Results for "percussion"

Mino Cinelu

Born: March 10, 1957

Master percussionist/composer/singer/producer/multi-instrumentalist Mino Cinelu's first solo album has been a long time coming. It's been 20 years, to be exact. Mino Cinelu, his self-titled debut on Blue Thumb Records, has certainly been worth the long wait. The album is a musical journey into the mind and heart of an internationally-respected performer. The short list of artists who have called on Cinelu for their tours and records features a number of major stars from the worlds of jazz and pop, including: Miles Davis, Weather Report, Sting, Cassandra Wilson, Lou Reed, Geri Allen, David Sanborn, Dizzy Gillespie, Pat Metheny, Herbie Hancock, Kenny Barron, Branford Marsalis, Tori Amos, Bruce Springsteen, Christian McBride, Tracy Chapman, Stevie Wonder, and Bonnie Raitt. To call this project a solo album is almost literal: Cinelu was joined in the studio by only two musicians American guitarist Mitch Stein and Cameroon bassist Richard Bona

Willie Bobo

Born: February 28, 1934

Willie Bobo was one of the key players who fused influences from Latin soul, rock, and jazz in the late 1960s and 1970s. Willie went on to become an important band leader, whose music reflected the traditions of Spanish and Black Harlem. Born William Correa of Puerto Rican parents, in 1934, Willie was raised in New York City. In 1947, he worked as a band boy for Machito’s Afro-Cubans, one of the most popular Latin music ensembles of the era. Late at night, during the last set, he was sometimes allowed to sit in on bongos, getting his first taste of performing on a bandstand in the company of world class musicians

Warren Smith

Born: May 14, 1934

Warren Smith is an American jazz percussionist, known as a contributor to Max Roach's M'boom ensemble and leader of the Composer's Workshop Ensemble Smith was born in Chicago, Illinois, into a musical family; his father played saxophone and clarinet with Noble Sissle and Jimmy Noone, and his mother was a harpist and pianist. He studied clarinet under his father from age four. He graduated from the University of Illinois in 1957, then took a master's in percussion at the Manhattan School of Music in 1958. One of his earliest major recording dates was with Miles Davis as a vibraphonist in 1957

Washboard Sam

Born: July 15, 1910

Robert Brown was reputedly the illegitimate son of Frank Broonzy, who also fathered Big Bill Broonzy. Broonzy often joked that Sam was his half brother when they performed together. Sam was raised in Arkansas, working on a farm. He moved to Memphis in the early '20s to play the blues. While in Memphis, he met Sleepy John Estes and Hammie Nixon and the trio played street corners, collecting tips from passer-bys. In 1932, Washboard Sam moved to Chicago. Initially he played for tips, but soon he began performing regularly with "half brother" Big Bill Broonzy. Within a few years, Sam was supporting Broonzy on the guitarist's Bluebird recordings

Nana Vasconcelos

Born: August 2, 1944

Premier percussionist Nana Vasconcelos was an innovator in the fusion of Brazilian rhythms and jazz in the 1970’s. Born in Recife on the Northeast Coast of Brazil and, after a lifetime of playing throughout the world, his roots are apparent in everything he plays. When Nana was 12-years-old he began playing with his father, a guitarist, and in the city's marching band. Prodded by intense curiosity and an inquisitive ear that led him from the music of Brazil's greatest composer, Villa Lobos, to Jimi Hendrix, Nana came to learn all the Brazialian percussion instruments and, by the early Sixties, came to specialize in the berimbau

Emil Richards

Born: September 2, 1932

Richards started playing the xylophone at age six. In high school he performed with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. He studied with Al Lepak at the Hartt School of Music in Hartford, graduating in 1952. After being drafted, he belonged to an Army band in Japan and played with Toshiko Akiyoshi. He cited Lionel Hampton as his first and biggest influence on vibraphone. In 1954 Richards moved to New York City, where he played with Charles Mingus, Ed Shaughnessy, and Ed Thigpen while doing studio recordings for Perry Como, the Ray Charles Singers, and Mitchell Ayres. For about three years he was a member of a group led by George Shearing, then moved to Los Angeles and worked with Don Ellis and Paul Horn

Manny Oquendo

Born: January 1, 1931

Manny Oquendo - timbales, latin percussionist Latin Bandleader Manny Oquendo, is a veteran of the days when Latin bands crowded into a studio to polish off a recording in an all-night session. Oquendo’s musical education consisted of the old-school, "just play" approach, and he was in the right place to learn. He grew up on Kelly Street in the Bronx, New York, not far from the great Cuban tres player, Arsenio Rodriguez and famed pianist Noro Morales. And a lot of kids who’d later make their names in Latin music-such as Joe Cuba, and the Palmieri brothers, One floor down from the Oquendo apartment was the Almacenes Hernandez record shop

Andy Narell

Born: March 18, 1954

Andy Narell has spent more than a quarter century exploring the subtleties and complexities of steel pan and grafting them to the jazz idiom. He's one of only a small handful of steel pan players in the world who are playing jazz, and perhaps the only one among that coterie to commit an entire career—live and in the studio—to creating new music for the pan in that context.

In recent years, Narell has also explored the potential of the steel pan on an orchestral level. He enlisted the services of Calypsociation, a thirty-piece steel pan orchestra based in Paris, to record The Passage, his 2004 recording on the Heads Up label. That exploration continues with the release of Tatoom: Music for Steel Orchestra in February 2007. In addition to Narell playing all 22 pans in meticulously layered and carefully mixed orchestral arrangements, Tatoom also features three brilliant soloists: guitarist and labelmate Mike Stern, tenor saxophonist David Sanchez and percussionist Luis Conte. With drummers Mark Walker and Jean Philippe Fanfant driving the rhythm section Narell’s steelband sound has an unmistakable jazz groove.

Tatoom was recorded in various locales around the world, including Paris, New York, Boston, LA, the SF Bay Area, West Virginia, and Mississippi.

“This whole record was recorded one instrument at a time,” says Narell. “It was quite different from The Passage, where I recorded thirty pan players live. I started with the drums, the congas, the percussion and the iron, and then I put all the pans on one at a time. Then finally the soloists.”

This attention detail and commitment to creative perfection—no matter the scale—is nothing new for Narell, who has been almost singlehandedly ushering steel pan music into the mainstream since the 1980s. After a string of critically praised and commercially successful albums on Windham Hill Jazz throughout the ‘80s and early ‘90s, Narell joined the Heads Up label with the release of Behind the Bridge in 1998, followed by Fire in the Engine Room in 2000. But in the midst of hammering out his career—recording in the States; playing festivals and other gigs around the U.S., Europe and the Caribbean; composing for the Panorama steel band festival in Trinidad; laying down tracks on albums, film and commercials—he was unaware of a grassroots movement taking shape in South Africa that would have a dramatic impact on his musical and cultural perspective.

The end of apartheid in 1994—which included a lifting of economic restrictions and a transition to majority rule in South Africa—allowed residents of the major cities and outlying townships easier access to recorded music from around the world. A network of “listening clubs” sprouted throughout the region as low-income South Africans pooled their monies to buy CDs of their favorite artists. By the late ‘90s, Narell had ascended to folk-hero status in a fan club he knew nothing about.

Narell collided with his own destiny in the fall of 1999 during a visit to South Africa for the Arts Alive festival, where nearly 80,000 people turned out for his performance (he’d only expected to fill a few 200- or 300-seat clubs during his visit). The response to his music was so powerful and inspiring that he returned to South Africa the following spring for an extensive concert tour that reunited him with the band he’d played with during his initial visit. Live in South Africa, released in 2001, chronicles his two-night stand at the Blues Room in Johannesburg at the tail end of the tour.

Airto Moreira

Born: August 5, 1941

Airto Moreira made an immediate impact on the Americanjazz scene by being the first Brazilian percussionist to beplaying a lot of different instruments at the same time. Hebrought them all together with an avant-garde, progressivesensibility, and revolutionized the role of percussion, both injazz and popular music. After him it was a wave, and he wasat the forefront with his work with Miles, Weather Report,and Return to Forever.

Airto Moreira was born in 1941 in the small village ofItaiopolis - south Brasil, and was raised in Curitiba. Evenbefore he could walk he would start shaking and banging onthe floor every time the radio played a hot song. By the timehe was six years old he had won many music contests bysinging and playing percussion. The city gave him his ownradio program every Saturday afternoon. At thirteen hebecame a professional musician, playing percussion,drums, and singing in local dance bands. He moved to SaoPaulo at the age of sixteen and performed regularly innightclubs and television as a percussionist, drummer andsinger.

Marilyn Mazur

Born: January 18, 1955

Marilyn Mazur was born in New York in 1955. She has been living in Denmark since age six. As a child and teenager she played classical piano and danced ballet. She started her musical career as a dancer with Creative Dance Theatre in 1971. As composer/pianist she formed her first band Zirenes in 1973. From 1975 she worked as percussionist, drummer and singer with various groups, and became known on the danish musicscene as the colorful percussionist/composer of the group Six Winds with drummer Alex Riel and as the leader of the all-women- musictheatre-group Primi Band. Marilyn Mazur is educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, but is largely autodidact on her instruments, inspired by music from all over the world