mick laBriola

Oscar Pettiford (September 30, 1922 – September 8, 1960) was an American jazzdouble bassist and composer. He was one of the earliest musicians to work in the bebop idiom.

Jazz bassist Christian McBride called Pettiford “probably the most important bass player of that bebop generation in terms of creating new language for the bass.” Jamela Pettiford, a singer in St. Paul, Minnesota, and a descendant of the Pettiford family, told Minnesota Public Radio in 2022 that the Pettiford family band traveled itinerantly for a time as road musicians before settling in north Minneapolis. Pettiford died in 1960 in Copenhagen, shortly before his 38th birthday, from a virus closely related to polio.

Bernard “Buddy” Rich (September 30, 1917 – April 2, 1987) was an American jazzdrummer, songwriter, conductor, and bandleader. He is considered one of the most influential drummers of all time.

Rich was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, United States. He discovered his affinity for jazz music at a young age and began drumming at the age of two. He began playing jazz in 1937, working with acts such as Bunny Berigan, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, Count Basie, and Harry James. From 1942 to 1944, Rich served in the U.S. Marines. From 1945 to 1948, he led the Buddy Rich Orchestra. In 1966, he recorded a big-band style arrangement of songs from West Side Story. He found lasting success in 1966 with the formation of the Buddy Rich Big Band, also billed as the Buddy Rich Band and The Big Band Machine.

Rich was known for his virtuoso technique, power, and speed. He was an advocate of the traditional grip, though he occasionally used matched grip when playing the toms. Despite his commercial success and musical talent, Rich never learned how to read sheet music, preferring to listen to the drum parts played in rehearsal by whomever was his drum roadie at the time and relying on his uncanny photographic memory. In early March 1987, he was touring in New York when he was hospitalized after suffering a paralysis on his left side that physicians believed had been caused by a stroke. He was transferred to California to UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles for tests, where doctors discovered and removed a brain tumor on March 16. He was discharged a week later, but continued to receive daily chemotherapy treatments at the hospital. On April 2, 1987, he died of unexpected respiratory and cardiac failure after a treatment related to the malignant brain tumor.

Artist Johannes Stoetter

September 29th 1941-May 15th 1995

Perry Lederman, who died May 15 at his home in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, after a long battle with cancer, was one of the little-known legends of the folk revival. Born in Brooklyn, NY, he was inspired to learn guitar after seeing Tom Paley playing in Washington Square Park and quickly became one of the foremost fingerstyle players in the city, exploring and reviving traditional styles in the company of friends like Danny Kalb and Roy Berkeley. He was also a peerless seeker-out of vintage ¾-size Martin guitars, which he continued to favor throughout his life.

Perry continued to play during a brief college stint in Ann Arbor, Michigan, then moved to Berkeley, California, where he became a leading folk performer in partnership with writer and poet Al Young. His playing, notable for its passion and imagination, and an astonishing, controlled vibrato, was a major influence on later West Coast players like John Fahey and frequent housemate and jamming partner Michael Bloomfield. It was during this period that he made his only issued recording, on a Bay Area sampler for the Arhoolie label. More interested in the music itself than in commercial success, Perry put the guitar aside just as his West Coast followers began to receive national attention, preferring to spend eight years studying sarod as a student and friend of Indian master Ali Akbar Khan.

Roy Sinclair Campbell Jr. (September 29, 1952 – January 9, 2014) was an American trumpeter frequently linked to free jazz, although he also performed rhythm and bluesand funk during his career.

Born in Los Angeles, California, in 1952, Campbell was raised in New York City. At the age of fifteen, he began learning to play trumpet and soon studied at the Jazz Mobile program along with Kenny Dorham, Lee Morgan and Joe Newman.Throughout the 1960s, still unacquainted with the avant-garde movement, Campbell performed in the big bands of the Manhattan Community College. From the 1970s onwards, he performed primarily within the context of free jazz, spending some of this period studying with Yusef Lateef. Campbell composed the film music for the documentary Survival in New York (1989) by Rosa von Praunheim.

In the early 1990s, Campbell moved to the Netherlands and performed regularly with Klaas Hekman and Don Cherry. In addition to leading his own groups, he performed with Yo La Tengo, William Parker, Peter Brötzmann, Matthew Shipp, and other improvisors. Upon returning to the United States he began leading his group Other Dimensions In Music and also formed the Pyramid Trio, a pianoless trio formed with William Parker.

He died in January 2014 of hypertensive atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease at the age of 61.

Jean-Luc Ponty (born 29 September 1942) is a French jazz and jazz fusion violinist and composer. Ponty was born into a family of classical musicians in Avranches, France. His father taught violin, his mother taught piano. At sixteen, he was admitted to the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris, graduating two years later with the institution’s highest honor, Premier Prix (first prize). He was hired by the Orchestre Lamoureux in which he played for three years.

While still a member of the orchestra in Paris, Ponty picked up a side job playing clarinet (which his father had taught him) for a college jazz band that regularly performed at local parties. It proved life-changing. A growing interest in Miles Davis and John Coltrane compelled him to take up tenor saxophone. One night after an orchestra concert, and still wearing his tuxedo, Ponty found himself at a local club with only his violin. Within four years, he was widely accepted as the leading figure in “jazz fiddle”.

At that time, Ponty was leading a dual musical life: rehearsing and performing with the orchestra while also playing jazz at clubs throughout Paris. The demands of this schedule eventually brought him to a crossroads. Critic Joachim-Ernst Berendt wrote that “Since Ponty, the jazz violin has been a different instrument”.

John Gilmore (September 28, 1931 – August 20, 1995) was an American jazz saxophonist, clarinetist, and percussionist. He was known for his tenure with the avant-garde keyboardist/bandleader Sun Ra from the 1950s to the 1990s, and led The Sun Ra Arkestra from Sun Ra’s death in 1993 until his own death in 1995.

Gilmore was raised in Chicago and played clarinet from the age of 14. He took up the tenor saxophone while serving in the United States Air Force from 1948 through 1951.He then pursued a musical career, beginning as a tenor saxophonist on a national tour with the Harlem Globetrotters in an ensemble that included pianist Earl Hines in 1952.

In 1953 Gilmore met pianist and bandleader Sun Ra who had a profound impact on him as a musician. For the next four decades, he recorded and performed almost exclusively with Sun Ra; first as a trio, and then in the Sun Ra Arkestra. This was puzzling to some, who noted Gilmore’s talent, and thought he could be a major star like John Coltrane or Sonny Rollins. Despite being five years older than Gilmore, Coltrane was impressed with his playing, and took informal lessons from Gilmore in the late 1950s. Coltrane’s epochal, proto–free jazz “Chasin’ the Trane” was inspired partly by Gilmore’s sound. The Penguin Guide to Jazz suggests Gilmore remained an influence in Coltrane’s later period, particularly on Sun Ship.

Kenneth David Kirkland (September 28, 1955 – November 12, 1998) was an American pianist and keyboardist. Kirkland’s first professional work came with Polish fusion violinist Michal Urbaniak, touring throughout Europe with his group in 1977. Coincidentally, his next high-profile gig was with another Eastern European jazz émigré, Miroslav Vitous. Kirkland is featured on Vitous’ ECM recordings First Meeting and Miroslav Vitous Group.

In 1980, while Kirkland was on tour in Japan with Terumasa Hino, he met Wynton Marsalis, which began his long association with both Wynton and his older brother Branford. On Wynton’s self-titled debut album, Kirkland shared the piano duties with one of his musical influences, Herbie Hancock, but was the sole pianist on Marsalis’s subsequent releases Think of One, Hot House Flowers and Black Codes (From the Underground). Kirkland was found dead in his Queens apartment on Friday, November 13, 1998.