Here is an eclectic selection of jazz musicians, born in December, prepared by Louise Levy and Phillip Cant
Jaco Pastorius
1 December, 1951 – 21 September, 1987
“Music is the only thing keeping the planet together.”
Jaco Pastorius was an American jazz bassist who was a member of Weather Report from 1976 to 1981. He worked with Pat Metheny and Joni Mitchell, and recorded albums as a solo artist and band leader. His bass playing employed funk, lyrical solos, bass chords, and innovative harmonics. As of 2017, he is the only electric bassist of seven bassists inducted into the DownBeat Jazz Hall of Fame, and has been lauded as one of the best electric bassists of all time.
Wynton Kelly
2 December, 1931 – 12 April, 1971
“Music had to be accessible, entertaining and easy to dance to”
Wynton Kelly was an American jazz pianist and composer. He is known for his lively, blues-based playing and as one of the finest accompanists in jazz. He began playing professionally at the age of 12 and was pianist on a No. 1 R&B hit at the age of 16. His recording debut as a leader occurred three years later, around the time he started to become better known as an accompanist to singer Dinah Washington, and as a member of trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie’s band. Over the next few years, these included instrumentalists Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane, Hank Mobley, Wes Montgomery, and Sonny Rollins, and vocalists Betty Carter, Billie Holiday, and Abbey Lincoln. Kelly attracted the most attention as part of Miles Davis’ band from 1959, including an appearance on the trumpeter’s Kind of Blue, often mentioned as the best-selling jazz album ever.
Melissa Aldana
3 December, 1988
Melissa Aldana was born in Santiago, Chile. Aldana began with alto, influenced by artists such as Charlie Parker, Cannonball Adderley and Michael Brecker. However, upon first hearing the music of Sonny Rollins, she switched to tenor. She started performing in Santiago jazz clubs in her early teens. Aldana graduated from Berklee in 2009, relocating to New York City to study under George Coleman. She recorded her first album, Free Fall. In 2012 Aldana had formed a group, Melissa Aldana & Crash Trio.
Jim Hall
4 December, 1930 – 10 December, 2013
Jim Hall moved with his family to Cleveland, Ohio during his childhood. He began playing the guitar at the age of 10 when his mother gave him an instrument as a Christmas present. At 13 he heard Charlie Christian play on a Benny Goodman record, which he calls his “spiritual awakening”. Jim Hall insisted a lot on the aural aspect of improvising music, stating that “Players should force themselves to hear something and then play it, rather than just do whatever comes under their fingers. I try to make my playing as fresh as possible by not relying on set patterns.”
Enrico Pieranunzi
5 December, 1949
Enrico Pieranunzi is an Italian jazz pianist. He combines classical technique with jazz. He studied classical music until 1973 when he became a Professor of Music and maintained that post for two years. In 1975 he left his teaching practice and played in trios and small ensembles. He has recorded over 60 albums. He has also been prolific as a session musician.
Dave Brubeck
6 December, 1920 – 5 December, 2012
“There’s a way of playing safe, there’s a way of using tricks and there’s the way I like to play which is dangerously where you’re going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven’t created before.”
Dave Brubeck was an American jazz pianist and composer, considered one of the foremost exponents of cool jazz. Many of his compositions have become jazz standards including “In Your Own Sweet Way” and “The Duke”. Brubeck’s style ranged from refined to bombastic, reflecting both his mother’s classical training and his own improvisational skills. His music is known for employing unusual time signatures as well as superimposing contrasting rhythms, meters, and tonalities. Brubeck experimented with time signatures throughout his career, recording “Pick Up Sticks” and “Unsquare Dance”. He was also a composer of orchestral and sacred music and wrote soundtracks for television.
Matthew Shipp
7 December, 1960
“What makes bebop legitimate is the fact that when it was done, it was illegitimate.”
Matthew Shipp is an American pianist, composer, and bandleader. Shipp was raised in Wilmington, Delaware, and began playing piano at six years old. His mother was a friend of trumpeter Clifford Brown. He was strongly attracted to jazz, but also played in rock groups while in high school. Shipp attended the University of Delaware for one year, then the New England Conservatory of Music, where he studied with saxophonist/composer Joe Maneri. He has cited private lessons with Dennis Sandole (who also taught saxophonist John Coltrane) as being crucial to his development. Shipp moved to New York in 1984 and has been very active since the early 1990s, appearing on dozens of albums as a leader, sideman, or producer.
Jimmy Smith
8 December, 1925 – 8 February, 2005
Jimmy Smith was an American jazz musician whose albums often charted on Billboard magazine. He helped popularize the Hammond B-3 organ, creating a link between jazz and 1960s soul music. While the electric organ had been used in jazz by Fats Waller, Count Basie, Wild Bill Davis and others, Smith’s virtuoso improvisation technique on the Hammond helped to popularize the electric organ as a jazz and blues instrument. In 2005, Smith was awarded the NEA Jazz Masters Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the highest honour that America bestows upon jazz musicians.
Donald Byrd
9 December, 1932 – 4 February, 2013
“I skipped school one day to see Dizzy Gillespie, and that’s where I met Coltrane. Coltrane and Jimmy Heath just joined the band, and I brought my trumpet, and he was sitting at the piano downstairs waiting to join Dizzy’s band. He had his saxophone across his lap, and he looked at me and he said, ‘You want to play?“
Donald Byrd was an American jazz and rhythm & blues trumpeter and vocalist. A sideman for many other jazz musicians of his generation, Byrd was known as one of the rare bebop jazz musicians who successfully explored funk and soul while remaining a jazz artist. As a bandleader, Byrd was an influence on the early career of Herbie Hancock.
Diane Schuur
10 December, 1953
Nicknamed “Deedles“, Diane Schuur is an American jazz singer and pianist. As of 2015, Schuur had released 23 albums and had extended her jazz repertoire to include essences of Latin, gospel, pop and country music. Her most successful album is Diane Schuur & the Count Basie Orchestra, which remained number one on the Billboard Jazz Charts for 33 weeks. She won Grammy Awards for best female jazz vocal performance in both 1986 and 1987 and has had three other Grammy nominations. Schuur has performed in venues such as Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, and the White House, and has performed with many artists including Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Quincy Jones, and Stevie Wonder. Co-performers on Schuur’s albums have included Barry Manilow, José Feliciano, Maynard Ferguson, Stan Getz, Vince Gill, Alison Krauss, and B.B. King. Her album with B.B. King was number one on the Billboard Jazz Charts.
McCoy Tyner
11 December, 1938 – 6 March, 2020
McCoy Tyner was an American jazz pianist known for his work with the John Coltrane Quartet and a long solo career. He was an NEA Jazz Master and a five-time Grammy winner. Not a player of electric keyboards and synthesizers, he was committed to acoustic instrumentation. Tyner, who was widely imitated, was one of the most recognizable and most influential pianists in jazz history. Tyner was named a 2002 NEA Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts. He won five Grammy Awards, for The Turning Point and Journey and best instrumental jazz album for Illuminations, Infinity, and Blues for Coltrane: A Tribute to John Coltrane.
Tony Williams
12 December, 1945 – 23 February, 1997
“Drummers don’t write – or at least, that’s what everybody believes.”
Tony Williams was an American jazz drummer. Williams first gained fame in the band of trumpeter Miles Davis and pioneered jazz fusion. He was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1986. Born in Chicago and growing up in Boston, Williams began studies with master drummer Alan Dawson at an early age and began playing professionally at the age of 13 with saxophonist Sam Rivers. Jackie McLean hired Williams at 16. At 17 Williams found considerable fame with Miles Davis, joining a group that was later dubbed Davis’s “Second Great Quintet.” His first album as a leader, 1964’s Life Time (not to be confused with the name of his band “Lifetime,” which he formed several years later) was recorded during his tenure with Davis.
Mark Elf
13 December, 1949
An excellent bop-based guitarist, Mark Elf created a stir with his own small-group recordings. He attended Berklee (1969-1971), picked up experience playing with a who’s who of modern mainstream jazz (including Wynton Marsalis, Clark Terry, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Benny Golson, Al Grey, Branford Marsalis, and Slide Hampton), and has recorded as a sideman with Lou Donaldson, Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson, Wynton Marsalis, Jon Hendricks, and others. Elf spent time with Jimmy Heath’s group, but has achieved his greatest recognition thus far with his recordings for the Jen Bay Jazz label and a set recorded in Chile (Alerce) made available in the U.S. His album roster supported by Jen Bay includes: Eternal Triangle (1988), Trickynometry (1997), and Over the Airwaves (2000). Swingin’ followed in early 2001.
Anna Maria Jopek
14 December, 1970
Anna Maria Jopek is a Polish vocalist, songwriter, and improviser. She represented her country in the 1997 Eurovision Song Contest, with the song “Ale jestem” and finished 11th out of 25 participating acts; and in 2002, she collaborated on an album with jazz guitarist Pat Metheny. She has received numerous awards for her music, including Michel Legrand’s Personal Award in Vitebsk in 1994, as well as all of the awards for music in Poland, together with gold and platinum records.
Eddie Palmieri
15 December, 1936
Eddie Palmieri is a Grammy Award-winning pianist, bandleader, musician, and composer of Puerto Rican ancestry. He is the founder of the bands La Perfecta, La Perfecta II, and Harlem River Drive. Palmieri continued his education in the city’s public school system where he was constantly exposed to music, specifically jazz. He took piano lessons and performed at Carnegie Hall when he was 11 years old. His main influences were Thelonious Monk and McCoy Tyner.
John Abercrombie
16 December, 1944 – 22 August, 2017
John Abercrombie was an American jazz guitarist. His work explored jazz fusion, free jazz, and avant-garde jazz. Abercrombie studied at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. He was known for his understated style and his work with organ trios. Growing up in the 1950s in Greenwich, Connecticut he was attracted to the rock and roll of Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Fats Domino, and Bill Haley and the Comets. He also liked the sound of jazz guitarist Mickey Baker of the vocal duo Mickey and Silvia. He had two friends who were musicians with a large jazz collection. They played him albums by Dave Brubeck and Miles Davis.
James Booker
17 December, 1939 – 8 November, 1983
“Human nature is the reason why I play the piano the way I do. But no just ordinary human nature — some people say I’m a freak of nature.”
James Booker was a New Orleans rhythm and blues keyboardist born in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. Booker’s unique style combined rhythm and blues with jazz standards. Musician Dr. John described Booker as “the best black, gay, one-eyed junkie piano genius New Orleans has ever produced.” Flamboyant in personality, he was known as “the Black Liberace”. A feature-length documentary about Booker titled Bayou Maharajah: The Tragic Genius of James Booker, directed by Lily Keber, premiered at the SXSW festival on March 14, 2013.
Wadada Leo Smith
18 December, 1941
Wadada Leo Smith is an American trumpeter and composer, working primarily in the fields of avant-garde jazz and free improvisation. He was one of three finalists for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Music for Ten Freedom Summers, released on May 22, 2012. Smith was born in Leland, Mississippi. He started out playing drums, mellophone, and French horn before he settled on the trumpet. He played in various R&B groups and by 1967 became a member of the AACM and co-founded the Creative Construction Company, a trio with Leroy Jenkins and Anthony Braxton. In 1971, Smith formed his own label, Kabell. He also formed another band, the New Dalta Ahkri, with members including Henry Threadgill, Anthony Davis and Oliver Lake.
Bob Brookmeyer
December 19, 1929 – December 16, 2011
“A Jazz man should be saying what he feels: humor, sadness, joy… all the things that humans have.“
Bob Brookmeyer was an American jazz valve trombonist, pianist, arranger, and composer. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Brookmeyer first gained widespread public attention as a member of Gerry Mulligan’s quartet from 1954 to 1957. He later worked with Jimmy Giuffre, before rejoining Mulligan’s Concert Jazz Band. He garnered 8 Grammy Award nominations during his lifetime.
In June 2005, Brookmeyer joined ArtistShare and announced a project to fund an upcoming third album featuring his New Art Orchestra. The resulting Grammy-nominated CD, titled Spirit Music, was released in 2006. Brookmeyer was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in the same year.”
Larry Willis
December 20, 1942 – September 29, 2019
“Every time I sit down at the piano, the more I learn about it, the more I don’t know. That keeps my interest in this music, in all forms. I’m trying to be not just a better pianist, but the best complete musician that I can be.”
Larry Willis was an American jazz pianist and composer. He performed in a wide range of styles, including jazz fusion, Afro-Cuban jazz, bebop, and avant-garde. Willis was born in New York City. After his first year studying music theory at the Manhattan School of Music he began performing regularly with Jackie McLean. After he graduated he made his first jazz recording, McLean’s Right Now! in January 1965, which featured two of Willis’ compositions. His first recording of any type, however, was as a singer with the Music and Arts Chorale Ensemble, performing an opera by Aaron Copland under the direction of Leonard Bernstein.
Hank Crawford
December 21, 1934 – January 29, 2009
“You can honk or squeal on a tenor sax and get away with it, but an alto sax was meant to sing. My approach to playing is vocal. It’s not a technical approach. It’s like singing. You can almost hear the words instrumentally. When I pick up my horn, I’m never far away from the voices in the church choir I grew up with.”
Hank Crawford was an American R&B, hard bop, jazz-funk, soul jazz alto saxophonist, arranger and songwriter. Crawford was musical director for Ray Charles before embarking on a solo career releasing many well-regarded albums on Atlantic, CTI and Milestone.
He began formal piano studies at the age of nine and was soon playing for his church choir. His father had brought an alto saxophone home from the service and when Hank entered Manassas High School, he took it up in order to join the band. He credits Charlie Parker, Louis Jordan, Earl Bostic and Johnny Hodges as early influences.
John Patitucci
December 22, 1959
“The obvious priority is to get your intonation together. Your sound and your pitch should be inspiring to people, not a distraction. It is really refreshing to hear a big band that has the ability to execute ensemble passages with swing and precision while retaining a “small group” feel during the solo sections. This kind of “tight, loose” approach is seldom heard in big bands, whether they are professional or not. Now, all the band needs is to hit the road and take the music around the world!”
John Patitucci is an American jazz bassist and composer. When he was 12 he bought his first bass and decided on his career. He listened to bass parts in R&B songs on the radio and on his grandfather’s jazz records. He cites as influences Oscar Peterson’s albums with Ray Brown and Wes Montgomery’s with Ron Carter. For the development of rhythm, he points to the time he has spent with, a pianist from Panama.
In the late 1970s he studied acoustic bass at San Francisco State University and Long Beach State University. He began his professional career when he moved to Los Angeles in 1980 and made connections with Henry Mancini, Dave Grusin, and Tom Scott.”
Chet Baker
December 23, 1929 – May 13, 1988
“I’m definitely a romantic, I don’t think life is really worth all the pain and effort and struggling if you don’t have somebody that you love very much. You don’t know what love is, until you’ve learned the meaning of the blues, until you’ve loved a love you’ve had to lose.”
Chet Baker was an American jazz trumpeter and vocalist. He is known for major innovations within the cool jazz subgenre leading him to be nicknamed the “prince of cool”.
Baker earned much attention and critical praise through the 1950s, particularly for albums featuring his vocals (Chet Baker Sings, It Could Happen to You). Jazz historian Dave Gelly described the promise of Baker’s early career as “James Dean, Sinatra, and Bix, rolled into one.” His well-publicized drug habit also drove his notoriety and fame. Baker was in and out of jail frequently before enjoying a career resurgence in the late 1970s and ‘80s.”
Ray Bryant
December 24, 1931 – June 2, 2011
“He could sense when you weren’t relaxed and would say, ‘Take your time and breathe!’ He also taught me about pacing a set. I still use his format today. An idea will just come to me while I’m doing something else and if it sticks, I develop it into a tune.”
Ray Bryant was an American jazz pianist, composer, and arranger. Ray began playing the piano around the age of six or seven, following the example of his mother and his sister, Vera. Gospel influences in his playing came from being part of the church at this stage in his early life. He had switched from classical music to jazz by his early teens, and played the double bass at junior high school. He was first paid to play when he was 12: “I would play for dances, and they’d sneak me into bars. I’d get four or five bucks a night, which was good money then.” He turned professional aged 14, and immediately joined a local band led by Mickey Collins.”
Bob James
December 25, 1939
“I must say that this field has given me this opportunity. I think the stamp of jazz being American music makes it a very special thing in foreign countries and it gives us the opportunity of getting invited there, and to me, at least, I felt a responsibility to try to give something back and to try to learn from their culture and to try to do what actually has always been an important thing to me, is to have a kind of eclectic feeling in my music and to reinterpret either melodies or sounds from other genres and blend them into jazz.”
Bob James is an American jazz keyboardist, arranger, and record producer. He founded the band Fourplay and wrote “Angela”, the theme song for the TV show Taxi. Music from his first seven albums has often been sampled and has contributed to the formation of hip hop.
His first professional music job was when he was eight years old, playing for a tap dance class at Mercy Academy. During his adolescence, James music career proliferated. Early jobs included being a member of the Earle Parsons Dance Band (c. 1952–55) which played various engagements around the Marshall area. During this time, he penned his first dance band arrangement. During the summer of 1955, at Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, James played for dancing and occasional jam sessions with the Bob Falkenhainer Quartet on the Governor McClurg Excursion Boat in the evenings.”
John Scofield
December 26, 1951
“…The key to playing with any group is you listen all the time and you listen more than you play. Sound is what drives my solos, not verbal concepts, I never think ‘I’m going to use a Lydian Dominant scale and then go up a half-step’, even though that might be exactly what I end up doing.”
“…sometimes referred to as “Sco”, is an American jazz-rock guitarist and composer whose music includes bebop, jazz fusion, funk, blues, soul, and rock. He has worked with Miles Davis, Dave Liebman, Joe Henderson, Charles Mingus, Joey DeFrancesco, Herbie Hancock, Eddie Palmieri, Pat Metheny… Educated at the Berklee College of Music, Scofield left school to record with Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan. He joined the Billy Cobham/George Duke Band soon after and spent two years playing, recording, and touring with them. He recorded with Charles Mingus in 1976 and replaced Pat Metheny in Gary Burton’s
Bill Crow
December 27, 1927
“My reading was good enough to play big-band charts, but I ran into trouble with Claude (Thornhill)’s theme song “Snowfall,” which had a repeating bass line in D-flat that was very difficult for me to finger using my self-taught technique. I spent one morning figuring out an alternate fingering, and that started me on the way to learning a better use of the fingerboard.”
Bill Crow is an American jazz bassist. Among other work, Crow was the long-term bassist in saxophonist Gerry Mulligan’s bands in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1950, Crow moved to New York City. Within two years of starting to play the double bass, he played with Teddy Charles and was with Stan Getz from October 1952 to April of the following year. He was part of Gerry Mulligan’s groups as a bassist during the mid to late 1950s. Crow joined the house band at Eddie Condon’s club in 1965 and then played with Walter Norris’s small group, which was one of the house bands at the Playboy Club in New York (1965–71). From 1975 into the late 1990s he worked in theater orchestras for Broadway shows (where he sometimes played tuba).
Earl Hines
December 28, 1903 – 22 April, 1983
“You may have holes in your shoes, but don’t let people out front know it. Shine the tops.”
“I don’t think I think when I play. I have a photographic memory for chords, and when I’m playing,
the right chords appear in my mind like photographs long before I get to them.”
“I always challenge myself. I get out in deep water and I always try to get back. But I get hung up.
The audience never knows, but that’s when I smile the most, when I show the most ivory.”
Earl “Father” Hines was an American jazz pianist and bandleader. He was one of the most influential figures in the development of jazz piano and, according to one source, “one of a small number of pianists whose playing shaped the history of jazz”. The trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie (a member of Hines’s big band, along with Charlie Parker) wrote, “The piano is the basis of modern harmony. This little guy came out of Chicago, Earl Hines. He changed the style of the piano. You can find the roots of Bud Powell, Herbie Hancock, all the guys who came after that. If it hadn’t been for Earl Hines blazing the path for the next generation to come, it’s no telling where or how they would be playing now. There were individual variations but the style of … the modern piano came from Earl Hines.
Danilo Pérez
December 29, 1966
“Jazz wants to know who you are. Jazz questions what you are afraid of. Jazz tells you, “I dare you.” Jazz asks, “Who are you? Where do you come from? What did you want to say? What is your story?” Remember this music has a very strong connection with Africa…so it’s a folk-rooted music. So the more I understand where I come from, I move an inch closer to playing jazz. Jazz isn’t this intellectual exercise of hipness. It wasn’t born out of that. It was born out of a voice of freedom. The more I look into jazz, the more I found my culture.”
Danilo Pérez is a Panamanian pianist, composer, educator, and a social activist. His music is a blend of Panamanian roots with elements of Latin American folk music, jazz, European impressionism, African, and other musical heritages that promote music as a multi-dimensional bridge between people. He has released 11 albums as a leader, and appeared on many recordings as a side man, which have earned him critical acclaim, numerous accolades, Grammy Awards wins and nominations. He is a recipient of the United States Artists Fellowship, and the 2009 Smithsonian Legacy Award.
Lewis Nash
December 30, 1958
“It’s all about context: the musical environment, the other players, the music itself. Considering all that, I always look at what’s required to make the music work. I am a huge NBA fan. When a player, in basketball or music, changes environment, you have to make adjustments; then styles or approaches to the music can be different. I adjust to play different styles of music while maintaining my identity. You do that by thinking music first. I don’t think about my approach consciously; I’m thinking about the music first.”
Lewis Nash is an American jazz drummer. According to Modern Drummer magazine, Nash has one of the longest discographies in jazz and has played on over 400 records, earning him the honor of Jazz’s Most Valuable Player by the magazine in its May 2009 issue. Nash is noted for his adaptability to a vast array of genres, as evidenced by his performances with such different musicians as Tommy Flanagan and Don Pullen. Nash has made 5 recordings as bandleader: Rhythm is My Business (1989), It Don’t Mean a Thing (2003 Japanese import) and Stompin’ at the Savoy (2005 Japanese import), Lewis Nash and the Bebop All-Stars featuring Frank Wess (2008 Japanese Import), and The Highest Mountain (2012). In 2008, Nash became part of The Blue Note 7, a septet formed that year in honour of the 70th anniversary of Blue Note Records.
Jonah Jones
December 31, 1909 – April 29, 2000
“You never can say which way things are going in this business. Like myself, I had no idea it was going to happen for me. With bebop on the scene and people turning to rock-and-roll I couldn’t have made it no way, wouldn’t have bet ten cents on it. But here it come.”
Jonah Jones was a jazz trumpeter who created concise versions of jazz and swing and jazz standards that appealed to a mass audience. In the jazz community, he is known for his work with Stuff Smith. He was sometimes referred to as “King Louis II,” a reference to Louis Armstrong. Jones started playing alto saxophone at the age of 12 in the Booker T. Washington Community Center band in Louisville, Kentucky, before quickly transitioning to trumpet, where he excelled. He began in the 1920s playing on Mississippi riverboats and then in 1928 he joined with Horace Henderson. He was inducted into the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame in 1999 and died the following year in New York City.