventies when he cut his first record as a leader, The Sound (Red, 2006). Now, aged 76, ...
The Jazz Tribe: Everlasting
by Chris Mosey
The vogue for Latin jazz began in the 1940s when Dizzy Gillespie hired Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo to play in his big band. At the time, most critics dismissed it as a passing fad. However, percussionist Ray Mantilla, part of a “goodwill ensemble" Gillespie took on a tour of Castro's Cuba in 1977, is today elder ...
Stuff Smith: Five Fine Violins Celebrating 100 Years
by Chris Mosey
Featured here in his twilight years, violinist Hezekiah Leroy Gordon “Stuff" Smith was born in Portsmouth, Ohio in 1909. Before he died in Denmark in 1967, he became one of the jazz world's most colorful characters, performing on occasion with a parrot on his shoulder and playing with everyone from Alphonso Trent's minstrel band to Dizzy ...
Warne Marsh and Lee Konitz: Two Not One
by Chris Mosey
In 1975, the members of a musical appreciation society called The Danish Jazz Exchange clubbed together to bring their two favorite American improvisers, Warne Marsh and Lee Konitz, to their homeland. They then listened in rapt attention as the saxophonists played a series of concerts at Montmartre, then Copenhagen's premier jazz venue. The shadow of blind ...
Svend Asmussen: Rhythm Is Our Business
by Chris Mosey
Once, as they were jamming, Duke Ellington's drummer Sam Woodyard called out to Danish violinist Svend Asmussen, “Man, you play your ass off," to which The Fiddling Viking replied, with that charmingly naïvely innocent wit so typical of his homeland, “From now on then my name is only Mussen." There is just one ...
Jesse Elder: The Winding Shell
by Chris Mosey
A small black and white picture on the sleeve shows 29-year-old New York avant-garde pianist/composer Jesse Elder, unsmilingly clasping a hand to his head. His eyes are shut tight, screwed up as if in pain. Below the picture a note explains that The Winding Shell is part of a series “dedicaded (sic) to ...
