Tag: Trumpet

Today March 8th Austria’s only and top female jazz trumpet player Michaela Rabitsch celebrates her ?????? birthday, Michaela is a singer, composer and is called a modern-day female Chet Baker by the US magazine Jazzscene!! She calls Weyer, Oberosterreich, Austria her hometown and currently Vienna is home. She has started her musical journey at 7 studying classical violin, at 14 she moved to Vienna to continue her studies. She switched to trumpet and studies for jazz- and popular music at the Bruckner conservatory Linz (now Anton Bruckner private University) with Ingrid Jensen, Peter Tuscher and classical trumpet with Fritz Handlbaue. Over the years she has played in a variety of groups and individuals. Most recently she has concentrated on her own compositions played together in quartet or duo with Robert Pawlik. They have released to CDs as a duo Moods and their latest release Voyages. This afternoon I downloaded Voyages and gave it a listen – this is one terrific duo! According to their website: read more

About the same time that the Safari discovered Aynsley Lister, I also discovered the music of Japanese-born trumpet player Takuya Kuroda.That was several days ago, and yesterday Takuya celebrated his 34th birthday. While I had listened to a little of his latest album Rising Son, when I first heard about his music, but today I listened to the full album and it was a treat!!

Kuroda grew up in Kobe, Japan and arrived in the US in 2000. While living in Kobe he played in various high school jazz bands, but he didn’t receive his first formal jazz training until he attended the Berklee College of Music. After studying at Berklee, Takuya was ready to take on New York City. In 2006 he graduated from The New School’s Jazz & Contemporary Music program. While he was in that program  he met jazz vocalist Jose James. For the last several years,Takuya has been a member of James’ backing band. James says this about Takuya’s music: read more

This morning the name that caught my attention on the list of birthdays at All About Jazz was Paolo Fresu,a trumpet player. Paolo is in fact not only a trumpet and flugelhorn player, but he is also an arranger and composer. And an award-winning  one at that!!  Paolo was born in Berchidda, Sardina on February 10, 1961 and he his musical career has spanned the last 30 years in which he has performed on over 300 albums.many as a sideman and lots as a leader of his quintet.But wait there’s more…(if you call now – just joking) He is also  according to Wikipedia: read more

I’ve written it before and I am sure I will write it again during the years from 1980 to 1995 there was so much going on in my life that there was little time for musical explorations. During that period our family grew to include four children Nick (1979), Andrew (1982), Peter (1986) and Elizabeth (1990). Along the way our family lost my wife’s mother to breast cancer (1982 at the age of 48), my wife’s grandmother, and father, my father (1984) the way our sons Nick and Andrew both had medical problems, and mu wife had to miscarriages!! Anyway you get the picture, musical explorations were way down the list! I write all of this to give myself an excuse for not knowing about many of the artists that i have recently been discovering. One of those artists is trumpeter Terrence Blanchard! Today I have listened to his latest release Magnetic and throughly enjoying it!! read more

Christmas Eve was the birthday of one of the best, least famous trumpet players, Woody Shaw.  Shaw was born  December 24, 1944 in Laurinburg, North Carolina. and raised in Newark, New Jersey from the age of one year old.  His parents  were Rosalie Pegues and Woody Shaw, Sr. His father was a member of the African American gospel group known as the ‘Diamond Jubilee Singers’ and both his parents attended the same secondary private school as Dizzy Gillespie: Laurinburg Institute. Shaw’s mother was from the same town as Gillespie: Cheraw, South Carolina. read more

Early this year May 13th marked  the 25th anniversary of the death of Chet Baker, today we celebrate his life, because on this date in 1929 Chesney Henry “Chet” Baker, Jr. Well,  back in the day I was not a Chet Baker fan. But through the years I would be listening to jazz radio and one would come this great trumpet or flugelhorn and I usually know that I was listening to the horn of Chet Baker. As I started to collect more and more jazz over the last ten years more of Chet’s music has made its way into my library. Looking over his discography at AllMusic, I realize that I haven’t even scratched the surface of HIS music from a career  that ran from 1952 to his death in 1988.  During his career he released well over 100 albums on nine major labels plus many smaller labels predominately in Europe. The main reason that he recorded so many albums according to AllMusic.com  was that …. read more