Jazz Legends

Pianist, composer Bud Powell (born September 7, 1924) was one of the primary innovators of bebop. His prodigious technique and strong sense of swing placed him head and shoulders above all his contemporaries. His struggles with mental issues sadly affected his career, particularly later in life.

Since even before the advent of “talkies” music has been an integral part of motion pictures. Even small cinemas often had a pianist or organist who contributed musical accompaniment to the action on screen, but with the advent of sound, the music composed and synchronized with the action on screen and became an integral part of every film from then on. Great songwriters were drawn to work in Hollywood and their work of course was embraced by jazz musicians over the years.

Victor Young, born in Chicago (August 8, 1899), started playing the violin at the age of six and was sent to live with his grandfather in Poland when he was ten. He attended the Warsaw Conservatory, and while still a teenager, embarked on a career as a concert violinist with the Warsaw Philharmonic. World War I kept him from returning to the United States until 1920, when he took a job performing with a Chicago theater orchestra. In the mid-1930s, he relocated to Hollywood and composed a number of songs for films that have become standards and embraced by jazz musicians for decades. Young won a posthumous Oscar for his score for Around the World in 80 Days in 1957.

Jazz Evensong Schedule:
https://stmichaelsbythesea.org/evensong

Ray Noble, born Dec 17th, 1903, was a British big band leader responsible for composing a number of songs that have become standards. Jazz musicians have long played his tune Cherokee, with its bridge that traverses a number of far-flung key centers foreign to the tune’s home key, but he is also responsible for The Very Thought of You, I Hadn’t Anyone Till You, Goodnight Sweetheart, The Touch of Your Lips, the lesser-known Love is the Sweetest Thing, and Live Locked Out. He is also remembered as a radio and motion picture star, appearing alongside Burns and Allen and Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy.
 
Jazz Evensong Schedule:
https://stmichaelsbythesea.org/evensong

Woody Shaw (born Dec 24, 1944) was one of the most influential and prolifically virtuostic trumpet players and jazz composers of the twentieth century. In his brief career (he died at the young age of 44) he was pivotal in applying many of the harmonic and technical innovations of saxophonist John Coltrane to the trumpet, and his compositions celebrated those innovations as well, pushing the 
boundaries of jazz composition in an organic and logical way and extending the art of jazz trumpet playing.

 

Jazz Evensong Schedule:
https://stmichaelsbythesea.org/evensong