![]() ![]() I saw him at a free outdoor festival on Roosevelt Island, playing standards to a mix of out-jazz diehards and neighborhood folks who’d wandered by with their kids, because the music was outside and didn’t cost them anything. They worked together to get Logan’s life back on track he made an album that included Dave Burrell on piano, and played some gigs here and there. Years later, he was homeless and playing in Tompkins Square Park when fellow musician Matt Lavelle, who worked at Sam Ash Music in Manhattan, befriended him. Those records were intense, though his playing was a rough squawk, with as deep a sense of the blues as anyone since Ornette Coleman. He made two albums for ESP-Disk in 1965 and ’66, then drifted off the scene. Check him out on Cecil Taylor’s Conquistador! and Unit Structures Sonny Rollins’ Our Man In Jazz Pharoah Sanders’ Tauhid and, post-comeback, Marc Ribot’s Spiritual Unity. He was an astonishingly powerful bassist, capable of holding his own in any situation, but he displayed a remarkable sensitivity too he listened deeply and never tried to dominate the music until it was his moment to make a statement. I saw him play a few times, at the Vision Festival and once with Cecil Taylor and drummer Pheeroan akLaff. When he was rediscovered in 2002, William Parker gave him a bass and he returned to the scene. As it turned out, he’d moved to California and been unable to find musical work, so he took straight jobs and disappeared. But at the end of the decade, he vanished, and nobody heard from him for over three decades. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he was a phenomenon, playing with Sonny Rollins, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Frank Wright, Sunny Murray, Don Cherry, Pharoah Sanders, and many more. He was one of free jazz’s great comeback stories. He was also a teacher for many years.īassist Henry Grimes was 84. As a leader, he had some late ’80s and early ’90s albums, That Special Part Of Me and Dare To Dream, that were big on smooth jazz radio. ![]() He played with drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson’s Decoding Society on the latter man’s 1985 album Decode Yourself, and in 2013 recorded a solo piano album of Jackson compositions. He was a wide-ranging player who could do anything from smooth R&B-tinged jazz with drummer Norman Connors - the song “You Are My Starship,” with vocals by Michael Henderson (the bassist in Miles Davis’s mid-‘70s band) was a Top 40 hit - to avant-garde work with bassist Cecil McBee on the 1974 album Mutima to stunningly high-level acoustic hard bop with Woody Shaw on discs like Rosewood and Stepping Stones: Live At The Village Vanguard. Here are the ones that have stuck with me the most. Since my last column, there has been a wave of deaths in the jazz world, many of them related to COVID-19. ![]()
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January 2023
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