Greg Osby
Saxophonist Greg Osby, born in St. Louis on August 3, 1960, first gained fame in the Eighties as one of the movers and shakers of M-Base, a loosely knit group of New York based musicians exploring new ways to structure music that combines composition and improvisation.
While Osby is certainly a heady conceptualist, he's never lost touch with his musical or geographic roots, as exemplified by his 2003 CD St. Louis Shoes, an adventurous work that incorporated some of the emotional content of the blues, soul and funk Osby learned growing up here, as well as the expected intellectual rigor. (Osby appeared on Tavis Smiley's old NPR show to discuss the the CD, and you can hear a Real Audio file of the interview and some musical excerpts here.)
After taking a Sonny Rollins-like sabbatical a few years back, Osby is now in a very productive period of his career. In just the last two weeks, he's been featured in the premiere episode of a new show on the Bravo cable network called Solos; performed at the Umbria Jazz Festival in Italy, and released a new CD.
His Web site is a good one, and includes an extensive selection of live recordings, both individual tunes and entire performances, that are available as free MP3s. And Osby is an interesting interview subject, as demonstrated in this conversation with Dr. Billy Taylor and these interviews from All About Jazz and JazzWeekly.com. (The latter has some particularly juicy stuff about the economics of jazz album production and sales in today's marketplace.) Musicians may also enjoy checking out this transcription of Osby's solo on "East St. Louis Toodle-oo" to get a sense of how he approaches a very well-known composition in his own way.
(edited to fix a photo problem 8/4/05)
No comments:
Post a Comment