mick laBriola

Charles Thomas Potter (September 21, 1918 – March 1, 1988) was a jazz double bass player, best known for having been a member of Charlie Parker‘s “classic quintet”, with Miles Davis, between 1947 and 1950.

Born in Philadelphia, Potter had first played with Parker in 1944, in Billy Eckstine‘s band with Dizzy Gillespie, Lucky Thompson and Art Blakey.^[1]

Potter also performed and recorded with many other notable jazz musicians, including Earl Hines, Artie Shaw, Bud Powell, Count Basie, Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz, Max Roach, Eddie Heywood, Tyree Glenn, Harry “Sweets” Edison, Buck Clayton and Charles Lloyd.

Leroy Eliot “Slam” Stewart (September 21, 1914 – December 10, 1987) was an American jazz double bass player, whose trademark style was his ability to bow the bass (arco) and simultaneously hum or sing an octave higher. He was a violinist before switching to bass at the age of 20.

Stewart was born in Englewood, New Jersey, United States and began playing string bass while attending Dwight Morrow High School. While attending the Boston Conservatory, he heard Ray Perry singing along with his violin. This gave him the inspiration to follow suit with his bass. In 1937, Stewart teamed with Slim Gaillard to form the novelty jazz act Slim and Slam. The duo’s biggest hit was “Flat Foot Floogie (with a Floy Floy)” in 1938.

Steve Coleman (born September 20, 1956) is an American saxophonist, composer, and bandleader. In 2014, he was named a MacArthur Fellow.

Steve Coleman was born and grew up in South Side, Chicago. He started playing alto saxophone at the age of 14. Coleman attended Illinois Wesleyan University for two years,. followed by a transfer to Roosevelt University (Chicago Musical College).

Coleman moved to New York in 1978 and worked in big bands such as the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, Slide Hampton‘s big band, Sam Rivers‘ Studio Rivbea Orchestra, and briefly in Cecil Taylor‘s big band. Shortly thereafter, Coleman began working as a sideman with David Murray, Doug Hammond, Dave Holland, Mike Brecker and Abbey Lincoln. For the first four years in New York Coleman spent a good deal of time playing in the streets and in tiny clubs with a band that he put together with trumpeter Graham Haynes, the group that would evolve into the ensemble Steve Coleman and Five Elements that would serve as the main ensemble for Coleman’s activities. In this group, he developed his concept of improvisation within nested looping structures. Coleman collaborated with other young African-American musicians such as Cassandra Wilson and Greg Osby, and they founded the so-called M-Base movement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1-CQyeEHLg

Eric Gale (September 20, 1938 – May 25, 1994) was an American jazz and R&B guitarist.

Born in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York, Gale grew up in a diverse household. He was of Black-American, Native-American, and British-American heritage. Gale’s grandfather was from Yorkshire, England, who moved to Barbados and met his future wife there. Gale held dual-citizenship by descent to the UK, where he spent a lot of time going back and forth to visit family and for further studies.

Gale began playing guitar at the age of 12. In high school, he visited the home of John Coltrane after school and sat in on the jam sessions, which inspired Gale’s style. Gale received his Master of Science in chemistry at Niagara University, he was also on the football team. Later, Gale was pursued by Frank Sinatra to work on the hit song “My Way”, as mentioned in Frank Sinatra’s autobiography. Gale decided to commit to a musical career full time, instead of getting his Phd in Chemistry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzkC6BCXmfA

Elvira “Vi” Redd (born September 20, 1928) is an American jazz alto saxophone player, vocalist and educator. She has been active since the early 1950s and is known primarily for playing in the blues style. She is highly regarded as an accomplished veteran who has performed with Count Basie, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Linda Hopkins, Marian McPartland and Dizzy Gillespie.

Redd is the daughter of New Orleans jazz drummer and Clef Club co-founder Alton Redd and Mattie Redd (née Thomas).^[3] She was born in Los Angeles. She was deeply influenced during her formative years by her father, who was one of the leading figures on the Central Avenue jazz scene. Another important musical mentor was her paternal great aunt Alma Hightower.

Cass Elliot (born Ellen Naomi Cohen; September 19, 1941 – July 29, 1974), widely known as Mama Cass, was an American singer, actress and member of the singing group, the Mamas and the Papas. After the group broke up, Elliot released five solo albums. In 1998, she was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for her work with the Mamas and the Papas.

Ellen Naomi Cohen was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 19, 1941, the daughter of Bess (née Levine; 1915–1994) and Philip Cohen (died 1962). All four of her grandparents were Russian Jewish immigrants. Her family was subject to significant financial stresses and uncertainties during her childhood years. Her father, involved in several business ventures throughout his life, ultimately succeeded through the development of a lunch wagon business in Baltimore that provided meals to construction workers. Her mother was a trained nurse. Elliot had a brother, Joseph, and a younger sister, Leah, who also became a singer and recording artist. Elliot’s early life was spent with her family in Alexandria, Virginia, before the family moved to Baltimore when Elliot was 15, and where they had briefly lived at the time of Elliot’s birth.

David Bromberg (born September 19, 1945) is an American multi-instrumentalist, singer, and songwriter. An eclectic artist, Bromberg plays bluegrass, blues, folk, jazz, country and western, and rock and roll. He is known for his quirky, humorous lyrics, and the ability to play rhythm and lead guitar at the same time.

Bromberg has played with many famous musicians, including Jerry Jeff Walker, Willie Nelson, Jorma Kaukonen, Jerry Garcia, Rusty Evans (The Deep) and Bob Dylan. He co-wrote the song “The Holdup” with George Harrison, who played on Bromberg’s self-titled 1972 album. In 2008, he was nominated for a Grammy Award. Bromberg is known for his fingerpicking style that he learned from Reverend Gary Davis.

Bromberg was born to a Jewish family in Philadelphia and raised in Tarrytown, New York. He attended Columbia College of Columbia University in the 1960s, studying guitar with Reverend Gary Davis during that period. He soon established himself as a solo performer and accompanist on the mid-1960s Greenwich Village folk circuit.

Henry Kaiser (born September 19, 1952) is an American guitarist and composer, known as an idiosyncratic soloist, a sideman, an ethnomusicologist, and a film score composer. Recording and performing prolifically in many styles of music, Kaiser is a fixture on the San Francisco Bay Area music scene. He is considered a member of the “second generation” of American free improvisers. He is married to Canadian artist Brandy Gale. He is the son of Henry J. Kaiser Jr. and the grandson of industrialist Henry J. Kaiser.

In 1977, Kaiser founded Metalanguage Records with Larry Ochs (Rova Saxophone Quartet) and Greg Goodman. In 1979 he recorded With Friends Like These with Fred Frith, a collaboration that lasted for over 20 years. In 1983 they recorded Who Needs Enemies, and in 1987 the compilation album With Enemies Like These, Who Needs Friends? They joined with fellow experimental musicians John French, and English folk-rocker Richard Thompson to form French Frith Kaiser Thompson for two eclectic albums, Live, Love, Larf & Loaf (1987) and Invisible Means (1990). In 1999 Frith and Kaiser released Friends & Enemies, a compilation of their two Metalanguage albums along with additional material from 1984 and 1999.

George Lowen Coxhill (19 September 1932 – 10 July 2012) known professionally as Lol Coxhill, was an English free improvising saxophonist. He played soprano and sopranino saxophone.

Coxhill was born to George Compton Coxhill and Mabel Margaret Coxhill (née Motton) at Portsmouth, Hampshire, UK. He grew up in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, and bought his first saxophone in 1947. After national service he became a busy semi-professional musician, touring US airbases with Denzil Bailey’s Afro-Cubists and the Graham Fleming Combo. In the 1960s he played with visiting American blues, soul and jazz musicians including Rufus Thomas, Mose Allison, Otis Spann, and Champion Jack Dupree. He also developed his practice of playing unaccompanied solo saxophone, often busking in informal performance situations. Other than his solo playing, he performed mostly as a sideman or as an equal collaborator, rather than a conventional leader – there was no regular Lol Coxhill Trio or Quartet as would normally be expected of a saxophonist. Instead he had many intermittent but long-lasting collaborations with like-minded musicians.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Om9QiyIglFk

Cora “Lovie” Austin (September 19, 1887 – July 8, 1972) was an American Chicago bandleader, session musician, composer, singer, and arranger during the 1920s classic blues era. She and Lil Hardin Armstrong are often ranked as two of the best female jazz blues piano players of the period.

She was born Cora Taylor in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Lovie grew up with eight brothers and sisters. She took the name Cora Calhoun in her teens from an early marriage; she was married for a short time to a movie house operator in Detroit and then later married a vaudeville performer, Phillip Austin. She studied music theory at Roger Williams University in Nashville, and Knoxville College in Knoxville, Tennessee which was uncommon for African American woman and jazz musicians alike during the time.