Happy birthday to JazzCorner roster trombonist Steve Davis. We remember Shorty Rogers, arranger Gil Fuller and the Boss (before Bruce Springsteen), Gene Ammons was also known as Jug. Born in Chicago, Illinois, Ammons began to gain recognition while still at high school when in 1943, at the age of 18, he went on the road with trumpeter King Kolaxs band. In 1944 he joined the band of Billy Eckstine (who bestowed on him the nickname Jug when straw hats ordered for the band did not fit), playing alongside Charlie Parker and later @Dexter Gordon. Notable performances from this period include Blowin the Blues Away, featuring a saxophone duel between Ammons and Gordon. After 1947, when Eckstine became a solo performer, Ammons then led a group, including Miles Davis and Sonny Stitt, that performed at Chicagos Jumptown Club. In 1949 Ammons replaced Stan Getz as a member of Woody Hermans Second Herd, and then in 1950 formed a duet with Sonny Stitt. The 1950s were a prolific period for Ammons and produced some acclaimed recordings such as The Happy Blues (1955), featuring Freddie Redd and Lou Donaldson. Musicians who played in his groups, apart from Stitt, included Donald Byrd, Jackie McLean, John Coltrane, Kenny Burrell, Mal Waldron, Art Farmer, and Duke Jordan. His later career was interrupted by two prison sentences for narcotics possession, the first from 1958 to 1960, the second from 1962 to 1969. After his release from prison in 1969, having served a seven-year sentence at Joliet penitentiary, he signed the largest contract ever offered at that time by Prestiges Bob Weinstock. Ammons died in Chicago in 1974, at the age of 49, from cancer. Ammons and Von Freeman were the founders of the Chicago school of tenor saxophone. Ammonss style of playing showed influences from Lester Young as well as Ben Webster. These artists had helped develop the sound of the tenor saxophone to higher levels of expressiveness. Ammons, together with Dexter Gordon and Sonny Stitt, helped integrate their developments with the emerging vernacular of the bebop movement, and the chromaticism and rhythmic variety of Charlie Parker is evident in his playing. While adept at the technical aspects of bebop, in particular its love of harmonic substitutions, Ammons more than Young, Webster or Parker, stayed in touch with the commercial blues and R&B of his day. For example, in 1950 the saxophonists recording of My Foolish Heart made Billboard Magazines black pop charts.[2] The soul jazz movement of the mid-1960s, often using the combination of tenor saxophone and Hammond B3 electric organ, counts him as a founder. With a thicker, warmer tone than Stitt or Gordon, Ammons could at will exploit a vast range of textures on the instrument, vocalizing it in ways that look forward to later artists like Stanley Turrentine, Houston Person, and even Archie Shepp. Ammons showed little interest, however, in the modal jazz of John Coltrane, Joe Henderson or Wayne Shorter that was emerging at the same time. Some fine ballad performances in his oeuvre are testament to an exceptional sense of intonation and melodic symmetry, powerful lyrical expressiveness, and mastery both of the blues and the bebop vernacular that can now be described as, in its own way, classical. King Pleasure recorded his [vocalese] take on Ammons composition Hittin the Jug under the title Swan Blues. Answer Me, My Love written by Fred Rauch, Carl Sigman and Gerhard Winkler, performed by Gene Ammons, is featured on the soundtrack for Romance & Cigarettes (2005).
Posted on: Mon, 14 Apr 2014 04:58:23 +0000