Word: sideman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Died. Henry ("Red") Allen, 59, husky-voiced Negro singer and jazz trumpeter, who started playing the horn at eight in his father's New Orleans marching band, wailed his way to fame as a sideman and soloist with King Oliver, Fletcher Henderson and Louis Armstrong in the 1920s and '30s, later formed his own group, became a fixture at Manhattan's Metropole Cafe and Newport Jazz Festivals; of cancer; in Manhattan...
...would never play again. Though he has had three seizures since, he still keeps pounding away. "I've got to," he exclaims. "What am I going to do? Sit around the house and bite my nails?" Not content to be just the highest-paid ($1,500 a week) sideman in music, he left Harry James's band in March "to put music back in its perspective, to offer something else than just twang, twang, twang." His new band, he says, has nothing to do with nostalgia. "Who the hell wants to hear the Glenn Miller sound? I dress...
Boom-Boom. Back in the U.S. the combo's "ethnic jazz" gained a wide audience. But in the mounting din of his drummers Mann found himself becoming "a sideman in my own group" and he fled to Brazil. He came back playing a new music that helped touch off the bossa-nova craze...
...says quietly, "by listening to other pianists. I suppose I'm playing differently now than I did a few years ago-but that's just because I don't practice as much as I used to." Such fondness for the shadows makes him the perfect sideman; last year he made 25 jazz albums, none of which listed him as leader. Among new recordings, three of the best have one thing in common: Flanagan's uplifting presence. On Moodsville's Make Someone Happy, he is the artful tailor who sews up the holes in Coleman Hawkins...
Drummer James Bradley Jr. looks like the very spirit of the sideman-brow intent, eyes unsmiling, face masked in hazy boredom. When Los Angeles television station KTLA signed him to a 26-week contract last month, no one was surprised: Bradley is an exceptional drummer. He can play three-beat rhythms with one hand while he plays four-beat with the other. He can switch hands instantly to travel from the bone-dry clatter of the wood block to the rich depth of the snare...