Results for "Pittsburgh"

Kyle Beck

Born: August 27, 2001

Hello! I'm a freelance musician operating out of Western Pennsylvania. Currently on the work-week grind we all know and "love," I write percussion ensemble and steelband music, and (hopefully someday) play live jazz.

My primary instruments are drum set and vibraphone, and I also play bass guitar and am learning trumpet.

Yoko Suzuki - Saxophone

Yoko Suzuki is an alto saxophonist working in Pittsburgh and New York City. She started to take classical piano lessons at the age of six and continued on until graduating from high school. Throughout middle school and high school, she also played the trumpet in school brass bands. Then she finally switched to the alto saxophone upon joining a jazz ensemble at Osaka University in Japan, teaching herself jazz theory, improvisation and repertoire. After working as a musician in Osaka, Japan and New York City, she moved to Pittsburgh in 2006. She received an MA in musicology at Rutgers University in 2005 and Ph.D

Ahmad Jamal: An American Classic

by Chuck Lenatti
April 30, 2024

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 1930-1958: From Pittsburgh to The Pershing Frederick Russell Jones was born on July 2, 1930, to a working-class family in Pittsburgh. His friends called him Fritz. As a boy, he delivered newspapers to Billy Strayhorn's family. He converted to Islam around 1950 and ...

Jun Iida: Evergreen

by Gary Fukushima
January 5, 2024

They are everywhere, dotting the undulating terrain of the great Pacific Northwest, from the winding, twisting shorelines of Puget Sound to the mountains that rise in the distance in every direction: the Olympics to the west, the Cascades to the east, Mt. Baker to the north and the majestic Rainier to the south. The trees are ...

Take Five with Tubist Jim Shearer

by AAJ Staff
December 7, 2023

Meet Jim Shearer Jim Shearer was born in Water Valley, Mississippi, in 1964. His family owned the local newspaper, The North Mississippi Herald, from 1943-2004, and his father was an active musician on the side, playing jazz saxophone and serving as Minister of Music at the family church (but never at the same time!). After spending ...

Matthew Charles Heulitt

Born: June 26, 1974

Matthew Charles Heulitt recently relocated to Pittsburgh PA after living and working in the bay area for 25 years. He's currently working with bass player Tony Grey and drummer David Throckmorton playing jazz fusion.  His musical range and skills lead him to playing funk with Zigaboo, African folk music with Vusi, fusion/pop/rock with Narada, Zappa-esque art rock with MoeTar, and a wide range of instrumental jazz and lush ambient home productions that defy categorization but always deliver a rich feeling

Jazz Musician of the Day: Sonny Clark

July 21, 2023

All About Jazz is celebrating Sonny Clark's birthday today! Conrad Yeatis “Sonny" Clark was an American jazz pianist who mainly worked in the hard bop idiom. Contents Clark was born and raised in Herminie, Pennsylvania, a coal mining town southeast of Pittsburgh. At age 12, he moved to Pittsburgh. When visiting an aunt in California at ...

Ahmad Jamal: In his Own Sense of Time and Place

by Josef Woodard
April 20, 2023

This interview first appeared in the Santa Barbara News-Press on October 2005. The introduction has been updated. For the late, great and uniquely poetic pianist Ahmad Jamal, who passed on at age 92 on April 16, 2023, easy descriptors never sufficed in capturing his particular magic. He was a classicist, a modernist, a minimalist ...

Remembering Ahmad Jamal: Finished But Not Never

by Ian Patterson
April 19, 2023

Ahmad Jamal, the quiet pioneer of jazz piano has died aged 92, after a battle with prostate cancer. He passed away on Sunday, 16 April, according to a statement from his daughter, Sumayah Jamal. In a career that spanned the 1940s to the 2020s, Jamal always followed his own musical instincts. He was one ...

Craig Davis: Music of Dodo Marmarosa

January 11, 2023

Michael “Dodo" Marmarosa was a fascinating jazz pianist. Among the first pianists to master bebop in the mid-1940s, he had an accomplished, plush touch. As I wrote back in 2008, “Dodo was less aggressive than Bud Powell and more expressive and complex than Al Haig. He preferred a punctuating, full keyboard approach, developing ideas in the ...