Results for "piano"

Carla Bley

Born: May 11, 1938

Carla Bley was born in Oakland, California in 1936. Her father Emil Borg, a piano teacher and church organist, began giving her music lessons when she was three years old and she was soon playing at church functions. But her musical education ended at the age of eight. Her formal education stopped entirely when she dropped out of high school after completing the tenth grade.

During her adolescence Carla was drawn to jazz and moved to New York City to be closer to the musicians she admired. She resumed her musical education by working as a cigarette girl at the notorious Birdland jazz club, where she was able to hear the greatest jazz musicians of the day. She met pianist Paul Bley and eventually relocated to Los Angeles, where Paul and his quartet had a steady gig at the Hillcrest Club. She began to write music. When saxophonist Ornette Coleman came on the scene in the mid-fifties, Paul Bley immediately hired him and Carla was exposed nightly to ‘free’ playing, a powerful influence that was to affect her writing for many years.

Paul Bley

Born: November 10, 1932

"Since the Montreal-born, long-US resident Bley's 50's debut with Mingus and Blakey, he's worked with more first-rate, wide ranging original musical minds than anyone but Miles..." —Howard Mandel, Downbeat, April 1995

Bley gave violin recitals at age five. By age seven he was studying piano. He went through numerous classical teachers—including one Frenchman that had him play, balancing filled water glasses on the tops of his hands. At age 11 he graduated from the McGill Conservatory—having taken on their musical curriculum in addition to his public school education. Bley, who was known as "Buzzy" in his early adolescence, formed a band and played clubs and summer hotel jobs in the Laurentian Mountains at age 13. Four years later he replaced Oscar Peterson at the Alberta Lounge. Bley founded the Montreal Jazz Workshop and brought Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, Brew Moore and Alan Eager to Montreal inorder to perform with them.

Eubie Blake

Born: February 7, 1887

Ragtime music, with its syncopated, polyrhythmic style, was born, in the 1890s in the black saloons and brothels of southern and mid-western cities like Baltimore and St. Louis. It was at the center of American popular music from the end of the nineteenth century until the 1920s. One of the most enduring ragtime pianists was Eubie Blake, who took that music well into the 1980’s. Eubie Blake was one of the most important figures in early-20th-century African-American music, and one whose longevity made him a storehouse of the history of ragtime and early jazz music and culture. Born in Baltimore in 1883, Blake began playing piano professionally when he was 16; he wrote his first composition, "Sounds of Africa," (later retitled "Charleston Rag") around the same time

Ran Blake

Born: April 20, 1935

In a career that now spans five decades, pianist Ran Blake has created a unique niche in improvised music as an artist and educator. With a characteristic mix of spontaneous solos, modern classical tonalities, the great American blues and gospel traditions, and themes from classic Film Noir, Blake’s singular sound has earned a dedicated following all over the world. His dual musical legacy includes more than 30 albums on some of the world’s finest jazz labels, as well nearly 30 years as a groundbreaking educator at Boston’s New England Conservatory. Blake first discovered the dark, image laden and complex character driven films that would so influence his music at age 12 when he first saw Robert Siodmak’s Spiral Staircase

Otis Blackwell

Born: 1931

Otis Blackwell - pianist, vocalist, composer (1931 - 2002) Otis Blackwell was a pianist and a singer whose vocal style had a strong influence on the young Elvis Presley. Yet he will be remembered best not as a performer but as a one-man song-writing factory who helped to shape 1950’s rock 'n' roll and whose most memorable compositions included “Don't Be Cruel,” “All Shook Up,” “Fever” and “Great Balls of Fire,” all prominent in annals of American popular music. Born in Brooklyn in 1931, and brought up in New York City, he learned the piano as a child and listened on the radio to rhythm and blues (then known as "race" music) and to country music in films starring such singing cowboys as Gene Autry and Tex Ritter

Walter Bishop, Jr.

Born: October 4, 1927

Walter Bishop, Jr. was an American bop and hard bop jazz pianist. He was the son of composer Walter Bishop, Sr.. In high school his friends included Kenny Drew, Sonny Rollins, and Art Taylor. He began his musical career after World War II, and played and recorded with Art Blakey, Charlie Parker, Oscar Pettiford, Kai Winding, Miles Davis, Jackie McLean, Curtis Fuller, Terry Gibbs, Clark Terry, Blue Mitchell, and Supersax. In the early 1960s he also led his own trio with Jimmy Garrison and G. T. Hogan. He continued performing into the 1990s. After studying at The Juilliard School with Hall Overton in the late 1960s, he taught music theory at colleges in Los Angeles in the 1970s

Big Maceo

Born: March 31, 1905

By the mid 1930’s, there had been a significant change in the nature of blues piano. The piano blues and boogie-woogie of the “first generation” pianists had for the most part been a series of solo performances, augmented occasionally by perhaps a guitar. Boogie was a folk music; centered in a Northern city and always closely related to urban surroundings, but it still retained a certain flavor of its Southern and Mid-Western origins. The boogie-woogie and slow piano styles, deeply rooted in the tradition of the twelve-bar blues, laid the firm foundations on which the new form of an old music was based

Andy Bey

Born: October 28, 1939

Singer Andy Bey is one of this country's best-kept secrets as an interpreter of the American songbook. Born on Oct. 28, 1939, in Newark, N.J., Bey was self-taught at the piano, and by the age of 3 could play by ear (he did receive formal lessons in piano and singing later on).

In the early 1950s, Bey got his first real professional exposure with the television show "Star Time," with Connie Francis. He was with the show for five years. During this time (1953), he sang with Louis Jordan at the Apollo Theatre in New York. With the name Andy and the Bey Sisters, he worked for 10 years with his sisters Geraldine and Salome, touring internationally.

Warren Bernhardt

Born: November 13, 1938

Born in Wausau, Wisconsin in 1938, Warren was exposed to music and to the piano at an early age. His father Lawrence was a pianist and teacher and a close friend to other pianists, among them the Russian virtuoso Joseph Lhevinne, who actually gave Warren his very first training at the keyboard. At the age of five, Warren's family relocated to New York City where Warren immediately began serious study of the classical piano literature with well-known pianists Sascha Gorodonitzki, Miklos Schwalb and Herbert Stessin, as well as with his father. In 1957, following his father's untimely death, Warren left music behind for several years while he majored in organic chemistry and physics at the University of Chicago

David Berkman

Since moving to New York in 1985, David Berkman has been an important part of the jazz community. He is an award-winning composer/bandleader (2000 Doris Duke/Chamber Music America New Works Creation and Presentation Grant), a recording artist whose 4 Palmetto recordings have appeared on numerous best records of the year critic's lists (the New York Times, the Village Voice, Downbeat, JazzIz, Jazz Times and others) and an award-winning jazz clinician who has performed and taught at numerous jazz camps, universities and conservatories around the United States, South America and Europe. He has played in countless bands including those of Cecil McBee, Tom Harrell and the Vanguard Orchestra and has performed with and/or recorded and/or arranged for numerous jazz luminaries, including: Sonny Stitt,, Brian Blade, Joe Lovano, Dave Douglas, Ray Drummond, Billy Hart, Dick Oatts, Tony Malaby, Chris Potter, Scott Wendholt, Lenny White, Scott Colley, Craig Handy, Steven Bernstein, Bill Stewart, Dave Stryker, Fathead Newman, Hank Crawford, and Jane Monheit