This year marks the centennnial of the birth of legendary trumpeter and St. Louis native
Clark Terry. As we approach what would have been his 100th birthday on December 14, StLJN will be paying tribute by sharing videos of Terry, starting today with just a few of his many collaborations and encounters with other famous musicians and singers.
The first video up above shows Terry with another American musical icon, blues singer and guitarist
Muddy Waters, sitting in on a version of T-Bone Walker's standard "Stormy Monday." It was recorded in July, 1977 in Nice, France, with Muddy's band, which included Bob Margolin (guitar), Guitar Junior (guitar), Pinetop Perkins (piano), Calvin Jones (bass), and Willy "Big Eyes" Smith (drums).
After the jump, you can see Terry performing his signature song "Mumbles" in 2001 with the "Queen of Soul,"
Aretha Franklin, backed by a band including Herbie Hancock (keyboards), Russell Malone (guitar), Ron Carter (bass), Roy Haynes (drums), and James Carter (saxophones).
In the third clip, Terry returns to his former place of employment,
The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, sometime around 1980 to front the show's famous orchestra for a couple of numbers.
That's followed by a choice cameo appearance by Terry on another late night talk show, as he offers single choruses of flugelhorn and vocals on a version of Quincy Jones' "Soul Bossa Nova" recorded in 2001 for
Late Night with David Letterman with Jones' orchestra and saxophonist Phil Woods, who takes the solo before Terry's.
After that, you can see a full concert from the long-running "Jazz at the Philharmonic" series, which was started by producer Norman Granz in 1944 and continued through the 1950s in the US and into the 1980s in Europe. This all-star performance was recorded in 1967 in London by the BBC, and along with Terry, the ensemble includes Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet), James Moody (alto sax, flute), Zoot Sims (tenor sax), Teddy Wilson (piano), Bob Cranshaw (bass), and Louis Bellson (drums).
The final clip shows another all-star session, billed as "A Trumpet Summit" at the 1999 edition of the Jazz in Marciac festival in France. It features Terry will fellow trumpeters Benny Bailey, Stepka Gut, Jon Faddis, Terell Stafford, Nicholas Payton, Roy Hargrove, and Wynton Marsalis, backed by pianist Mulgrew Miller, bassist Pierre Moussaguet, and drummer Alvin Queen.
Look for more videos celebrating Clark Terry in the coming weeks. You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump...
Here's StLJN's latest wrap-up of assorted links and short news items of local interest:
* Keyboardist
Michael Silverman has been nominated for the Smooth Jazz Network's "Best Breakout Artist" award for 2020. Silverman
(pictured) is one of 12 musicians contending for the prize. Listener/reader voting for the award
continues through Monday, November 30.
* The documentary
The Black Artists’ Group: Creation Equals Movement was touted as
one of five "must see" films at this year's St. Louis International Film Festival in an article by the
Riverfront Times' Evan Suit. SLIFF and the online screenings of the film continue through this Sunday, November 22.
* The
Post-Dispatch's Kevin Johnson reports that the Kranzberg Arts Foundation and Jazz St. Louis will
extend their "Open Air" concert series into 2021. The Grand Center presenters are expected to announce 40 additional weeks of programming for the series, with January and February's shows to be revealed early next month.
* Pianist Peter Martin's company
Open Studio, which produces jazz instructional videos and educational materials, recently reached 50,000 subscribers to their YouTube channel, and to commemorate the occasion, they've compiled a video featuring the
"Top 7 Highlights from 2020 with Peter Martin and Adam Maness."
* Also from the
Post's Kevin Johnson, the
Old Rock House, which had reopened on a limited basis this summer,
will close temporarily again until some time in 2021, due to the recent resurgence in COVID-19 cases in the metropolitan area and the state.
* Singer Steve Brammeier's recent performance at Blue Strawberry was
reviewed by KDHX's Chuck Lavazzi.
This week, let's take a look at some history related to the most important jazz musician to come from the St. Louis area, Miles Davis.
As a bandleader, Davis had many celebrated groups over the years, such as the "Birth of the Cool" nonet; the six-piece ensemble that recorded
Kind of Blue; the first "great quartet" of the 1950s featuring John Coltrane; and its successor in the 1960s with Tony Williams, Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock, and Wayne Shorter.
All of these groups established their enduring appeal in part by recording notable albums that have become part of jazz history. But there also were a couple of relatively short-lived lineups led by Davis that, while packed with talent, have come to be known as "lost" because they toured but didn't make any studio recordings. Fortunately, some live recordings of these groups have surfaced in recent years, and thanks to YouTube, now we can see what they looked like as well as how they sounded.
The best known of these groups probably is the "Lost Quintet," which toured in 1969 and included Dave Holland on bass, Jack DeJohnette on drums, Chick Corea on electric piano, and Wayne Shorter on tenor and soprano saxes.
This band also is sometimes called Davis' "last quintet," because it was the final group he led with the traditional trumpet-saxophone-rhythm section instrumentation. With Corea playing a Rhodes piano and Holland sometimes using an electric bass, this lineup provided a bridge from Davis' all-acoustic quintets from earlier in the 60s to the larger, fully electric bands he would deploy in the 1970s.
Not coincidentally, 1969 also was the year Davis recorded his landmark album
Bitches Brew, and you can get some hints of what's to come in these videos of his working band from that year. They were recorded both before and after the August sessions for
Bitches Brew, with a set from July 25 in Antibes, France up above, followed after the jump by shows from October 20 in Rome and November 3 in Paris.
The other four videos feature Davis' "Lost Septet," which toured in 1971 and included Gary Bartz on alto and soprano sax, Keith Jarrett on electric piano and organ, Michael Henderson on bass, and Ndugu Leon Chancler on drums, plus percussionists James "Mtume" Foreman and Don Alias.
Davis was well along the fusion trail at that point, and while some of the material this group is playing would be familiar to audiences from his then-recent recordings, the prominence of the three drummers (and the absence of the guitars that played a major role in subsequent lineups of the 70s) definitely gives the music some different flavors from the rest of the trumpeter's electric period.
The "Lost Septet" is represented here in the four final videos, which document concerts from November 6, 1971 in Berlin; November 9 at the Jazzforum in Oslo, Norway; and November 16 at the Palazzo dello Sport, in Turin, Italy; plus a partial and somewhat blemished recording of their appearance on November 20 at the Cascais Jazz Festival in Portugal. (There are several versions of this last recording on YouTube; this one seemed best in terms of quality and completeness.)
You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump...
