Results for "guitar"

Attila Zoller

Born: June 13, 1927

Attila Cornelius Zoller (born June 13, 1927 in Visegrád, Hungary; died January 25, 1998 in Townshend, Vermont) was the first guitarist to discover free jazz and is considered as one of the innovators of modern jazz guitar. As a child, Zoller was taught classical violin by his father, a professional violinist. In his teens, he switched to flugelhorn, then jazz bass, and finally guitar. Zoller quit school during the Russian occupation of Hungary following World War II and began playing professionally in Budapest jazz clubs. He escaped Hungary in 1948 just before the permanent Soviet blockade of the country and began his serious music career after he moved to Vienna in 1948, He formed a jazz group with the accordionist and vibraphonist Vera Auer

Richie Zellon

Richie Zellon (guitarist, composer, arranger and educator) was born in Lima, Peru of American and Brazilian parents. Since the early 1980's he has been a pioneer of what is often referred to as the "sudaca" or South American jazz movement. AS ARTIST, in Peru he recorded his first album, "Landologia" in 1982 for the Fonovox label. The recording featured Zellon's unique compositions merging the percussive music of Peru's black population with jazz for the first time resulting in what has become known as Afro-Peruvian Jazz. Legendary American jazz musician, Jimmy Heath who met Zellon during one of his performances in Peru and was intrigued by his unique style, wrote the liner notes

Anthony Wilson

Born: May 9, 1968

Anthony Wilson is a guitarist and composer known for a nuanced body of work that moves fluidly across genres. Wilson has long been curious about blurring borders and finding the place where where style and possibility intersect. Wilson’s first recording— Anthony Wilson (1997) — featured a nine-piece “little big band” and garnered a Grammy nomination for Best Large Ensemble Jazz Recording. It was followed by Goat Hill Junket (1998), and Adult Themes (2000). His fourth recording with the nonet, Power of Nine (2006) was included in the New Yorker’s roundup of that year’s top-ten jazz albums

Robert Pete Williams

Born: March 14, 1914

There is a scarceness of authentic Blues artists who transcend the music and become the very essence of what they are conveying. They 'ARE' the Blues in its primordial form,beyond the field hollers and arhoolies, to the African griots, at its original source. One such individual was Robert Pete Williams, bluesman. From a Prison Cell to the Avant-Garde By Milo Miles Although Robert Pete Williams died in 1980 at the age of 66, he arguably remains the most avant-garde blues performer ever recorded. Few have approached his ability to evoke the torment of life in prison or bend language to cast an eerie spell over a chance encounter with a seductive woman

Big Joe Williams

Born: October 16, 1903

Big Joe played a 9-string guitar which he pounded, slapped and drove like a demented downhill slalom through a thicket of seminal Delta blues, singing in a gutsy, raw, emotion- exhausting voice. Many of his songs were loosely constructed around the beaten chassis of a familiar Mississippi tune or riff, but in his hands they were totally personal, often topical masterpieces.” - Ian Anderson - Folk Roots Born in Mississippi as one of 16 children, Williams learned to play guitar at five on a homemade instrument. By the time he was 12, he left home to hobo around Mississippi, playing and singing music wherever he could

Jack Wilkins

Born: June 3, 1944

Guitarist Jack Wilkins has been on the International jazz scene since the early 1970's. His flawless technique and imaginative chordal approach have inspired collaborations with Chet Baker, Sarah Vaughan, Bob Brookmeyer, and Buddy Rich among many others. A native of Brooklyn, Jack began playing guitar at age thirteen. His mentors included Johnny Smith, Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian, Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, Bill Evans, Clifford Brown and Freddie Hubbard.

“Windows”, his first album as a leader (Mainstream, 1973,) also available in transcription published by Hal Leonard Publications has been critically acclaimed as a dazzling, seminal guitar trio work.
Which had now been re-issued on Vinyl

Mark Whitfield

Born: October 6, 1966

Mark Whitfield graduated from Boston's prestigious Berklee College of Music in 1987 where he studied composition, arranging, film scoring and conducting as well as all styles of guitar performance. Later on that year, he returned to his native New York, and immediately began his professional career. Within a few months, he had begun to perform and record with many well-known artists including Dizzy Gillespie, Jimmy Smith, Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, Art Blakey, Jack McDuff, Betty Carter, Carmen McCrae, Dianne Reeves, Joe Williams, Cleo Laine, Wynton Marsalis, Branford Marsalis, Terence Blanchard, Stanley Turrentine, Clark Terry and many more. As a result of the popularity awarded gained while amassing this impressive resume, Whitfield was dubbed "The Best Young Guitarist In The Business", by The New York Times

Peter White

Born: September 20, 1954

Growing up in the sleepy little English town of Letchworth Garden City in the 1960s, I first got interested in music while listening to the Beatles on the radio. My parents bought me an acoustic guitar when I was about 8 and I taught myself to play while simultaneously taking lessons on the recorder, piano and then later, clarinet. My music education was going along just fine until one day in 1967 I heard the Jimi Hendrix song “Purple Haze”. I had never heard sounds like that coming out of my acoustic guitar and I decided that from that day on, the electric guitar was to be the most important thing in my life

Susan Weinert

Born: June 24, 1965

When Mike Mainieri, the musical brains of New York band Steps Ahead, heard Susan Weinert on the guitar for the first time, he found it very hard to believe that a woman could play so powerfully and spontaneously hired her for a tour with his band. What he liked most of all, besides the powerful style, was Susan’s independence. He told journalists that „Susan has carved out her own niche in the cluttered world of guitarists. International recognition is at her doorstep.“

And thus it came to pass, because the energetic power-lady has meanwhile travelled around the world with her guitar and her songs several times over, appearing in clubs and at international festivals.

Muddy Waters

Born: April 4, 1915

Waters was born McKinley Morganfield in Issaquena County, Mississippi in 1913 (He later told people that he was born in 1915 in Rolling Fork, Mississippi; the reason for this remains unknown). His grandmother Della Grant raised him after his mother died in 1918. His fondness for playing in mud earned him his nickname at an early age. Waters started out on harmonica but by age seventeen he was playing the guitar at parties and "fish fries", emulating two blues artists who were extremely popular in the south, Son House and Robert Johnson. "His thick heavy tone, the dark coloration of his voice and his firm almost stolid manner were all clearly derived from House," wrote Peter Guralnick in Feel Like Going Home, "but the embellishments which he added, the imaginative slide technique and more agile rhythms, were closer to Johnson." In 1940 Waters moved to St