Results for "Percy Heath"

Percy Heath

The American jazz musician and bassist with the Modern Jazz Quartet, Percy Heath, began his musical apprenticeship in 1946, after Air Force service. It was just the right time. Though the double bass had always been used sporadically in jazz, performers capable of advancing both its rhythmic and harmonic role into a distinctive jazz-bass language were arriving on the scene more slowly than trumpeters, saxophonists or pianists. But by the 1940s, the place of the bass had significantly changed. Swing specialists like Pops Foster, John Kirby and Walter Page had brought animation, drive and swing - as well as harmonic breadth - to bass technique, and Duke Ellington's young star, Jimmy Blanton, had added a soloistic agility that rewrote the book on the instrument

New Faces - New Sounds

By C. MICHAEL BAILEY

Jazz is littered with musicians like Elmo Hope: young, talented and, ultimately, doomed because of racism, poverty, and chemical dependency. Born in jny: New York City, the son of immigrants from the Caribbean, Hope managed to release more than a baker's dozen of studio recordings in as many years, before dying of drug addiction-related health problems ...

The New Golden Age of Jazz Radio

By KARL ACKERMANN

There was the Jazz Age, and later, the Golden Age of Radio. There was no golden age of jazz radio unless one considers the brief, ten-year reign of devolution when swing music dominated the airwaves. Think about this: New York City has not had a twenty-four-hour commercial jazz radio station in over ten years; decades longer ...

Ilaria Capalbo & Stefano Falcone: Invisible Atlas

By MARK CORROTO

There is nothing more intimate in jazz than a duo. To be successful, musicians must be familiar, faithful, and comfortable with the chosen music and maybe more importantly, with each other. Such rapport is the theme of Invisible Atlas by two Neapolitan jazz musicians, pianist Stefano Falcone and bassist Ilaria Capalbo. Both have studied in Sweden ...

Culture Clubs: A History of the U.S. Jazz Clubs, Part III: Kansas City, Philadelphia, Los Angeles & Beyond

By KARL ACKERMANN

Beyond the Hubs While jny: New Orleans, jny: Chicago, jny: Kansas City and jny: New York City were the incubators of modern jazz, they were by no means the only locations with an appetite for live music. Jazz artists whose point of origin could not sustain multiple venues ventured to locations near and far ...

Philadelphia Jazz: A Brief History

By JACK MCCARTHY

This article was first published at the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia website. Jazz began to emerge as a distinct musical style around the turn of the twentieth century, a merging of two vernacular African American musical styles—ragtime and blues—with elements of popular music. New Orleans, the “cradle of jazz," was the most important city ...