Regina Carter

“I think a lot of people look at the violin and they get a little nervous. They have a stereotype of what the violin is–very high, kind of shrill-sounding with long notes, and a lot of vibrato. It doesn’t have to be that at all, it can be a very fiery persuasive instrument and that’s how I like to use it.”-Regina Carter

Famous for her scintillating and sophisticated violin solos, Regina Carter, born August 6, 1966 to a proud school teacher in Detroit, Michigan, is an American jazz powerhouse. Discovering the passion for classical violin at the tender age of 4, Carter embarked on an educational journey and honed her skills at the Suzuki Method until she was 9. It wasn’t until high school in Cass Technical High School that she got musically inclined to jazz violin when her close friend, future jazz singer Carla Cook, introduced her to the music of Ella Fitzgerald, Jean-Luc Ponty, Noel Pointer, and Stephanie Grapelli, who notably convinced her that jazz was her calling. Even in high school she started performing with the Detroit Civic Orchestra, with pop/funk group Brainstorm and pursued jazz studies with Detroit trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, bassist Bob Hurst and organist Lymon Woodard. She then received a degree in music from Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan and moved on to the prestigious New England Conservatory Music in Boston before focusing on her jazz career in 1987.

She first came into the spotlight when she teamed up with New York’s all-female jazz quintet Straight Ahead which included Cynthia Dewberry, Gailyn McKinney, Eileen Orr and Marion Hayden up until the year 1995. Her funky smooth jazz, old style swing and classical quintet music has produced 3 albums for Atlantic jazz label with Carter leaving the group before the release of the third album “Dance of the Forest Rain”. She soon found herself working with Max Roach, the String Trio of New York and the Uptown String Quartet before she recorded her self-titled debut recording “Regina Carter” (1995)and another album dedicated to her mother “Something for Grace”(1997) on Atlantic. Leaving Atlantic Records for Verve Records in 1998, she recorded two more albums “Rhythms of the Heart” and “Motor City Moments”, acclaimed as one of her finest.

December 31, 2001, she recorded “Paganini: After a Dream” for Verve records after playing a concert in Genoa. She became the first jazz musician and the first African-American to play the 250-year old II Cannone Guarnerius violin which was formerly owned by Niccolo Paganini. Also a mentor of the Suzuki method at the Berklee College of Music and Stanford Jazz Workshop, she has also done sessions with Faith Evans, Mary J. Blige and Detroit techno legend Carl Craig.

On the fretful year of 2006, her mother Grace Carter passed and as a tribute to the woman who first encouraged her into music, she recorded and released the album “I’ll Be Seeing You: A Sentimental Journey” which included her violin interpretations of the popular “Sentimental Journey”, “This Can’t be Love” and “A-Tisket, A-Tisket”.

Edited: September 25th, 2011

Amy Winehouse

Multi-awarded Hall of Famer British artist of the 21^st century, Amy Jade Winehouse was popularly known for her powerful contralto vocals and her distinctive fusion of R&B, soul and jazz.

Born on the 14^th of September 1983 in the suburb of Southgate, North London to cab driver Mitch Winehouse and pharmacist Janis Winehouse. She grew up in a jazz environment with her uncles being professional jazz musicians and her grandmother actually having a romantic link with British jazz legend Ronnie Scott.

At the age of 10, she was quite drawn to the rebellious music of TLC, Salt-N-Pepa and other American R&B hiphop artists that she sometimes toyed with her brother’s guitar and composed her own music. Two years later, she was granted a privilege of enrolling at Sylvia Young Theatre School, a prestigious school for the arts. She received her own guitar a year after. She began working as a showbiz journalist for the World Entertainment News Network and had gigs with local group Bolsha band. However, at 16 she was expelled for certain rebellious acts and piercing her nose. In 2002, she signed to Simon Fuller’s 19 Management and was kept an industry secret while she recorded a number of songs and signed a publishing deal with EMI. That same year she was discovered by A&R representative Darcus Beese under Island/Universal Records after her then boyfriend, James Tyler submitted her demo tape to his label A&R.

With her quick rise to fame began with her debut album of “Frank” by producer Salaam Remi in October 20, 2003. In this album she co-wrote most of the songs and made two covers in her own jazz rendition. The positive reviews of her album then compared her being at par or even exceeding the vocal talents of her then idol Sarah Vaughn and Macy Gray. In 2004, her album rose to the UK album charts and was nominated in the BRIT awards in the categories of “British Female Solo Artist” and “British Urban Act”. It went platinum and later on bagged the Ivor Novello Award for Best Contemporary Song together with Salaam Remi for her contribution to the first single “Stronger than Me”.

Winehouse then continued creating and releasing albums with chart-topping songs and bagging awards after awards. Notable one was her album “Back to Black” which won her five awards during the 2008 Grammys Awards for “Record of the Year”, “Song of the Year”, “Best Female Pop Vocal Performance” for the single “Rehab”, “Best Pop Vocal Album”, the “Best New Artist” and her album “Back to black” was nominated “Album of the Year”. In fact all these earned her a spot at the Guinness World Book of Records for Most Grammy Awards won by a British Female Act. Even after that prestigious acknowledgement, Winehouse continued producing chart-topping albums, performing at international concerts and winning more awards.

For Amy Winehouse, the life of an acclaimed British jazz sensation is not all glitz and glamour. In fact, despite all her recognition and contribution to jazz music, she has been an alcoholic and an all-type substance abuser partying and getting wasted in bars and in her own night club “Snakehips at the Monarch” in Camden Monarch venue in London, having this erratic and disturbing behavior, going to rehab and back, as well as getting arrested and jailed a couple of times. She’s another exclaimed tabloid baby next to the infamous Paris Hilton and Britney Spears with so many paparazzi pictures and videos of her smoking crack in the internet and every news or celebrity gossip.

She died the 23^rd of July 2011 at the young age of 27 for reasons yet to be established.

Edited: September 18th, 2011

Joao Gilberto

Hailed as the Father of Bossa Nova and a legendary singer and guitarist, João Gilberto Prado Pereira de Oliveira, most popularly known as Joao Gilberto, was born on June 10, 1931 in Juazeiro, Bahia in Brazil. From a humble beginning as a kid, Joao has always been a Brazilian music enthusiast as he absorbed the rhythmic subtlety of Brazilian pop songs and the rich sounds of swing jazz by Duke Ellington and Tommy Dorsey, as well as the light opera singing of Jeannette MacDonald. At the age of 14, against his father’s great disapproval, his grandfather bought him his first guitar. As a teenager in high school, he formed and led a small band with some of his classmates.

At the age of 18, he headed on to Salvador, Bahia’s largest city, to get a quick grasp of the music industry performing on live radio shows. In 1950, despite unrequited attempts at stardom, his constant radio appearances caught the attention of Antonio Maria who then recruited him to join the vocal quintet Garotos de Luna (Moon Boys) as the lead vocalist. He moved to Rio de Janeiro and became quite passive and stubborn, showing up late for rehearsals or not attending at all that a year and a half later on, he was dismissed from the group.

Between the years 1951 and 1959, Joao’s first recordings were released in Brazil as two-song 78rpm singles and in the ‘60s, after the double compact format evolution, 4 songs on a 45rpm record.  Oftentimes nomadic, he performed in Clube de Chave and other night clubs only when he felt like it and through that gained a circle of friends that included several future stars of Brazilian music namely vocalist Luiz Bonfa and pianist/ composer Antonio Carlos Jobim, who was at times credited for the birth of bossa nova. He had the chance of reaching that certain moment at stardom however, before the hipster era, Joao embarked on a creative but unproductive existence marked by heavy marijuana usage. Hope dawned on him in 1955 when Luiz Tellez, leader of the vocal group Quitandinha Serenaders, took him to Porto Alegre, Southern Brazil where he had his musical epiphany and development.

In the 8 months he spent with his sister Dadainha and her husband, he continued to play day and night creating this new musical style which we now call Bossa Nova. The first Bossa Nova song ever played, “Bim-Bom”, was a song Joao wrote as he came across the laundresses balancing loads of clothes on their heads in the banks of the Sao Francisco River. Disturbed by his eccentric behavior, his sister and her husband sent him back to his parents’ house where he was pushed by his father to be admitted in a mental asylum. After a week of rehabilitation, he finally gave up drug abuse.

Returning to Rio in 1956, Joao started to define Bossa Nova after renewing acquaintance with Jobim and producing “Chega de Saudade” for Odeon Records. Releasing two more albums within 3 years, the Bossa Nova, also known in English as the “New wave” gained much attention and widespread popularity. During the goodwill jazz tour of Latin America sponsored by the US State Department, American jazz guitarist Charlie Byrd discovered his and Jobim’s musical prowess and introduced them to American jazz saxophonist Stan Getz. They recorded the top-selling Bossa nova album “Jazz Samba” which spent 70 weeks on the American pop charts at the top spot. After moving to the US, in 1964 he and Getz recorded “Getz/Gilberto” featuring the all-time favorite hit “The Girl from Ipanema” sung by his then-wife Astrud Gilberto and earned Grammys that year.

Edited: September 11th, 2011

Jeff Golub

“It’s really important as an artist to keep evolving. Too many artists play it safe, especially after they’ve had some success. I never want to recreate what I’ve already done. I always want to take my music to a new place, with no limits as to where it can go.” –Jeff Golub

Contemporary jazz and multi-awarded guitarist, Jeff Golub was born on the 15^th of April 1955 in Akron, Ohio.

Inspired by the blues of the ‘60s guitarists Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and the legendary Jimi Hendrix and after listening to a Wes Montgomery record in his early teens, Jeff found his passion in music and pursued that calling as he entered the Berklee Music College in Boston.

He moved to New York in 1980 and had his first exposure in collaboration with rock star Billy Squier. He appeared in 7 albums and 3 world tours with Billy. Henceforth, he became a highly sought for session player and a sideman for artists such as Ashford and Simpson, John Waite, Peter Wolf, Rod Stewart and Tina Turner.

In 1988 he released his first solo by Gaia Records, “Unspoken Words” which was regarded by the Guitar World as smooth, versatile, full of taste and soul. He joined the Rod Stewart band and played for 8 years. Soon he embraced his role as band leader and instrumentalist when he left the Stewart band in 1995 and formed the contemporary jazz group, which he dubbed “Avenue Blue” in 1994. Their self titled “Bluemoon” debut was an immediate success reaching the second spot on both R&R and The Gavin Report’s contemporary jazz charts. It was hailed by Jazz Times as “An elegant excursion into atmospheric, R&B-touched jazz”. Releasing hits like “Naked City”(1996) and “Night Life”(1997) for Mesa Bluemoon/Atlantic records, Jeff soon left the band and became a solo artist with his debut album “Out of the Blue” released in 1999.

“Out of the Blue” stepped out front with an original collection of the kinetic blend of blues and the soulful melodies of funky Latin jazz like the notable tracks “Lucky Strike” and the evocative “The Velvet Touch”, which established Golub’s musical maturity and acknowledged him as one of today’s most inventive and graceful guitarists.

In 2000, he joined the GRP roster with “Dangerous Curves” that had tracks spending 12 weeks in the top 20. This album hit the Billboard’s Contemporary Jazz Chart with a number 1 and  2 new adult contemporary singles. His other album, “Do it Again” which was his remake of Average White band’s “Cut the Cake”, spent an impressive 6 weeks on the top spot on NAC radio and a number 8 spot at the Billboard’s Contemporary Jazz Chart.

Participating in the Guitars & Saxes tour in 2003 with saxmen Richard Elliot and Steve Cole, and guitarist Peter White, Golub, having this improviser’s mentality, took his fame to a new level as he stressed that his albums had a strong soul-jazz component despite being compared with artists like David Sanborn, Joe Sample, The Crusaders, Ronnie Laws and the late Grover Washington Jr.

Golub’s kinetic blend of jazz, R&B and rock music has epitomized the powerful, evocative and earthbound side of smooth jazz and made him one of the contemporary jazz/blues hottest artists.

Edited: September 4th, 2011