Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong
Fiel do Rock - A Brazilian blog talking about Corinthians, Tech, Blues, Rock'n'Roll and so on. Be my guest. Have fun and keep in touch!
4/27/2014
Billie Holiday - All of me
Billie Holiday was a true artist of her day and rose as a social phenomenon in the 1950s. Her soulful, unique singing voice and her ability to boldly turn any material that she confronted into her own music made her a superstar of her time. Today, Holiday is remembered for her masterpieces, creativity and vivacity, as many of Holiday's songs are as well known today as they were decades ago. Holiday's poignant voice is still considered to be one of the greatest jazz voices of all time.
4/25/2014
T-Bone Walker - Hey Baby
Aaron Thibeaux Walker aka T-Bone Walker (vocals, guitar; born May 28, 1910, died March 16, 1975)
It was T-Bone Walker, B.B. King once said, who “really started me to want to play the blues. I can still hear T-Bone in my mind today, from that first record I heard, ‘Stormy Monday.’ He was the first electric guitar player I heard on record. He made me so that I knew I just had to go out and get an electric guitar.”
T-Bone Walker was born Aaron Thibeaux Walker to musical parents on May 28, 1910, in Linden, Texas. When he was two, his family moved to Dallas. Through his church choir and his street-singing stepfather, Marco Washington, he became interested in music. He got his nickname T-Bone at an early age. His mother called him T-Bow, a shortening of his middle name Thibeaux, and it soon became T-Bone. By the time he was 10, T-Bone was accompanying his stepfather at drive-in soft-drink stands. Around the same time, he became the “lead boy” for Blind Lemon Jefferson, who was the most popular and influential country bluesman of the Twenties. From 1920 to 1923, Walker would lead Jefferson down Texas streets.
While still in his teens, Walker, who was self-taught on guitar, banjo and ukulele, toured with a medicine show and with blues singer Ida Cox. In 1929, he began recording acoustic country blues under the name Oak Cliff T-Bone. In 1934, he moved to Los Angeles. He said he began playing amplified guitar shortly thereafter. If that is true, then he was one of the first major guitarists to go electric. And, indeed, he pioneered the electric guitar sound that helped create the blues and thus influence all popular music that followed.
In 1939, Walker joined Les Hite’s Cotton Club Orchestra. It was a rough-and-tumble big band whose alumni included Dizzy Gillespie and Lionel Hampton. With the Hite band, Walker perfected his flowing, hornlike guitar licks and his mellow blues vocals. Over the next decade, he worked with both small groups and big bands, on the West Coast and on tours through the Midwest and all the way to New York.
He first recorded as T-Bone Walker in 1942, and the following year he had his biggest hit, “Call It Stormy Monday,” which as “Stormy Monday Blues” or just “Stormy Monday” has become one of the most frequently covered blues songs. Walker recorded for Black & White Records, the label that released “Stormy Monday,” until 1947. He recorded other classics for the label, including “T-Bone Shuffle” and “West Side Lady.”
In 1950, Walker signed with Imperial Records, where he remained until 1954. At Imperial, he cut “The Hustle Is On,” “Cold Cold Feeling,” “Blue Moon,” “Vida Lee” and “Party Girl.” He then moved on to Atlantic Records. He recorded sessions in 1955, 1956 and 1959, and they were finally released in 1960 on the album T-Bone Blues.
Walker’s career began to slow down during the Sixties. He made an appearance at the American Folk Blues Festival in 1962, performing with Memphis Slim and Willie Dixon, among others. In 1968, he released the album I Want a Little Girl. And, in 1971, he won the Grammy Award for Best Ethic or Traditional Folk Recording for the album Good Feelin’.
In 1973, Walker climaxed his recording career with the double album Very Rare. It was produced by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and they assembled an all-star cast of jazz veterans and young studio pros to honor the great bluesman.
The following year, Walker became inactive after he was hospitalized with bronchial pneumonia. He died from the disease on March 16, 1975.
T-Bone Walker’s single-string solos influenced blues players like B.B. King and such rockers as Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan. As Pete Welding wrote: “T-Bone Walker is the fundamental source of the modern urban style of playing and singing the blues. The blues was different before he came onto the scene, and it hasn’t been the same since.”
It was T-Bone Walker, B.B. King once said, who “really started me to want to play the blues. I can still hear T-Bone in my mind today, from that first record I heard, ‘Stormy Monday.’ He was the first electric guitar player I heard on record. He made me so that I knew I just had to go out and get an electric guitar.”
T-Bone Walker was born Aaron Thibeaux Walker to musical parents on May 28, 1910, in Linden, Texas. When he was two, his family moved to Dallas. Through his church choir and his street-singing stepfather, Marco Washington, he became interested in music. He got his nickname T-Bone at an early age. His mother called him T-Bow, a shortening of his middle name Thibeaux, and it soon became T-Bone. By the time he was 10, T-Bone was accompanying his stepfather at drive-in soft-drink stands. Around the same time, he became the “lead boy” for Blind Lemon Jefferson, who was the most popular and influential country bluesman of the Twenties. From 1920 to 1923, Walker would lead Jefferson down Texas streets.
While still in his teens, Walker, who was self-taught on guitar, banjo and ukulele, toured with a medicine show and with blues singer Ida Cox. In 1929, he began recording acoustic country blues under the name Oak Cliff T-Bone. In 1934, he moved to Los Angeles. He said he began playing amplified guitar shortly thereafter. If that is true, then he was one of the first major guitarists to go electric. And, indeed, he pioneered the electric guitar sound that helped create the blues and thus influence all popular music that followed.
In 1939, Walker joined Les Hite’s Cotton Club Orchestra. It was a rough-and-tumble big band whose alumni included Dizzy Gillespie and Lionel Hampton. With the Hite band, Walker perfected his flowing, hornlike guitar licks and his mellow blues vocals. Over the next decade, he worked with both small groups and big bands, on the West Coast and on tours through the Midwest and all the way to New York.
He first recorded as T-Bone Walker in 1942, and the following year he had his biggest hit, “Call It Stormy Monday,” which as “Stormy Monday Blues” or just “Stormy Monday” has become one of the most frequently covered blues songs. Walker recorded for Black & White Records, the label that released “Stormy Monday,” until 1947. He recorded other classics for the label, including “T-Bone Shuffle” and “West Side Lady.”
In 1950, Walker signed with Imperial Records, where he remained until 1954. At Imperial, he cut “The Hustle Is On,” “Cold Cold Feeling,” “Blue Moon,” “Vida Lee” and “Party Girl.” He then moved on to Atlantic Records. He recorded sessions in 1955, 1956 and 1959, and they were finally released in 1960 on the album T-Bone Blues.
Walker’s career began to slow down during the Sixties. He made an appearance at the American Folk Blues Festival in 1962, performing with Memphis Slim and Willie Dixon, among others. In 1968, he released the album I Want a Little Girl. And, in 1971, he won the Grammy Award for Best Ethic or Traditional Folk Recording for the album Good Feelin’.
In 1973, Walker climaxed his recording career with the double album Very Rare. It was produced by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and they assembled an all-star cast of jazz veterans and young studio pros to honor the great bluesman.
The following year, Walker became inactive after he was hospitalized with bronchial pneumonia. He died from the disease on March 16, 1975.
T-Bone Walker’s single-string solos influenced blues players like B.B. King and such rockers as Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan. As Pete Welding wrote: “T-Bone Walker is the fundamental source of the modern urban style of playing and singing the blues. The blues was different before he came onto the scene, and it hasn’t been the same since.”
4/20/2014
Miles Davis - Time After Time
The Official Miles Davis Web Site
Miles Davis is one of the key figures in the history of jazz, and his place in vanguard of that pantheon is secure. His induction as a performer into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a subtler and less obvious matter. Davis never played rock or rhythm & blues, though he experimented with funk grooves on 1972’s On the Corner and in some of his later bands. However, his work intrigued a sizable segment of rock’s more ambitious fans in a way that no other serious jazz figure had ever done – and not retroactively but while he was alive and making some of his most challenging music. In particular, the boldly experimental soundscapes of Davis’ 1969 album Bitches Brew spoke to the sensibilities of rock fans who’d been digesting the Grateful Dead’s expansive improvisations. Davis’ was acutely attuned to his environment and he once remarked, “We play what the day recommends.”
Davis’ exposure to the rock audience owes much to concert promoter Bill Graham, who booked Davis at his Fillmore auditoriums. Graham figured that his open-eared audiences would make the connection between venturesome San Francisco jam bands (like the Dead, Quicksilver and Santana) and Davis’ free-flowing ensemble. This exposure allowed Davis to cross over without compromise, and he actually recorded albums – Miles Davis at Fillmore and Black Beauty – at Graham’s Fillmore East and Fillmore West, respectively.
It is important to note that Miles Davis did not make jazz-rock – a briefly popular hybrid in the late Sixties and early Seventies, whose chief proponents were Blood, Sweat & Tears and Chicago. Davis played jazz, period. But his forward-thinking sensibility, insatiably curious muse and eagerness to move music into uncharted realms made him a contemporary musician, irrespective of genre. The bond he established with rock’s more inquisitive listeners at that time carried through to his death in 1991. Moreover, his career-long example of pushing the boundaries has influenced many of rock’s leading lights, particularly those who eschewed the status quo for musical explorations on rock’s more experimental tip. He possessed one of the most gifted and curious minds in music history, and compromise was not in his blood.
As a French jazz magazine wrote of him in 1960: “The behavior of Miles Davis is not that of an ordinary star. It is that of a man who has decided to live without hypocrisy.”
Born in the St. Louis suburb of Alton, Illinois, Miles Dewey Davis III was the son of a successful dental surgeon. His mother played piano and violin, and Miles received tutoring on the trumpet. In 1942, he joined Eddie Randle’s Blue Devils, with whom he played throughout high school. Davis first heard modern jazz at 18 when Billy Eckstine’s ensemble, which included saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, came to town for a two-week residency. Davis wound up replacing a trumpet player in the band who had taken ill. He accompanied Eckstine back to New York, where he studied classical music at Juilliard by day and played jazz clubs at night. Davis joined Parker’s quintet in 1945 and made his recording debut as a bandleader two years later.
Jazz writer Nat Hentoff identified the fundamental elements of Davis’ style: “spareness, evocative use of space, intense lyricism, and deep fire underneath it all.” The innovations he brought to jazz in the second half of the 20th century were profound in their scope and consequences. With The Birth of the Cool, a series of sessions cut with a nine-piece band in 1949 and 1950, Davis tempered bop’s heat with a more supple, serene lyricism. As Robert Palmer wrote many years later, “[The Birth of the Cool] initiated a still-evolving exchange between of ideas between jazz and European classical music.”
Davis changed courses in the mid-Fifties with Walkin’, a bluesier, more muscular effort (recorded during a stint with Prestige Records) that ushered in the hard-bop era. He’d formed a legendary quintet that included pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers, drummer Philly Joe Jones and a young saxophonist named John Coltrane. They went on to record other milestones, such as Round About Midnight, which inaugurated Davis’ 30-year association with Columbia Records. Davis followed this with the ambitious Miles Ahead (1957), credited to “Miles Davis + 19.” This big-band session renewed Davis’ fruitful partnership with arranger Gil Evans (who’d also worked on The Birth of the Cool). Theirs has been called “the most important relationship ever forged between a jazz soloist and an arranger.”
The innovations came fast and furious as the Fifties segued into the Sixties. Working with a sextet that included pianist Bill Evans and saxophonists Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley, Davis recorded the understated masterpiece Kind of Blue in the spring of 1959. The musicians soloed in uncluttered settings typified by “melodic rather than harmonic variation,” in Davis’ words. The album included the classic originals “All Blues,” “So What” and “Flamenco Sketches.” Sketches of Spain, a large-scale orchestral project, appeared a year later. It was the apex in a series of expressive collaborations between Davis and arranger/composer Gil Evans. Both albums highlighted Davis’ painterly approach to horn-playing. Unsurprisingly, painting would later become another mode of self-expression for Davis.
During the Sixties, Davis led a stellar quintet that included tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter and drumming prodigy Tony Williams (who was only 17 when he first performed with Davis). Their many notable works included E.S.P. (1965), Miles Smiles (1967), Sorcerer (1967), Nefertiti (1968) and Filles de Kilimanjaro (1969). Davis would then move in a more electric direction, occasioning the same sort of controversy in the jazz world that Bob Dylan’s embrace of amplified instruments had generated in the folk world at mid-decade. His first step in this direction was the atmospheric In a Silent Way (1969), which saw him joined by guitarist John McLaughlin, and keyboardists Chick Corea and Joe Zawinul. This album pointed the way to Davis’ groundbreaking Bitches Brew, one of the most challenging and innovative musical works ever made.
Enamored of the rock styles of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, Davis had expressed a desire to form “the world’s baddest rock band.” He didn’t literally do that, but he did bring a fiery, rock-inspired sensibility to Bitches Brew (1969), A Tribute To Jack Johnson (1971) and Live-Evil (1971). During this highly productive period he employed musicians who would go on to become household names in the Seventies: Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter (who cofounded Weather Report); Chick Corea (who’d make waves with Return to Forever); Billy Cobham and John McLaughlin (who’d form Mahavishnu Orchestra); Harvey Brooks (from the rock group Electric Flag); Lenny White (who’d join Larry Coryell’s fusion band, the Eleventh House); Ron Carter and Airto Moreira (key figures on the CTI label’s new-wave jazz roster); and others. Davis wasn’t so much leading a band as conducting an extended seminar on new directions for jazz, and its impact would be felt for decades.
Davis’ infatuation with rock and funk peaked with 1972’s On the Corner. He drew from numerous influences, including Sly Stone, Parliament/Funkadelic, James Brown, German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and British composer/arranger Paul Buckmaster. Thereafter, he kept two or three electric guitarists in his band, and the music turned even more spectral and extreme. Such albums as Agharta, Pangaea and Dark Magus made for difficult listening. They subsequently influenced movements on rock’s fringe like no wave, industrial, electronica, punk-funk and grunge. Those albums also reflected Davis’ turmoil during one of the darker periods in his life. He actually dropped out of the music scene from 1975 to 1981. Davis resurfaced in 1981 with The Man With the Horn. It was followed by the double live album We Want Miles and Star People, which was Davis’ most blues-minded recording in many years. He closed out his 30-year run on Columbia Records with the albums Decoy (1984) and You’re Under Arrest (1985). The latter included Davis’ interpretations of Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” and Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time.”
Davis’ comeback continued with a move to Warner Bros. in the mid-Eighties, where he continued to push the envelope with such albums as Tutu (1986) and Music From Siesta (1987). In 1989, Davis published a frank, uncensored memoir entitled Miles: The Autobiography, which made numerous best-seller lists. Davis’ final studio project, Doo Bop, found him collaborating with Brooklyn rapper Easy Mo Bee on a synthesis of hip-hop, doo-wop and be-bop. Unsurprisingly, he was still forging new connections and avenues of expression until the very end of his life.
Davis succumbed to a combination of pneumonia, stroke and respiratory failure at a hospital in Santa Monica, California, in 1991. In the flood of tributes that followed, Vernon Reid (of Living Colour) perhaps stated it best: “Miles shares with a handful of artists of this century the ineffable mystery of creation at its highest level.”
In Davis’ own words, “The way you change and help music is by tryin’ to invent new ways to play.” For nearly 50 years, Miles Davis did just that.
Live Under The Sky 1985
Live At Yomiuri Land Open Theatre East, Tokyo, Japan
28th, July
Miles Davis is one of the key figures in the history of jazz, and his place in vanguard of that pantheon is secure. His induction as a performer into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a subtler and less obvious matter. Davis never played rock or rhythm & blues, though he experimented with funk grooves on 1972’s On the Corner and in some of his later bands. However, his work intrigued a sizable segment of rock’s more ambitious fans in a way that no other serious jazz figure had ever done – and not retroactively but while he was alive and making some of his most challenging music. In particular, the boldly experimental soundscapes of Davis’ 1969 album Bitches Brew spoke to the sensibilities of rock fans who’d been digesting the Grateful Dead’s expansive improvisations. Davis’ was acutely attuned to his environment and he once remarked, “We play what the day recommends.”
Davis’ exposure to the rock audience owes much to concert promoter Bill Graham, who booked Davis at his Fillmore auditoriums. Graham figured that his open-eared audiences would make the connection between venturesome San Francisco jam bands (like the Dead, Quicksilver and Santana) and Davis’ free-flowing ensemble. This exposure allowed Davis to cross over without compromise, and he actually recorded albums – Miles Davis at Fillmore and Black Beauty – at Graham’s Fillmore East and Fillmore West, respectively.
It is important to note that Miles Davis did not make jazz-rock – a briefly popular hybrid in the late Sixties and early Seventies, whose chief proponents were Blood, Sweat & Tears and Chicago. Davis played jazz, period. But his forward-thinking sensibility, insatiably curious muse and eagerness to move music into uncharted realms made him a contemporary musician, irrespective of genre. The bond he established with rock’s more inquisitive listeners at that time carried through to his death in 1991. Moreover, his career-long example of pushing the boundaries has influenced many of rock’s leading lights, particularly those who eschewed the status quo for musical explorations on rock’s more experimental tip. He possessed one of the most gifted and curious minds in music history, and compromise was not in his blood.
As a French jazz magazine wrote of him in 1960: “The behavior of Miles Davis is not that of an ordinary star. It is that of a man who has decided to live without hypocrisy.”
Born in the St. Louis suburb of Alton, Illinois, Miles Dewey Davis III was the son of a successful dental surgeon. His mother played piano and violin, and Miles received tutoring on the trumpet. In 1942, he joined Eddie Randle’s Blue Devils, with whom he played throughout high school. Davis first heard modern jazz at 18 when Billy Eckstine’s ensemble, which included saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, came to town for a two-week residency. Davis wound up replacing a trumpet player in the band who had taken ill. He accompanied Eckstine back to New York, where he studied classical music at Juilliard by day and played jazz clubs at night. Davis joined Parker’s quintet in 1945 and made his recording debut as a bandleader two years later.
Jazz writer Nat Hentoff identified the fundamental elements of Davis’ style: “spareness, evocative use of space, intense lyricism, and deep fire underneath it all.” The innovations he brought to jazz in the second half of the 20th century were profound in their scope and consequences. With The Birth of the Cool, a series of sessions cut with a nine-piece band in 1949 and 1950, Davis tempered bop’s heat with a more supple, serene lyricism. As Robert Palmer wrote many years later, “[The Birth of the Cool] initiated a still-evolving exchange between of ideas between jazz and European classical music.”
Davis changed courses in the mid-Fifties with Walkin’, a bluesier, more muscular effort (recorded during a stint with Prestige Records) that ushered in the hard-bop era. He’d formed a legendary quintet that included pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers, drummer Philly Joe Jones and a young saxophonist named John Coltrane. They went on to record other milestones, such as Round About Midnight, which inaugurated Davis’ 30-year association with Columbia Records. Davis followed this with the ambitious Miles Ahead (1957), credited to “Miles Davis + 19.” This big-band session renewed Davis’ fruitful partnership with arranger Gil Evans (who’d also worked on The Birth of the Cool). Theirs has been called “the most important relationship ever forged between a jazz soloist and an arranger.”
The innovations came fast and furious as the Fifties segued into the Sixties. Working with a sextet that included pianist Bill Evans and saxophonists Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley, Davis recorded the understated masterpiece Kind of Blue in the spring of 1959. The musicians soloed in uncluttered settings typified by “melodic rather than harmonic variation,” in Davis’ words. The album included the classic originals “All Blues,” “So What” and “Flamenco Sketches.” Sketches of Spain, a large-scale orchestral project, appeared a year later. It was the apex in a series of expressive collaborations between Davis and arranger/composer Gil Evans. Both albums highlighted Davis’ painterly approach to horn-playing. Unsurprisingly, painting would later become another mode of self-expression for Davis.
During the Sixties, Davis led a stellar quintet that included tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter and drumming prodigy Tony Williams (who was only 17 when he first performed with Davis). Their many notable works included E.S.P. (1965), Miles Smiles (1967), Sorcerer (1967), Nefertiti (1968) and Filles de Kilimanjaro (1969). Davis would then move in a more electric direction, occasioning the same sort of controversy in the jazz world that Bob Dylan’s embrace of amplified instruments had generated in the folk world at mid-decade. His first step in this direction was the atmospheric In a Silent Way (1969), which saw him joined by guitarist John McLaughlin, and keyboardists Chick Corea and Joe Zawinul. This album pointed the way to Davis’ groundbreaking Bitches Brew, one of the most challenging and innovative musical works ever made.
Enamored of the rock styles of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, Davis had expressed a desire to form “the world’s baddest rock band.” He didn’t literally do that, but he did bring a fiery, rock-inspired sensibility to Bitches Brew (1969), A Tribute To Jack Johnson (1971) and Live-Evil (1971). During this highly productive period he employed musicians who would go on to become household names in the Seventies: Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter (who cofounded Weather Report); Chick Corea (who’d make waves with Return to Forever); Billy Cobham and John McLaughlin (who’d form Mahavishnu Orchestra); Harvey Brooks (from the rock group Electric Flag); Lenny White (who’d join Larry Coryell’s fusion band, the Eleventh House); Ron Carter and Airto Moreira (key figures on the CTI label’s new-wave jazz roster); and others. Davis wasn’t so much leading a band as conducting an extended seminar on new directions for jazz, and its impact would be felt for decades.
Davis’ infatuation with rock and funk peaked with 1972’s On the Corner. He drew from numerous influences, including Sly Stone, Parliament/Funkadelic, James Brown, German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and British composer/arranger Paul Buckmaster. Thereafter, he kept two or three electric guitarists in his band, and the music turned even more spectral and extreme. Such albums as Agharta, Pangaea and Dark Magus made for difficult listening. They subsequently influenced movements on rock’s fringe like no wave, industrial, electronica, punk-funk and grunge. Those albums also reflected Davis’ turmoil during one of the darker periods in his life. He actually dropped out of the music scene from 1975 to 1981. Davis resurfaced in 1981 with The Man With the Horn. It was followed by the double live album We Want Miles and Star People, which was Davis’ most blues-minded recording in many years. He closed out his 30-year run on Columbia Records with the albums Decoy (1984) and You’re Under Arrest (1985). The latter included Davis’ interpretations of Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” and Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time.”
Davis’ comeback continued with a move to Warner Bros. in the mid-Eighties, where he continued to push the envelope with such albums as Tutu (1986) and Music From Siesta (1987). In 1989, Davis published a frank, uncensored memoir entitled Miles: The Autobiography, which made numerous best-seller lists. Davis’ final studio project, Doo Bop, found him collaborating with Brooklyn rapper Easy Mo Bee on a synthesis of hip-hop, doo-wop and be-bop. Unsurprisingly, he was still forging new connections and avenues of expression until the very end of his life.
Davis succumbed to a combination of pneumonia, stroke and respiratory failure at a hospital in Santa Monica, California, in 1991. In the flood of tributes that followed, Vernon Reid (of Living Colour) perhaps stated it best: “Miles shares with a handful of artists of this century the ineffable mystery of creation at its highest level.”
In Davis’ own words, “The way you change and help music is by tryin’ to invent new ways to play.” For nearly 50 years, Miles Davis did just that.
4/18/2014
T-Bone Walker - Goin' to Chicago
Aaron Thibeaux Walker aka T-Bone Walker (vocals, guitar; born May 28, 1910, died March 16, 1975)
It was T-Bone Walker, B.B. King once said, who “really started me to want to play the blues. I can still hear T-Bone in my mind today, from that first record I heard, ‘Stormy Monday.’ He was the first electric guitar player I heard on record. He made me so that I knew I just had to go out and get an electric guitar.”
T-Bone Walker was born Aaron Thibeaux Walker to musical parents on May 28, 1910, in Linden, Texas. When he was two, his family moved to Dallas. Through his church choir and his street-singing stepfather, Marco Washington, he became interested in music. He got his nickname T-Bone at an early age. His mother called him T-Bow, a shortening of his middle name Thibeaux, and it soon became T-Bone. By the time he was 10, T-Bone was accompanying his stepfather at drive-in soft-drink stands. Around the same time, he became the “lead boy” for Blind Lemon Jefferson, who was the most popular and influential country bluesman of the Twenties. From 1920 to 1923, Walker would lead Jefferson down Texas streets.
While still in his teens, Walker, who was self-taught on guitar, banjo and ukulele, toured with a medicine show and with blues singer Ida Cox. In 1929, he began recording acoustic country blues under the name Oak Cliff T-Bone. In 1934, he moved to Los Angeles. He said he began playing amplified guitar shortly thereafter. If that is true, then he was one of the first major guitarists to go electric. And, indeed, he pioneered the electric guitar sound that helped create the blues and thus influence all popular music that followed.
In 1939, Walker joined Les Hite’s Cotton Club Orchestra. It was a rough-and-tumble big band whose alumni included Dizzy Gillespie and Lionel Hampton. With the Hite band, Walker perfected his flowing, hornlike guitar licks and his mellow blues vocals. Over the next decade, he worked with both small groups and big bands, on the West Coast and on tours through the Midwest and all the way to New York.
He first recorded as T-Bone Walker in 1942, and the following year he had his biggest hit, “Call It Stormy Monday,” which as “Stormy Monday Blues” or just “Stormy Monday” has become one of the most frequently covered blues songs. Walker recorded for Black & White Records, the label that released “Stormy Monday,” until 1947. He recorded other classics for the label, including “T-Bone Shuffle” and “West Side Lady.”
In 1950, Walker signed with Imperial Records, where he remained until 1954. At Imperial, he cut “The Hustle Is On,” “Cold Cold Feeling,” “Blue Moon,” “Vida Lee” and “Party Girl.” He then moved on to Atlantic Records. He recorded sessions in 1955, 1956 and 1959, and they were finally released in 1960 on the album T-Bone Blues.
Walker’s career began to slow down during the Sixties. He made an appearance at the American Folk Blues Festival in 1962, performing with Memphis Slim and Willie Dixon, among others. In 1968, he released the album I Want a Little Girl. And, in 1971, he won the Grammy Award for Best Ethic or Traditional Folk Recording for the album Good Feelin’.
In 1973, Walker climaxed his recording career with the double album Very Rare. It was produced by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and they assembled an all-star cast of jazz veterans and young studio pros to honor the great bluesman.
The following year, Walker became inactive after he was hospitalized with bronchial pneumonia. He died from the disease on March 16, 1975.
T-Bone Walker’s single-string solos influenced blues players like B.B. King and such rockers as Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan. As Pete Welding wrote: “T-Bone Walker is the fundamental source of the modern urban style of playing and singing the blues. The blues was different before he came onto the scene, and it hasn’t been the same since.”
London. Nov 30th,1966. Jazz at Philharmonic are: Dizzy Gillespie, Teddy Wilson, Louis Bellson, Clark Terry, Coleman Hawkins, Zoot Sims, Jimmy Moody, Benny Carter and Bob Cranshaw.
It was T-Bone Walker, B.B. King once said, who “really started me to want to play the blues. I can still hear T-Bone in my mind today, from that first record I heard, ‘Stormy Monday.’ He was the first electric guitar player I heard on record. He made me so that I knew I just had to go out and get an electric guitar.”
T-Bone Walker was born Aaron Thibeaux Walker to musical parents on May 28, 1910, in Linden, Texas. When he was two, his family moved to Dallas. Through his church choir and his street-singing stepfather, Marco Washington, he became interested in music. He got his nickname T-Bone at an early age. His mother called him T-Bow, a shortening of his middle name Thibeaux, and it soon became T-Bone. By the time he was 10, T-Bone was accompanying his stepfather at drive-in soft-drink stands. Around the same time, he became the “lead boy” for Blind Lemon Jefferson, who was the most popular and influential country bluesman of the Twenties. From 1920 to 1923, Walker would lead Jefferson down Texas streets.
While still in his teens, Walker, who was self-taught on guitar, banjo and ukulele, toured with a medicine show and with blues singer Ida Cox. In 1929, he began recording acoustic country blues under the name Oak Cliff T-Bone. In 1934, he moved to Los Angeles. He said he began playing amplified guitar shortly thereafter. If that is true, then he was one of the first major guitarists to go electric. And, indeed, he pioneered the electric guitar sound that helped create the blues and thus influence all popular music that followed.
In 1939, Walker joined Les Hite’s Cotton Club Orchestra. It was a rough-and-tumble big band whose alumni included Dizzy Gillespie and Lionel Hampton. With the Hite band, Walker perfected his flowing, hornlike guitar licks and his mellow blues vocals. Over the next decade, he worked with both small groups and big bands, on the West Coast and on tours through the Midwest and all the way to New York.
He first recorded as T-Bone Walker in 1942, and the following year he had his biggest hit, “Call It Stormy Monday,” which as “Stormy Monday Blues” or just “Stormy Monday” has become one of the most frequently covered blues songs. Walker recorded for Black & White Records, the label that released “Stormy Monday,” until 1947. He recorded other classics for the label, including “T-Bone Shuffle” and “West Side Lady.”
In 1950, Walker signed with Imperial Records, where he remained until 1954. At Imperial, he cut “The Hustle Is On,” “Cold Cold Feeling,” “Blue Moon,” “Vida Lee” and “Party Girl.” He then moved on to Atlantic Records. He recorded sessions in 1955, 1956 and 1959, and they were finally released in 1960 on the album T-Bone Blues.
Walker’s career began to slow down during the Sixties. He made an appearance at the American Folk Blues Festival in 1962, performing with Memphis Slim and Willie Dixon, among others. In 1968, he released the album I Want a Little Girl. And, in 1971, he won the Grammy Award for Best Ethic or Traditional Folk Recording for the album Good Feelin’.
In 1973, Walker climaxed his recording career with the double album Very Rare. It was produced by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and they assembled an all-star cast of jazz veterans and young studio pros to honor the great bluesman.
The following year, Walker became inactive after he was hospitalized with bronchial pneumonia. He died from the disease on March 16, 1975.
T-Bone Walker’s single-string solos influenced blues players like B.B. King and such rockers as Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan. As Pete Welding wrote: “T-Bone Walker is the fundamental source of the modern urban style of playing and singing the blues. The blues was different before he came onto the scene, and it hasn’t been the same since.”
London. Nov 30th,1966. Jazz at Philharmonic are: Dizzy Gillespie, Teddy Wilson, Louis Bellson, Clark Terry, Coleman Hawkins, Zoot Sims, Jimmy Moody, Benny Carter and Bob Cranshaw.
Bend It, Charge It, Dunk It: Graphene, the Material of Tomorrow
Source: Disruptions NYT NOW
Bend It, Charge It, Dunk It: Graphene, the Material of Tomorrow
By NICK BILTON
April 13, 2014, 11:00 am
I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. No, fans of “The Graduate,” the word isn’t “plastics.”
It’s “graphene.”
Graphene is the strongest, thinnest material known to exist. A form of carbon, it can conduct electricity and heat better than anything else. And get ready for this: It is not only the hardest material in the world,
but also one of the most pliable.
Only a single atom thick, it has been called the wonder material. Graphene could change the electronics industry, ushering in flexible devices, supercharged quantum computers, electronic clothing and computers that can interface with the cells in your body.
While the material was discovered a decade ago, it started to gain attention in 2010 when two physicists at the University of Manchester were awarded the Nobel Prize for their experiments with it. More recently, researchers have zeroed in on how to commercially produce graphene.
The American Chemical Society said in 2012 that graphene was discovered to be 200 times stronger than steel and so thin that a single ounce of it could cover 28 football fields. Chinese scientists have created
a graphene aerogel, an ultralight material derived from a gel, that is one-seventh the weight of air. A cubic inch of the material could balance on one blade of grass.
“Graphene is one of the few materials in the world that is transparent, conductive and flexible — all at the same time,” said Dr. Aravind Vijayaraghavan, a lecturer at the University of Manchester. “All of these properties together are extremely rare to find in one material.”
So what do you do with graphene? Physicists and researchers say that we will soon be able to make electronics that are thinner, faster and cheaper than anything based on silicon, with the option of making
them clear and flexible. Long-lasting batteries that can be submerged in water are another possibility.
In 2011, researchers at Northwestern University built a battery that incorporated graphene and silicon, which the university said could lead to a cellphone that “stayed charged for more than a week and recharged
in just 15 minutes.” In 2012, the American Chemical Society said that advancements in graphene were leading to touch-screen electronics that “could make cellphones as thin as a piece of paper and foldable
enough to slip into a pocket.”
Dr. Vijayaraghavan is building an array of sensors out of graphene — including gas sensors, biosensors and light sensors — that are far smaller than what has come before.
And last week, researchers at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, working with Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea, said that Samsung had figured out how to create high-quality graphene
on silicon wafers, which could be used for the production of graphene transistors. Samsung said in a statement that these advancements meant it could start making “flexible displays, wearables and other
next-generation electronic devices.”
Sebastian Anthony, a reporter at Extreme Tech, said that Samsung’s breakthrough could end up being the “holy grail of commercial graphene production.”
Samsung is not the only company working to develop graphene. Researchers at IBM, Nokia and SanDisk have been experimenting with the material to create sensors, transistors and memory storage.
When these electronics finally hit store shelves, they could look and feel like nothing we’ve ever seen. James Hone, a professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University, said research in his lab led to the discovery that graphene could stretch by 20 percent while still remaining able to conduct electricity. “You know what else you can stretch by 20 percent? Rubber,” he said. “In comparison, silicon, which is in today’s
electronics, can only stretch by 1 percent before it cracks.” He continued: “That’s just one of the crazy things about this material — there’s really nothing else quite like it.” The real kicker? Graphene is inexpensive. If you think of something in today’s electronics industry, it can most likely be made better, smaller and cheaper with graphene.
Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley made graphene speakers last year that delivered sound at quality equal to or better than a pair of commercial Sennheiser earphones. And they were much smaller.
Another fascinating aspect of graphene is its ability to be submerged in liquids without oxidizing, unlike other conductive materials. As a result, Dr. Vijayaraghavan said, graphene research is leading to experiments where electronics can integrate with biological systems.
In other words, you could have a graphene gadget implanted in you that could read your nervous system or talk to your cells. But while researchers believe graphene will be used in nextgeneration gadgets, there are entire industries that build electronics using traditional silicon chips and transistors, and they could be slow to
adopt graphene counterparts.
If that is the case, graphene might end up being used in other industries before it becomes part of electronics. Last year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation paid for the development of a graphenebased condom that is thin, light and impenetrable. Carmakers are exploring building electronic cars with bodies made of graphene that are not only protective, but act as solar panels that charge the car’s battery. Airline makers also hope to build planes out of graphene. If all that isn’t enough, an international team of researchers based
at M.I.T. has performed tests that could lead to the creation of quantum computers, which would be a big market of computing in the future.
So forget plastics. There’s a great future in graphene. Think about it.
A version of this article appears in print on 04/14/2014, on page B6 of the NewYork edition
with the headline: Bend, Charge or Dunk It: Graphene, Ever Versatile.
Bend It, Charge It, Dunk It: Graphene, the Material of Tomorrow
By NICK BILTON
April 13, 2014, 11:00 am
I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. No, fans of “The Graduate,” the word isn’t “plastics.”
It’s “graphene.”
Graphene is the strongest, thinnest material known to exist. A form of carbon, it can conduct electricity and heat better than anything else. And get ready for this: It is not only the hardest material in the world,
but also one of the most pliable.
Only a single atom thick, it has been called the wonder material. Graphene could change the electronics industry, ushering in flexible devices, supercharged quantum computers, electronic clothing and computers that can interface with the cells in your body.
While the material was discovered a decade ago, it started to gain attention in 2010 when two physicists at the University of Manchester were awarded the Nobel Prize for their experiments with it. More recently, researchers have zeroed in on how to commercially produce graphene.
The American Chemical Society said in 2012 that graphene was discovered to be 200 times stronger than steel and so thin that a single ounce of it could cover 28 football fields. Chinese scientists have created
a graphene aerogel, an ultralight material derived from a gel, that is one-seventh the weight of air. A cubic inch of the material could balance on one blade of grass.
“Graphene is one of the few materials in the world that is transparent, conductive and flexible — all at the same time,” said Dr. Aravind Vijayaraghavan, a lecturer at the University of Manchester. “All of these properties together are extremely rare to find in one material.”
So what do you do with graphene? Physicists and researchers say that we will soon be able to make electronics that are thinner, faster and cheaper than anything based on silicon, with the option of making
them clear and flexible. Long-lasting batteries that can be submerged in water are another possibility.
In 2011, researchers at Northwestern University built a battery that incorporated graphene and silicon, which the university said could lead to a cellphone that “stayed charged for more than a week and recharged
in just 15 minutes.” In 2012, the American Chemical Society said that advancements in graphene were leading to touch-screen electronics that “could make cellphones as thin as a piece of paper and foldable
enough to slip into a pocket.”
Dr. Vijayaraghavan is building an array of sensors out of graphene — including gas sensors, biosensors and light sensors — that are far smaller than what has come before.
And last week, researchers at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, working with Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea, said that Samsung had figured out how to create high-quality graphene
on silicon wafers, which could be used for the production of graphene transistors. Samsung said in a statement that these advancements meant it could start making “flexible displays, wearables and other
next-generation electronic devices.”
Sebastian Anthony, a reporter at Extreme Tech, said that Samsung’s breakthrough could end up being the “holy grail of commercial graphene production.”
Samsung is not the only company working to develop graphene. Researchers at IBM, Nokia and SanDisk have been experimenting with the material to create sensors, transistors and memory storage.
When these electronics finally hit store shelves, they could look and feel like nothing we’ve ever seen. James Hone, a professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University, said research in his lab led to the discovery that graphene could stretch by 20 percent while still remaining able to conduct electricity. “You know what else you can stretch by 20 percent? Rubber,” he said. “In comparison, silicon, which is in today’s
electronics, can only stretch by 1 percent before it cracks.” He continued: “That’s just one of the crazy things about this material — there’s really nothing else quite like it.” The real kicker? Graphene is inexpensive. If you think of something in today’s electronics industry, it can most likely be made better, smaller and cheaper with graphene.
Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley made graphene speakers last year that delivered sound at quality equal to or better than a pair of commercial Sennheiser earphones. And they were much smaller.
Another fascinating aspect of graphene is its ability to be submerged in liquids without oxidizing, unlike other conductive materials. As a result, Dr. Vijayaraghavan said, graphene research is leading to experiments where electronics can integrate with biological systems.
In other words, you could have a graphene gadget implanted in you that could read your nervous system or talk to your cells. But while researchers believe graphene will be used in nextgeneration gadgets, there are entire industries that build electronics using traditional silicon chips and transistors, and they could be slow to
adopt graphene counterparts.
If that is the case, graphene might end up being used in other industries before it becomes part of electronics. Last year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation paid for the development of a graphenebased condom that is thin, light and impenetrable. Carmakers are exploring building electronic cars with bodies made of graphene that are not only protective, but act as solar panels that charge the car’s battery. Airline makers also hope to build planes out of graphene. If all that isn’t enough, an international team of researchers based
at M.I.T. has performed tests that could lead to the creation of quantum computers, which would be a big market of computing in the future.
So forget plastics. There’s a great future in graphene. Think about it.
A version of this article appears in print on 04/14/2014, on page B6 of the NewYork edition
with the headline: Bend, Charge or Dunk It: Graphene, Ever Versatile.
4/13/2014
Miles Davis - All Blues
The Official Miles Davis Web Site
Miles Davis is one of the key figures in the history of jazz, and his place in vanguard of that pantheon is secure. His induction as a performer into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a subtler and less obvious matter. Davis never played rock or rhythm & blues, though he experimented with funk grooves on 1972’s On the Corner and in some of his later bands. However, his work intrigued a sizable segment of rock’s more ambitious fans in a way that no other serious jazz figure had ever done – and not retroactively but while he was alive and making some of his most challenging music. In particular, the boldly experimental soundscapes of Davis’ 1969 album Bitches Brew spoke to the sensibilities of rock fans who’d been digesting the Grateful Dead’s expansive improvisations. Davis’ was acutely attuned to his environment and he once remarked, “We play what the day recommends.”
Davis’ exposure to the rock audience owes much to concert promoter Bill Graham, who booked Davis at his Fillmore auditoriums. Graham figured that his open-eared audiences would make the connection between venturesome San Francisco jam bands (like the Dead, Quicksilver and Santana) and Davis’ free-flowing ensemble. This exposure allowed Davis to cross over without compromise, and he actually recorded albums – Miles Davis at Fillmore and Black Beauty – at Graham’s Fillmore East and Fillmore West, respectively.
It is important to note that Miles Davis did not make jazz-rock – a briefly popular hybrid in the late Sixties and early Seventies, whose chief proponents were Blood, Sweat & Tears and Chicago. Davis played jazz, period. But his forward-thinking sensibility, insatiably curious muse and eagerness to move music into uncharted realms made him a contemporary musician, irrespective of genre. The bond he established with rock’s more inquisitive listeners at that time carried through to his death in 1991. Moreover, his career-long example of pushing the boundaries has influenced many of rock’s leading lights, particularly those who eschewed the status quo for musical explorations on rock’s more experimental tip. He possessed one of the most gifted and curious minds in music history, and compromise was not in his blood.
As a French jazz magazine wrote of him in 1960: “The behavior of Miles Davis is not that of an ordinary star. It is that of a man who has decided to live without hypocrisy.”
Born in the St. Louis suburb of Alton, Illinois, Miles Dewey Davis III was the son of a successful dental surgeon. His mother played piano and violin, and Miles received tutoring on the trumpet. In 1942, he joined Eddie Randle’s Blue Devils, with whom he played throughout high school. Davis first heard modern jazz at 18 when Billy Eckstine’s ensemble, which included saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, came to town for a two-week residency. Davis wound up replacing a trumpet player in the band who had taken ill. He accompanied Eckstine back to New York, where he studied classical music at Juilliard by day and played jazz clubs at night. Davis joined Parker’s quintet in 1945 and made his recording debut as a bandleader two years later.
Jazz writer Nat Hentoff identified the fundamental elements of Davis’ style: “spareness, evocative use of space, intense lyricism, and deep fire underneath it all.” The innovations he brought to jazz in the second half of the 20th century were profound in their scope and consequences. With The Birth of the Cool, a series of sessions cut with a nine-piece band in 1949 and 1950, Davis tempered bop’s heat with a more supple, serene lyricism. As Robert Palmer wrote many years later, “[The Birth of the Cool] initiated a still-evolving exchange between of ideas between jazz and European classical music.”
Davis changed courses in the mid-Fifties with Walkin’, a bluesier, more muscular effort (recorded during a stint with Prestige Records) that ushered in the hard-bop era. He’d formed a legendary quintet that included pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers, drummer Philly Joe Jones and a young saxophonist named John Coltrane. They went on to record other milestones, such as Round About Midnight, which inaugurated Davis’ 30-year association with Columbia Records. Davis followed this with the ambitious Miles Ahead (1957), credited to “Miles Davis + 19.” This big-band session renewed Davis’ fruitful partnership with arranger Gil Evans (who’d also worked on The Birth of the Cool). Theirs has been called “the most important relationship ever forged between a jazz soloist and an arranger.”
The innovations came fast and furious as the Fifties segued into the Sixties. Working with a sextet that included pianist Bill Evans and saxophonists Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley, Davis recorded the understated masterpiece Kind of Blue in the spring of 1959. The musicians soloed in uncluttered settings typified by “melodic rather than harmonic variation,” in Davis’ words. The album included the classic originals “All Blues,” “So What” and “Flamenco Sketches.” Sketches of Spain, a large-scale orchestral project, appeared a year later. It was the apex in a series of expressive collaborations between Davis and arranger/composer Gil Evans. Both albums highlighted Davis’ painterly approach to horn-playing. Unsurprisingly, painting would later become another mode of self-expression for Davis.
During the Sixties, Davis led a stellar quintet that included tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter and drumming prodigy Tony Williams (who was only 17 when he first performed with Davis). Their many notable works included E.S.P. (1965), Miles Smiles (1967), Sorcerer (1967), Nefertiti (1968) and Filles de Kilimanjaro (1969). Davis would then move in a more electric direction, occasioning the same sort of controversy in the jazz world that Bob Dylan’s embrace of amplified instruments had generated in the folk world at mid-decade. His first step in this direction was the atmospheric In a Silent Way (1969), which saw him joined by guitarist John McLaughlin, and keyboardists Chick Corea and Joe Zawinul. This album pointed the way to Davis’ groundbreaking Bitches Brew, one of the most challenging and innovative musical works ever made.
Enamored of the rock styles of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, Davis had expressed a desire to form “the world’s baddest rock band.” He didn’t literally do that, but he did bring a fiery, rock-inspired sensibility to Bitches Brew (1969), A Tribute To Jack Johnson (1971) and Live-Evil (1971). During this highly productive period he employed musicians who would go on to become household names in the Seventies: Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter (who cofounded Weather Report); Chick Corea (who’d make waves with Return to Forever); Billy Cobham and John McLaughlin (who’d form Mahavishnu Orchestra); Harvey Brooks (from the rock group Electric Flag); Lenny White (who’d join Larry Coryell’s fusion band, the Eleventh House); Ron Carter and Airto Moreira (key figures on the CTI label’s new-wave jazz roster); and others. Davis wasn’t so much leading a band as conducting an extended seminar on new directions for jazz, and its impact would be felt for decades.
Davis’ infatuation with rock and funk peaked with 1972’s On the Corner. He drew from numerous influences, including Sly Stone, Parliament/Funkadelic, James Brown, German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and British composer/arranger Paul Buckmaster. Thereafter, he kept two or three electric guitarists in his band, and the music turned even more spectral and extreme. Such albums as Agharta, Pangaea and Dark Magus made for difficult listening. They subsequently influenced movements on rock’s fringe like no wave, industrial, electronica, punk-funk and grunge. Those albums also reflected Davis’ turmoil during one of the darker periods in his life. He actually dropped out of the music scene from 1975 to 1981. Davis resurfaced in 1981 with The Man With the Horn. It was followed by the double live album We Want Miles and Star People, which was Davis’ most blues-minded recording in many years. He closed out his 30-year run on Columbia Records with the albums Decoy (1984) and You’re Under Arrest (1985). The latter included Davis’ interpretations of Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” and Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time.”
Davis’ comeback continued with a move to Warner Bros. in the mid-Eighties, where he continued to push the envelope with such albums as Tutu (1986) and Music From Siesta (1987). In 1989, Davis published a frank, uncensored memoir entitled Miles: The Autobiography, which made numerous best-seller lists. Davis’ final studio project, Doo Bop, found him collaborating with Brooklyn rapper Easy Mo Bee on a synthesis of hip-hop, doo-wop and be-bop. Unsurprisingly, he was still forging new connections and avenues of expression until the very end of his life.
Davis succumbed to a combination of pneumonia, stroke and respiratory failure at a hospital in Santa Monica, California, in 1991. In the flood of tributes that followed, Vernon Reid (of Living Colour) perhaps stated it best: “Miles shares with a handful of artists of this century the ineffable mystery of creation at its highest level.”
In Davis’ own words, “The way you change and help music is by tryin’ to invent new ways to play.” For nearly 50 years, Miles Davis did just that.
Miles Davis Quintet
Teatro dell'Arte, Milan, Italy October 11 1964
Personnel:
Miles Davis: trumpet
Wayne Shorter: tenor sax
Herbie Hancock: piano
Ron Carter: bass
Tony Williams: drums
Miles Davis is one of the key figures in the history of jazz, and his place in vanguard of that pantheon is secure. His induction as a performer into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a subtler and less obvious matter. Davis never played rock or rhythm & blues, though he experimented with funk grooves on 1972’s On the Corner and in some of his later bands. However, his work intrigued a sizable segment of rock’s more ambitious fans in a way that no other serious jazz figure had ever done – and not retroactively but while he was alive and making some of his most challenging music. In particular, the boldly experimental soundscapes of Davis’ 1969 album Bitches Brew spoke to the sensibilities of rock fans who’d been digesting the Grateful Dead’s expansive improvisations. Davis’ was acutely attuned to his environment and he once remarked, “We play what the day recommends.”
Davis’ exposure to the rock audience owes much to concert promoter Bill Graham, who booked Davis at his Fillmore auditoriums. Graham figured that his open-eared audiences would make the connection between venturesome San Francisco jam bands (like the Dead, Quicksilver and Santana) and Davis’ free-flowing ensemble. This exposure allowed Davis to cross over without compromise, and he actually recorded albums – Miles Davis at Fillmore and Black Beauty – at Graham’s Fillmore East and Fillmore West, respectively.
It is important to note that Miles Davis did not make jazz-rock – a briefly popular hybrid in the late Sixties and early Seventies, whose chief proponents were Blood, Sweat & Tears and Chicago. Davis played jazz, period. But his forward-thinking sensibility, insatiably curious muse and eagerness to move music into uncharted realms made him a contemporary musician, irrespective of genre. The bond he established with rock’s more inquisitive listeners at that time carried through to his death in 1991. Moreover, his career-long example of pushing the boundaries has influenced many of rock’s leading lights, particularly those who eschewed the status quo for musical explorations on rock’s more experimental tip. He possessed one of the most gifted and curious minds in music history, and compromise was not in his blood.
As a French jazz magazine wrote of him in 1960: “The behavior of Miles Davis is not that of an ordinary star. It is that of a man who has decided to live without hypocrisy.”
Born in the St. Louis suburb of Alton, Illinois, Miles Dewey Davis III was the son of a successful dental surgeon. His mother played piano and violin, and Miles received tutoring on the trumpet. In 1942, he joined Eddie Randle’s Blue Devils, with whom he played throughout high school. Davis first heard modern jazz at 18 when Billy Eckstine’s ensemble, which included saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, came to town for a two-week residency. Davis wound up replacing a trumpet player in the band who had taken ill. He accompanied Eckstine back to New York, where he studied classical music at Juilliard by day and played jazz clubs at night. Davis joined Parker’s quintet in 1945 and made his recording debut as a bandleader two years later.
Jazz writer Nat Hentoff identified the fundamental elements of Davis’ style: “spareness, evocative use of space, intense lyricism, and deep fire underneath it all.” The innovations he brought to jazz in the second half of the 20th century were profound in their scope and consequences. With The Birth of the Cool, a series of sessions cut with a nine-piece band in 1949 and 1950, Davis tempered bop’s heat with a more supple, serene lyricism. As Robert Palmer wrote many years later, “[The Birth of the Cool] initiated a still-evolving exchange between of ideas between jazz and European classical music.”
Davis changed courses in the mid-Fifties with Walkin’, a bluesier, more muscular effort (recorded during a stint with Prestige Records) that ushered in the hard-bop era. He’d formed a legendary quintet that included pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers, drummer Philly Joe Jones and a young saxophonist named John Coltrane. They went on to record other milestones, such as Round About Midnight, which inaugurated Davis’ 30-year association with Columbia Records. Davis followed this with the ambitious Miles Ahead (1957), credited to “Miles Davis + 19.” This big-band session renewed Davis’ fruitful partnership with arranger Gil Evans (who’d also worked on The Birth of the Cool). Theirs has been called “the most important relationship ever forged between a jazz soloist and an arranger.”
The innovations came fast and furious as the Fifties segued into the Sixties. Working with a sextet that included pianist Bill Evans and saxophonists Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley, Davis recorded the understated masterpiece Kind of Blue in the spring of 1959. The musicians soloed in uncluttered settings typified by “melodic rather than harmonic variation,” in Davis’ words. The album included the classic originals “All Blues,” “So What” and “Flamenco Sketches.” Sketches of Spain, a large-scale orchestral project, appeared a year later. It was the apex in a series of expressive collaborations between Davis and arranger/composer Gil Evans. Both albums highlighted Davis’ painterly approach to horn-playing. Unsurprisingly, painting would later become another mode of self-expression for Davis.
During the Sixties, Davis led a stellar quintet that included tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter and drumming prodigy Tony Williams (who was only 17 when he first performed with Davis). Their many notable works included E.S.P. (1965), Miles Smiles (1967), Sorcerer (1967), Nefertiti (1968) and Filles de Kilimanjaro (1969). Davis would then move in a more electric direction, occasioning the same sort of controversy in the jazz world that Bob Dylan’s embrace of amplified instruments had generated in the folk world at mid-decade. His first step in this direction was the atmospheric In a Silent Way (1969), which saw him joined by guitarist John McLaughlin, and keyboardists Chick Corea and Joe Zawinul. This album pointed the way to Davis’ groundbreaking Bitches Brew, one of the most challenging and innovative musical works ever made.
Enamored of the rock styles of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, Davis had expressed a desire to form “the world’s baddest rock band.” He didn’t literally do that, but he did bring a fiery, rock-inspired sensibility to Bitches Brew (1969), A Tribute To Jack Johnson (1971) and Live-Evil (1971). During this highly productive period he employed musicians who would go on to become household names in the Seventies: Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter (who cofounded Weather Report); Chick Corea (who’d make waves with Return to Forever); Billy Cobham and John McLaughlin (who’d form Mahavishnu Orchestra); Harvey Brooks (from the rock group Electric Flag); Lenny White (who’d join Larry Coryell’s fusion band, the Eleventh House); Ron Carter and Airto Moreira (key figures on the CTI label’s new-wave jazz roster); and others. Davis wasn’t so much leading a band as conducting an extended seminar on new directions for jazz, and its impact would be felt for decades.
Davis’ infatuation with rock and funk peaked with 1972’s On the Corner. He drew from numerous influences, including Sly Stone, Parliament/Funkadelic, James Brown, German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and British composer/arranger Paul Buckmaster. Thereafter, he kept two or three electric guitarists in his band, and the music turned even more spectral and extreme. Such albums as Agharta, Pangaea and Dark Magus made for difficult listening. They subsequently influenced movements on rock’s fringe like no wave, industrial, electronica, punk-funk and grunge. Those albums also reflected Davis’ turmoil during one of the darker periods in his life. He actually dropped out of the music scene from 1975 to 1981. Davis resurfaced in 1981 with The Man With the Horn. It was followed by the double live album We Want Miles and Star People, which was Davis’ most blues-minded recording in many years. He closed out his 30-year run on Columbia Records with the albums Decoy (1984) and You’re Under Arrest (1985). The latter included Davis’ interpretations of Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” and Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time.”
Davis’ comeback continued with a move to Warner Bros. in the mid-Eighties, where he continued to push the envelope with such albums as Tutu (1986) and Music From Siesta (1987). In 1989, Davis published a frank, uncensored memoir entitled Miles: The Autobiography, which made numerous best-seller lists. Davis’ final studio project, Doo Bop, found him collaborating with Brooklyn rapper Easy Mo Bee on a synthesis of hip-hop, doo-wop and be-bop. Unsurprisingly, he was still forging new connections and avenues of expression until the very end of his life.
Davis succumbed to a combination of pneumonia, stroke and respiratory failure at a hospital in Santa Monica, California, in 1991. In the flood of tributes that followed, Vernon Reid (of Living Colour) perhaps stated it best: “Miles shares with a handful of artists of this century the ineffable mystery of creation at its highest level.”
In Davis’ own words, “The way you change and help music is by tryin’ to invent new ways to play.” For nearly 50 years, Miles Davis did just that.
Teatro dell'Arte, Milan, Italy October 11 1964
Personnel:
Miles Davis: trumpet
Wayne Shorter: tenor sax
Herbie Hancock: piano
Ron Carter: bass
Tony Williams: drums
4/11/2014
T-Bone Walker - Stormy Monday Blues
Aaron Thibeaux Walker aka T-Bone Walker (vocals, guitar; born May 28, 1910, died March 16, 1975)
It was T-Bone Walker, B.B. King once said, who “really started me to want to play the blues. I can still hear T-Bone in my mind today, from that first record I heard, ‘Stormy Monday.’ He was the first electric guitar player I heard on record. He made me so that I knew I just had to go out and get an electric guitar.”
T-Bone Walker was born Aaron Thibeaux Walker to musical parents on May 28, 1910, in Linden, Texas. When he was two, his family moved to Dallas. Through his church choir and his street-singing stepfather, Marco Washington, he became interested in music. He got his nickname T-Bone at an early age. His mother called him T-Bow, a shortening of his middle name Thibeaux, and it soon became T-Bone. By the time he was 10, T-Bone was accompanying his stepfather at drive-in soft-drink stands. Around the same time, he became the “lead boy” for Blind Lemon Jefferson, who was the most popular and influential country bluesman of the Twenties. From 1920 to 1923, Walker would lead Jefferson down Texas streets.
While still in his teens, Walker, who was self-taught on guitar, banjo and ukulele, toured with a medicine show and with blues singer Ida Cox. In 1929, he began recording acoustic country blues under the name Oak Cliff T-Bone. In 1934, he moved to Los Angeles. He said he began playing amplified guitar shortly thereafter. If that is true, then he was one of the first major guitarists to go electric. And, indeed, he pioneered the electric guitar sound that helped create the blues and thus influence all popular music that followed.
In 1939, Walker joined Les Hite’s Cotton Club Orchestra. It was a rough-and-tumble big band whose alumni included Dizzy Gillespie and Lionel Hampton. With the Hite band, Walker perfected his flowing, hornlike guitar licks and his mellow blues vocals. Over the next decade, he worked with both small groups and big bands, on the West Coast and on tours through the Midwest and all the way to New York.
He first recorded as T-Bone Walker in 1942, and the following year he had his biggest hit, “Call It Stormy Monday,” which as “Stormy Monday Blues” or just “Stormy Monday” has become one of the most frequently covered blues songs. Walker recorded for Black & White Records, the label that released “Stormy Monday,” until 1947. He recorded other classics for the label, including “T-Bone Shuffle” and “West Side Lady.”
In 1950, Walker signed with Imperial Records, where he remained until 1954. At Imperial, he cut “The Hustle Is On,” “Cold Cold Feeling,” “Blue Moon,” “Vida Lee” and “Party Girl.” He then moved on to Atlantic Records. He recorded sessions in 1955, 1956 and 1959, and they were finally released in 1960 on the album T-Bone Blues.
Walker’s career began to slow down during the Sixties. He made an appearance at the American Folk Blues Festival in 1962, performing with Memphis Slim and Willie Dixon, among others. In 1968, he released the album I Want a Little Girl. And, in 1971, he won the Grammy Award for Best Ethic or Traditional Folk Recording for the album Good Feelin’.
In 1973, Walker climaxed his recording career with the double album Very Rare. It was produced by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and they assembled an all-star cast of jazz veterans and young studio pros to honor the great bluesman.
The following year, Walker became inactive after he was hospitalized with bronchial pneumonia. He died from the disease on March 16, 1975.
T-Bone Walker’s single-string solos influenced blues players like B.B. King and such rockers as Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan. As Pete Welding wrote: “T-Bone Walker is the fundamental source of the modern urban style of playing and singing the blues. The blues was different before he came onto the scene, and it hasn’t been the same since.”
It was T-Bone Walker, B.B. King once said, who “really started me to want to play the blues. I can still hear T-Bone in my mind today, from that first record I heard, ‘Stormy Monday.’ He was the first electric guitar player I heard on record. He made me so that I knew I just had to go out and get an electric guitar.”
T-Bone Walker was born Aaron Thibeaux Walker to musical parents on May 28, 1910, in Linden, Texas. When he was two, his family moved to Dallas. Through his church choir and his street-singing stepfather, Marco Washington, he became interested in music. He got his nickname T-Bone at an early age. His mother called him T-Bow, a shortening of his middle name Thibeaux, and it soon became T-Bone. By the time he was 10, T-Bone was accompanying his stepfather at drive-in soft-drink stands. Around the same time, he became the “lead boy” for Blind Lemon Jefferson, who was the most popular and influential country bluesman of the Twenties. From 1920 to 1923, Walker would lead Jefferson down Texas streets.
While still in his teens, Walker, who was self-taught on guitar, banjo and ukulele, toured with a medicine show and with blues singer Ida Cox. In 1929, he began recording acoustic country blues under the name Oak Cliff T-Bone. In 1934, he moved to Los Angeles. He said he began playing amplified guitar shortly thereafter. If that is true, then he was one of the first major guitarists to go electric. And, indeed, he pioneered the electric guitar sound that helped create the blues and thus influence all popular music that followed.
In 1939, Walker joined Les Hite’s Cotton Club Orchestra. It was a rough-and-tumble big band whose alumni included Dizzy Gillespie and Lionel Hampton. With the Hite band, Walker perfected his flowing, hornlike guitar licks and his mellow blues vocals. Over the next decade, he worked with both small groups and big bands, on the West Coast and on tours through the Midwest and all the way to New York.
He first recorded as T-Bone Walker in 1942, and the following year he had his biggest hit, “Call It Stormy Monday,” which as “Stormy Monday Blues” or just “Stormy Monday” has become one of the most frequently covered blues songs. Walker recorded for Black & White Records, the label that released “Stormy Monday,” until 1947. He recorded other classics for the label, including “T-Bone Shuffle” and “West Side Lady.”
In 1950, Walker signed with Imperial Records, where he remained until 1954. At Imperial, he cut “The Hustle Is On,” “Cold Cold Feeling,” “Blue Moon,” “Vida Lee” and “Party Girl.” He then moved on to Atlantic Records. He recorded sessions in 1955, 1956 and 1959, and they were finally released in 1960 on the album T-Bone Blues.
Walker’s career began to slow down during the Sixties. He made an appearance at the American Folk Blues Festival in 1962, performing with Memphis Slim and Willie Dixon, among others. In 1968, he released the album I Want a Little Girl. And, in 1971, he won the Grammy Award for Best Ethic or Traditional Folk Recording for the album Good Feelin’.
In 1973, Walker climaxed his recording career with the double album Very Rare. It was produced by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and they assembled an all-star cast of jazz veterans and young studio pros to honor the great bluesman.
The following year, Walker became inactive after he was hospitalized with bronchial pneumonia. He died from the disease on March 16, 1975.
T-Bone Walker’s single-string solos influenced blues players like B.B. King and such rockers as Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan. As Pete Welding wrote: “T-Bone Walker is the fundamental source of the modern urban style of playing and singing the blues. The blues was different before he came onto the scene, and it hasn’t been the same since.”
4/07/2014
Koko Taylor - Ernestine
Grammy Award-winning blues legend Koko Taylor, 80, died on June 3, 2009 in her hometown of Chicago, IL, as a result of complications following her May 19 surgery to correct a gastrointestinal bleed. On May 7, 2009, the critically acclaimed Taylor, known worldwide as the “Queen of the Blues,” won her 29th Blues Music Award (for Traditional Female Blues Artist Of The Year), making her the recipient of more Blues Music Awards than any other artist. In 2004 she received the NEA National Heritage Fellowship Award, which is among the highest honors given to an American artist. Her most recent CD, 2007’s Old School, was nominated for a Grammy (eight of her nine Alligator albums were Grammy-nominated). She won a Grammy in 1984 for her guest appearance on the compilation album Blues Explosion on Atlantic.
Born Cora Walton on a sharecropper’s farm just outside Memphis, TN, on September 28, 1928, Koko, nicknamed for her love of chocolate, fell in love with music at an early age. Inspired by gospel music and WDIA blues disc jockeys B.B. King and Rufus Thomas, Taylor began belting the blues with her five brothers and sisters, accompanying themselves on their homemade instruments. In 1952, Taylor and her soon-to-be-husband, the late Robert “Pops” Taylor, traveled to Chicago with nothing but, in Koko’s words, “thirty-five cents and a box of Ritz Crackers.”
In Chicago, “Pops” worked for a packing company, and Koko cleaned houses. Together they frequented the city’s blues clubs nightly. Encouraged by her husband, Koko began to sit in with the city’s top blues bands, and soon she was in demand as a guest artist. One evening in 1962 Koko was approached by arranger/composer Willie Dixon. Overwhelmed by Koko’s performance, Dixon landed Koko a Chess Records recording contract, where he produced her several singles, two albums and penned her million-selling 1965 hit “Wang Dang Doodle,” which would become Taylor’s signature song.
After Chess Records was sold, Taylor found a home with the Chicago’s Alligator Records in 1975 and released the Grammy-nominated I Got What It Takes. She recorded eight more albums for Alligator between 1978 and 2007, received seven more Grammy nominations and made numerous guest appearances on various albums and tribute recordings. Koko appeared in the films Wild At Heart, Mercury Rising and Blues Brothers 2000. She performed on Late Night With David Letterman, Late Night With Conan O’Brien, CBS-TV’s This Morning, National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, CBS-TV’s Early Edition, and numerous regional television programs.
Over the course of her 40-plus-year career, Taylor received every award the blues world has to offer. On March 3, 1993, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley honored Taylor with a “Legend Of The Year” Award and declared “Koko Taylor Day” throughout Chicago. In 1997, she was inducted into the Blues Foundation’s Hall of Fame. A year later, Chicago Magazine named her “Chicagoan Of The Year” and, in 1999, Taylor received the Blues Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2009 Taylor performed in Washington, D.C. at The Kennedy Center Honors honoring Morgan Freeman.
Koko Taylor was one of very few women who found success in the male-dominated blues world. She took her music from the tiny clubs of Chicago’s South Side to concert halls and major festivals all over the world. She shared stages with every major blues star, including Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, Junior Wells and Buddy Guy as well as rock icons Robert Plant and Jimmy Page.
Taylor’s final performance was on May 7, 2009 in Memphis at the Blues Music Awards, where she sang “Wang Dang Doodle” after receiving her award for Traditional Blues Female Artist Of The Year.
4/04/2014
Cab Calloway & His Orchestra - Minnie the Moocher
One of the great entertainers, Cab Calloway was a household name by 1932, and never really declined in fame. A talented jazz singer and a superior scatter, Calloway's gyrations and showmanship on-stage at the Cotton Club sometimes overshadowed the quality of his always excellent bands. The younger brother of singer Blanche Calloway (who made some fine records before retiring in the mid-'30s), Cab grew up in Baltimore, attended law school briefly, and then quit to try to make it as a singer and a dancer. For a time, he headed the Alabamians, but the band was not strong enough to make it in New York. The Missourians, an excellent group that had previously recorded heated instrumentals but had fallen upon hard times, worked out much better. Calloway worked in the 1929 revue Hot Chocolates, started recording in 1930, and in 1931 hit it big with both "Minnie the Moocher" and his regular engagement at the Cotton Club. Calloway was soon (along with Bill Robinson, Ethel Waters, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington) the best-known black entertainer of the era. He appeared in quite a few movies (including 1943's Stormy Weather), and "Minnie the Moocher" was followed by such recordings as "Kicking the Gong Around," "Reefer Man," "Minnie the Moocher's Wedding Day," "You Gotta Hi-De-Ho," "The Hi-De-Ho Miracle Man," and even "Mister Paganini, Swing for Minnie." Among Calloway's sidemen through the years (who received among the highest salaries in the business) were Walter "Foots" Thomas, Bennie Payne, Doc Cheatham, Eddie Barefield, Shad Collins, Cozy Cole, Danny Barker, Milt Hinton, Mario Bauza, Chu Berry, Dizzy Gillespie, Jonah Jones, Tyree Glenn, Panama Francis, and Ike Quebec. His 1942 recording of "Blues in the Night" was a big hit.
With the end of the big band era, Calloway had to reluctantly break up his orchestra in 1948, although he continued to perform with his Cab Jivers. Since George Gershwin had originally modeled the character Sportin' Life in Porgy and Bess after Calloway, it was fitting that Cab got to play him in a 1950s version. Throughout the rest of his career, Calloway made special appearances for fans who never tired of hearing him sing "Minnie the Moocher."
With the end of the big band era, Calloway had to reluctantly break up his orchestra in 1948, although he continued to perform with his Cab Jivers. Since George Gershwin had originally modeled the character Sportin' Life in Porgy and Bess after Calloway, it was fitting that Cab got to play him in a 1950s version. Throughout the rest of his career, Calloway made special appearances for fans who never tired of hearing him sing "Minnie the Moocher."
4/01/2014
Nina Simone - Central Park Blues
The Official Home of Nina Simone
Nina Simone was one of the most gifted vocalists of her generation, and also one of the most eclectic. Simone was a singer, pianist, and songwriter who bent genres to her will rather than allowing herself to be confined by their boundaries; her work swung back and forth between jazz, blues, soul, classical, R&B, pop, gospel, and world music, with passion, emotional honesty, and a strong grasp of technique as the constants of her musical career.
Nina Simone was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina on February 21, 1933. Her mother, Mary Kate Waymon, was a Methodist minister, and her father, John Divine Waymon, was a handyman who moonlighted as a preacher. Eunice displayed a precocious musical talent at the age of three when she started picking out tunes on the family's piano, and a few years later she was playing piano at her mother's Sunday church services. Mary Kate worked part time as a housemaid, and when her employers heard Eunice play, they arranged for her to study with pianist Muriel Mazzanovich, who tutored Eunice in the classics, focusing on Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, and Schubert. After graduating at the top of her high school class, Eunice received a grant to study at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City, and applied for enrollment at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. However, Eunice was denied admission at the Curtis Institute under mysterious circumstances, despite what was said to be a stellar audition performance; Eunice would insist that her race was the key reason she was rejected.
Determined to support herself as a musician, in 1954 Eunice applied for a job playing piano at the Midtown Bar & Grill in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Eunice was told she would have to sing as well as play jazz standards and hits of the day. While she had no experience as a vocalist, Eunice faked it well enough to get the job, and she adopted a stage name, Nina Simone -- Nina from a pet name her boyfriend used, and Simone from the French film star Simone Signoret. The newly christened Nina Simone was a quick study as a singer, and her unique mixture of jazz, blues, and the classics soon earned her a loyal audience. Within a few years, Simone was a headliner at nightclubs all along the East Coast, and in 1957 she came to the attention of Syd Nathan, the mercurial owner of the influential blues and country label King Records. Nathan offered Simone a contract with his jazz subsidiary, Bethlehem Records, and the two were soon butting heads as the strong-willed Simone insisted on choosing her own material. Simone won out, and in 1958, she enjoyed a major hit with her interpretation of "I Loves You Porgy" from Porgy and Bess. The single rose to the Top 20 of the pop charts, but like many of Nathan's signings, Simone did not see eye to eye with him about business details (particularly after she discovered she'd signed away her right to royalties upon receiving her advance), and by 1959 she had signed a new deal with Colpix Records.
Nina Simone at Town HallSimone's reputation as a powerful live performer had only grown by this time, and her second album for Colpix was the first of many live recordings she would release, Nina Simone at Town Hall. Simone's live performances gave her more room to show off her classical piano influences, and her albums for Colpix reflected an intelligent taste in standards, pop songs, and supper club blues, and while she didn't enjoy another American hit on the level of "I Loves You Porgy," her recordings of "Trouble in Mind" and "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out" both entered the pop charts as singles.
In 1964, Simone left Colpix to sign a new deal with Philips, and the move coincided with a shift in the themes of her music. While always conscious of the ongoing struggle for civil rights, Simone often avoided explicit political messages in her material; as she later wrote, "How can you take the memory of a man like Medgar Evers and reduce all that he was to three and a half minutes and a simple tune?" But as the fight for racial equality became a more pressing issue in America, Simone began addressing issues of social justice in her music, penning songs such as "Mississippi Goddam," "Four Women," and "Young, Gifted and Black," the latter inspired by the work of her friend and mentor Lorraine Hansberry. Simone also enjoyed a British hit single in 1964 with "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," and while the record didn't fare as well in the United States, a year later the Animals would take the song to the pop charts on both sides of the Atlantic. Simone would next hit the British charts with her cover of Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You," which also rose to the Top 30 in the States.
Nina Simone Sings the Blues In 1967, after recording seven albums for Philips, Simone struck a new deal with RCA Records, and while her first album for her new label, Nina Simone Sings the Blues, was a straightforward collection of blues standards, her subsequent work for RCA found Simone focusing on contemporary pop, rock, and soul material, much of which dealt with topical themes and progressive philosophies (1969's To Love Somebody featured no fewer than three Bob Dylan tunes). Simone's 1968 cover of "Ain't Got No/I Got Life" (from the musical Hair) was a major chart hit in the U.K., and Simone would focus her energies on her European career when she left the United States in 1970, initially settling in Barbados and divorcing her husband and manager. Simone's exile was prompted by her increasing disillusionment with American politics, as well as her refusal to pay income taxes as a protest against the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, though recording sessions and concert dates would occasionally bring her back to the United States. In 1974, Simone released her last album for RCA, It Is Finished, and spent the next several years traveling the world and playing occasional concerts; she would not return to the recording studio until 1978, when she recorded the album Baltimore at a studio in Belgium for Creed Taylor's CTI label. (That same year, Simone was arrested and charged for her non-payment of taxes from 1971 to 1973.) It would be another four years until Simone would record again, cutting Fodder on My Wings for a Swiss label in 1982.
Live & Kickin After several more years of travel, Simone released a live album through the American VPI label, 1985's Live & Kickin, and another concert set, Let It Be Me, was issued by Verve in 1987, a year that saw Simone enjoying a major career resurgence in Europe; her 1959 recording of "My Baby Just Cares for Me" was used in a British television commercial for Chanel No. 5 perfume, and the song subsequently became a hit, rising to the Top Ten of the U.K. pop charts. In 1989, Simone was invited by Pete Townshend to sing the song "Fast Food" on his concept album The Iron Man, which also featured John Lee Hooker. Simone's autobiography I Put a Spell on You was published in 1990, and after a well-received United States concert tour, she was signed by Elektra Records, which released the album A Single Woman in 1993.
In 1995, Simone found herself in the news after she fired a gun at one of her neighbors during an argument; she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which was said to be the cause of several episodes of erratic behavior in her later years. Simone continued to perform live in Europe and the United States up until the summer of 2002, when it was discovered she had breast cancer. Simone's battle with the disease came to a close on April 21, 2003 in Carry-le-Rouet, France. Only a few days earlier, Simone had received an honorary degree from the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, the same school that had rejected her in 1953.
Nina Simone was one of the most gifted vocalists of her generation, and also one of the most eclectic. Simone was a singer, pianist, and songwriter who bent genres to her will rather than allowing herself to be confined by their boundaries; her work swung back and forth between jazz, blues, soul, classical, R&B, pop, gospel, and world music, with passion, emotional honesty, and a strong grasp of technique as the constants of her musical career.
Nina Simone was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina on February 21, 1933. Her mother, Mary Kate Waymon, was a Methodist minister, and her father, John Divine Waymon, was a handyman who moonlighted as a preacher. Eunice displayed a precocious musical talent at the age of three when she started picking out tunes on the family's piano, and a few years later she was playing piano at her mother's Sunday church services. Mary Kate worked part time as a housemaid, and when her employers heard Eunice play, they arranged for her to study with pianist Muriel Mazzanovich, who tutored Eunice in the classics, focusing on Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, and Schubert. After graduating at the top of her high school class, Eunice received a grant to study at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City, and applied for enrollment at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. However, Eunice was denied admission at the Curtis Institute under mysterious circumstances, despite what was said to be a stellar audition performance; Eunice would insist that her race was the key reason she was rejected.
Determined to support herself as a musician, in 1954 Eunice applied for a job playing piano at the Midtown Bar & Grill in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Eunice was told she would have to sing as well as play jazz standards and hits of the day. While she had no experience as a vocalist, Eunice faked it well enough to get the job, and she adopted a stage name, Nina Simone -- Nina from a pet name her boyfriend used, and Simone from the French film star Simone Signoret. The newly christened Nina Simone was a quick study as a singer, and her unique mixture of jazz, blues, and the classics soon earned her a loyal audience. Within a few years, Simone was a headliner at nightclubs all along the East Coast, and in 1957 she came to the attention of Syd Nathan, the mercurial owner of the influential blues and country label King Records. Nathan offered Simone a contract with his jazz subsidiary, Bethlehem Records, and the two were soon butting heads as the strong-willed Simone insisted on choosing her own material. Simone won out, and in 1958, she enjoyed a major hit with her interpretation of "I Loves You Porgy" from Porgy and Bess. The single rose to the Top 20 of the pop charts, but like many of Nathan's signings, Simone did not see eye to eye with him about business details (particularly after she discovered she'd signed away her right to royalties upon receiving her advance), and by 1959 she had signed a new deal with Colpix Records.
Nina Simone at Town HallSimone's reputation as a powerful live performer had only grown by this time, and her second album for Colpix was the first of many live recordings she would release, Nina Simone at Town Hall. Simone's live performances gave her more room to show off her classical piano influences, and her albums for Colpix reflected an intelligent taste in standards, pop songs, and supper club blues, and while she didn't enjoy another American hit on the level of "I Loves You Porgy," her recordings of "Trouble in Mind" and "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out" both entered the pop charts as singles.
In 1964, Simone left Colpix to sign a new deal with Philips, and the move coincided with a shift in the themes of her music. While always conscious of the ongoing struggle for civil rights, Simone often avoided explicit political messages in her material; as she later wrote, "How can you take the memory of a man like Medgar Evers and reduce all that he was to three and a half minutes and a simple tune?" But as the fight for racial equality became a more pressing issue in America, Simone began addressing issues of social justice in her music, penning songs such as "Mississippi Goddam," "Four Women," and "Young, Gifted and Black," the latter inspired by the work of her friend and mentor Lorraine Hansberry. Simone also enjoyed a British hit single in 1964 with "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," and while the record didn't fare as well in the United States, a year later the Animals would take the song to the pop charts on both sides of the Atlantic. Simone would next hit the British charts with her cover of Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You," which also rose to the Top 30 in the States.
Nina Simone Sings the Blues In 1967, after recording seven albums for Philips, Simone struck a new deal with RCA Records, and while her first album for her new label, Nina Simone Sings the Blues, was a straightforward collection of blues standards, her subsequent work for RCA found Simone focusing on contemporary pop, rock, and soul material, much of which dealt with topical themes and progressive philosophies (1969's To Love Somebody featured no fewer than three Bob Dylan tunes). Simone's 1968 cover of "Ain't Got No/I Got Life" (from the musical Hair) was a major chart hit in the U.K., and Simone would focus her energies on her European career when she left the United States in 1970, initially settling in Barbados and divorcing her husband and manager. Simone's exile was prompted by her increasing disillusionment with American politics, as well as her refusal to pay income taxes as a protest against the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, though recording sessions and concert dates would occasionally bring her back to the United States. In 1974, Simone released her last album for RCA, It Is Finished, and spent the next several years traveling the world and playing occasional concerts; she would not return to the recording studio until 1978, when she recorded the album Baltimore at a studio in Belgium for Creed Taylor's CTI label. (That same year, Simone was arrested and charged for her non-payment of taxes from 1971 to 1973.) It would be another four years until Simone would record again, cutting Fodder on My Wings for a Swiss label in 1982.
Live & Kickin After several more years of travel, Simone released a live album through the American VPI label, 1985's Live & Kickin, and another concert set, Let It Be Me, was issued by Verve in 1987, a year that saw Simone enjoying a major career resurgence in Europe; her 1959 recording of "My Baby Just Cares for Me" was used in a British television commercial for Chanel No. 5 perfume, and the song subsequently became a hit, rising to the Top Ten of the U.K. pop charts. In 1989, Simone was invited by Pete Townshend to sing the song "Fast Food" on his concept album The Iron Man, which also featured John Lee Hooker. Simone's autobiography I Put a Spell on You was published in 1990, and after a well-received United States concert tour, she was signed by Elektra Records, which released the album A Single Woman in 1993.
In 1995, Simone found herself in the news after she fired a gun at one of her neighbors during an argument; she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which was said to be the cause of several episodes of erratic behavior in her later years. Simone continued to perform live in Europe and the United States up until the summer of 2002, when it was discovered she had breast cancer. Simone's battle with the disease came to a close on April 21, 2003 in Carry-le-Rouet, France. Only a few days earlier, Simone had received an honorary degree from the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, the same school that had rejected her in 1953.
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