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"Javon adds a modern twist to the music we grew up with. Everybody get ready for a funky good time." - Branford Marsalis  Wallace Roney © Ancrea Canter Javon Jackson was born in Carthage, Missouri and raised in Denver, Colorado. Sonny Stitt's music inspired Javon to pick up saxophone at a young age. Jackson began working professionally in local jazz clubs at age 16, playing with former Max Roach Quintet pianist Billy Wallace. During this time, Javon met and was befriended by Branford Marsalis, who encouraged Javon to attend the Berklee School of Music. Two of Javon's instructors at Berklee were saxophonist Billy Pierce and pianist Donald Brown, two former members of Art Blakey's legendary Jazz Messengers. One of the seminal groups of the hard bop movement of the 50's and 60's, the Messengers provided a training ground for the likes of Freddie Hubbard, Lee Morgan, and Javon's early mentor, Branford Marsalis.
Javon met the legendary Art Blakey one night at Mikell's, a New York City jazz club. After sitting in with the Messengers, Javon's skill on the tenor led to an invitation to join the group. Those years under the tutelage of Blakey involved intensive study of both interplay and improvisation. Performing alongside Terence Blanchard, Kenny Garrett, Wallace Roney and Benny Green, Javon appeared on several recordings with Blakey, including Not Yet (Soul Note), One For All (A&M) and Chippin' In (Timeless).  Javon Jackson
Javon earned his degree from Berklee while continuing to tour with Freddie Hubbard, Elvin Jones, Charlie Haden and Cedar Walton. Javon spent several years touring with a host of jazz greats, as well as his own groups, concentrating on technique and composition. He earned his master's degree in music and a position as Assistant Professor of Jazz Education at SUNY Purchase College. Wallace Roney, while one of the most accomplished and acclaimed trumpeters in jazz today, remains one of today's most misunderstood jazz masters. Roney rose to national prominence in the 1980's as a member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, earning favorable notice as a young lion with impressive technique in the Clifford Brown-Lee Morgan-Freddie Hubbard tradition. By the middle of the decade Roney was holding down a difficult dual membership with both the Messengers and Tony Williams' Quintet. Soon he began to display a more thoughtful and spacious approach to sound and improvisation -- one that nodded in the direction of Williams' former leader, Miles Davis, who by that time had befriended the young trumpeter, having given him the blue horn that is his trademark. “I feel that my music is always a tribute to Miles because my music definitely has Miles’ stamp. He was like my father and I never ran from his influence.” -- Wallace Roney
In 1991, at Davis' request, Roney played side-by-side with his mentor at the Montreux Jazz Festival, performing Gil Evans' classic arrangements from Miles Ahead and Porgy and Bess with the Quincy Jones-George Gruntz Orchestras. Wallace's immersion into the Davis canon and ten years of study with Miles had an understandably profound effect on his approach to music one that perfectly suited his own forward-looking artistic vision. On his Warner Brothers debut cd Misteriosos, the eerie resemblance of the sound of Roney's trumpet to that of Davis caused much of the jazz press, who were superficially focused on the trumpeter's tone while overlooking his very personal choice of notes, to misguidedly label him a Davis clone.Born in Philadelphia, May 25, 1960, the young trumpeter's special musical gift was first recognized at the age of six by Sigmund Hering, the first trumpet chair of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra with whom Wallace would later study. When police brutality and gang violence threatened his Philly neighborhood, Roney was sent him to live in Washington, DC, where he attended the prestigious Duke Ellington School for the Arts, while playing professionally with his own group. He went on to study further at Howard University, where he met his future wife, pianist Geri Allen, and Berklee College of Music in Boston, a prime incubator of the burgeoning neobop movement. Moving on to New York, he paid heavy dues before eventually joining Blakey and then Williams. Benny Green
Wallace would go on to share bandstands and recording studios with many of the giants of jazz, including Kenny Barron, Sonny Rollins, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Randy Weston and Chick Corea, in addition to Miles. Since the beginning of nineties it has been as the leader of his own bands that the trumpeter made his most consistently rewarding music. His excellent early efforts on Muse introduced the world to Roney's skill as composer and bandleader, while ialso ntroducing such important young talents as Christian McBride and Jack Terrason. Piano master Benny Green is an exciting and hard-swinging pianist in the Bud Powell mold. Green ranks alongside Mulgrew Miller and Donald Brown as one of a number of talented hard-bop keyboard stars to have graduated from Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers training ground. During America's hard-bop revival of the ‘80s, Green established his own distinctive voice as the leader of a number of bands. After high school, Green moved to the West Coast and freelanced around the San Francisco Bay Area, gaining experience working as a sideman. But it was after his return to New York in the spring of 1982 that Green's career took a sharp upward turn. Benefiting from studies with Walter Bishop Jr., he joined Betty Carter's band in April 1983 and began a four-year stint of performing, recording and learning with jazz's most respected vocalist. The piano chair in Art Blakey's prestigious Jazz Messengers followed, as well as a year with the Freddie Hubbard Quintet in 1989. Green joined Ray Brown's Trio in 1992 and was with it un Brown's death. |
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Friday, 25 July 2008
