Here is an eclectic selection of jazz musicians born in January, prepared by Louise Levy and Phillip Cant.

Chris Potter
1 January, 1971

Chris Potter is an American jazz saxophonist, composer, and multi-instrumentalist. Potter came to prominence as a sideman with trumpeter Red Rodney, before stints with drummer Paul Motian, bassist Dave Holland, trumpeter Dave Douglas and others.

Naama Gheber
2 January, 1991

Naama Gheber is a New York-based jazz vocalist inspired by the emotionally direct compositions of Rodgers and Hart, Fields and Hugh, Cole Porter and other great composers and lyricist of the 1930’s and ‘40’s. Possessed with an urbane and elegant voice, Gheber’s sensitive interpretation and crisp phrasing have become recognizable elements of her signature style and timeless appeal.

James Carter
3 January, 1969

James Carter is an American jazz musician. He is the cousin of jazz violinist Regina Carter. As a young man, Carter attended Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp, becoming the youngest faculty member at the camp. He first toured Europe (Scandinavia) with the International Jazz Band in 1985 at the age of 16.

John McLaughlin
4 January, 1942

“Spirituality is worthless if it’s not practical. Music is my work. I am a musician. Music speaks from spirit to spirit and in that sense you could call it a true spiritual language.”

John McLaughlin is an English guitarist, bandleader, and composer. A pioneer of jazz fusion, his music combines elements of jazz with rock, world music, Indian classical music, Western classical music, flamenco, and blues. After contributing to several key British groups of the early 1960s, McLaughlin made Extrapolation, his first album as a bandleader, in 1969. He then moved to the U.S., where he played with Tony Williams’s group Lifetime and then with Miles Davis on his electric jazz-fusion albums In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, Jack Johnson, and On the Corner. His 1970s electric band, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, performed a technically virtuosic and complex style of music that fused electric jazz and rock with Indian influences.

Paul Wertico
5 January, 1953

Paul Wertico is an American drummer. He gained recognition as a member of the Pat Metheny Group from 1983 until 2001, leaving the group to spend more time with his family and to pursue other musical interests. Wertico formed Wertico Cain & Gray with multi-instrumentalists David Cain and Larry Gray. Their debut album Sound Portraits (2013) won Best Live Performance Album in the 13th Annual Independent Music Awards. He’s the inventor of TUBZ, made by Pro-Mark, which makes the “Paul Wertico Signature Drum Stick”.

Maurice “Mobetta” Brown
6 January, 1981

Maurice “Mobetta” Brown, originally from Harvey, Illinois is a Grammy Award-winning American jazz trumpeter, producer and composer. As a member of Tedeschi Trucks Band, he shared the 2011 Grammy for Best Blues Album (Revelator). In 2010 he toured internationally with his band Maurice Brown and the Full Effect appearing in such locales as New Delhi, India and Jakarta, Indonesia as well as the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

Henry “Red” Allen
7 January, 1906 – 17 April, 1967

Henry “Red” Allen was an American jazz trumpeter and vocalist whose style has been claimed to be the first to fully incorporate the innovations of Louis Armstrong. Red Allen’s trumpet style has been described, by some critics, as the first to fully incorporate the innovations of Louis Armstrong and to develop an emphasis on phrasing. Allen’s recordings received much favourable attention. His versatility is shown by his winning of Down Beat awards in both the traditional jazz and the modern jazz categories.

Dave Weckl
8 January, 1960

Dave Weckl is an American jazz fusion drummer and leader of the Dave Weckl Band. He was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 2000. Weckl started playing his first set of drums at age 8 in his spare room along to records. He later played in the living room, sometimes with his father on piano. Weckl studied at the University of Bridgeport. Starting out on the New York fusion scene in the early 1980s, Weckl soon began working with artists such as Paul Simon, George Benson, Michel Camilo, Robert Plant and Anthony Jackson.

Bucky Pizzarelli
9 January, 1926 – 1 April, 2020

Bucky Pizzarelli was an American jazz guitarist. He was the father of jazz guitarist John Pizzarelli and double bassist Martin Pizzarelli. He worked for NBC as a staffman for Dick Cavett (1971) and ABC with Bobby Rosengarden in (1952). The list of musicians he collaborated with includes Benny Goodman, Les Paul, Stéphane Grappelli, and Antônio Carlos Jobim. Pizzarelli cited as influences Django Reinhardt, Freddie Green, and George Van Eps.

William Parker
10 January, 1952

William Parker is an American free jazz double bassist, multi-instrumentalist, poet and composer. While Parker has been active since the early 1970s; he has had a higher public profile since the early 1990s. He is a prominent and influential musician in the New York City experimental jazz scene, and has regularly appeared at music festivals around the world.

Lee Ritenour
11 January, 1952

Lee Ritenour is an American jazz guitarist who has been active since the late 1960s. At the age of eight he started playing guitar and four years later decided on a career in music. When he was 16 he played on his first recording session with the Mamas & the Papas. He developed a love for jazz and was influenced by guitarist Wes Montgomery. At the age of 17 he worked with Lena Horne and Tony Bennett. He studied classical guitar at the University of Southern California.

Jay McShann
12 January, 1909 – 7 December, 2006

Jay McShann was a jazz pianist and bandleader. He led bands in Kansas City, Missouri, that included Charlie Parker, Bernard Anderson, Ben Webster, and Walter Brown. He began working as a professional musician in 1931, performing around Tulsa, Oklahoma, and neighboring Arkansas.

Melba Liston
13 January, 1926 – 23 April, 1999

Melba Liston was an American jazz trombonist, arranger, and composer. Other than those playing in all-female bands she was the first woman trombonist to play in big bands during the 1940s and 1960s, but as her career progressed she became better known as an arranger, particularly in partnership with pianist Randy Weston. Other major artists with whom she worked include Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane and Count Basie.

Kenny Wheeler
14 January, 1930 – 18 September, 2014

Kenny Wheeler was a Canadian composer and trumpet and flugelhorn player, based in the U.K. from the 1950s onwards. Most of his performances were rooted in jazz, but he was also active in free improvisation and occasionally contributed to rock music recordings. Wheeler wrote over one hundred compositions and was a skilled arranger for small groups and large ensembles.

Gene Krupa
15 January, 1909 – 16 October, 1973

“I’ll never play a drum solo you can’t dance to.”

Gene Krupa was an American jazz drummer, band leader and composer known for his energetic style and showmanship. His drum solo on “Sing, Sing, Sing” (1937) elevated the role of the drummer from an accompanying line to an important solo voice in the band. In collaboration with the Slingerland drum and Zildjian cymbal manufacturers, he was a major force in defining the standard band drummer’s kit. Krupa is considered “the founding father of the modern drumset” by Modern Drummer magazine.

Sade Adu
16 January, 1959

Sade is a British singer, songwriter, and actress, known as the lead singer of her eponymous band. She has been credited as one of the most successful British female artists in history, and is often recognised as an influence on contemporary music. Her services to music were recognised in the UK with an award of the OBE in 2002, and a CBE in the 2017 Birthday Honours.

Cedar Walton
17 January, 1934 – 19 August, 2013

Cedar Walton was an American hard bop jazz pianist. He came to prominence as a member of drummer Art Blakey’s band before establishing a long career as a bandleader and composer. Many of Walton’s compositions have been adopted as jazz standards, including “Firm Roots”, “Bolivia”, “Holy Land”, “Mode for Joe” and “Cedar’s Blues”. “Bolivia” is perhaps his best-known composition, while one of his oldest is “Fantasy in D”, recorded under the title “Ugetsu” by Art Blakey in 1963, and as “Polar AC” by Freddie Hubbard, first in 1971.

Marilyn Mazur
18 January, 1955

Marilyn Mazur is a Danish percussionist, drummer, composer, vocalist, pianist, dancer, and bandleader. She was born in New York City and has lived in Denmark since age six. Since 1975, she has worked as a percussionist with various groups, among them Six Winds with Alex Riel. Mazur is primarily an autodidact, but she has a degree in percussion from the Royal Danish Academy of Music. She has worked with many musicians, including John Tchicai, Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Gil Evans, Dhafer Youssef, and Makiko Hirabayashi.

Israel Crosby
19 January, 1919 – 11 August, 1962

Israel Crosby was an American jazz double-bassist born in Chicago, Illinois. He started on trumpet at age 5, later taking up tuba and trombone and switching to bass at 15 in 1934. Crosby took to his new instrument as prodigiously as the biblical David took to the sling, making his first records in April 1935 with pianist-singer Charles LaVere. One of the finest to emerge during the 1930s, he was also a member of the Ahmad Jamal trio for most of 1954 to 1962. He is credited with taking one of the first recorded full-length bass solos, on his 1935 recording of “Blues of Israel” with drummer Gene Krupa when he was only 16. His bass lines on classics such as “But Not for Me,” “Poinciana” and everything else he recorded with Jamal, are ingenious masterpieces of melodic invention, harmonic direction, swinging propulsion and subtle orchestration. Crosby died of a heart attack at age 43, two months after joining the Shearing Quintet.

Jimmy Cobb
20 January, 1929 – 24 May, 2020

“Miles could tell me the things he wanted from the drums but I didn’t let him tell me how to play them.”

Wilbur James “Jimmy” Cobb was an American jazz drummer. Before he began his music career, he listened to jazz albums, staying awake into the late hours of the night. He was also exposed to Church music. Cobb started his touring career in 1950 with the saxophonist Earl Bostic. He subsequently performed with vocalist Dinah Washington, pianist Wynton Kelly and saxophonist Cannonball Adderley. From 1958 he was part of Miles Davis’ first great sextet. At the time of his death, he had been the Sextet’s last surviving member for nearly thirty years. He was awarded an NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship in 2009.

Bob Whitlock
21 January, 1931 – 20 June, 2015

Von Varlynn “Bob” Whitlock was a (West Coast) American jazz double-bassist. He began playing bass as a teenager, and was active in Los Angeles as a session musician from the early 1950s. He was the last surviving original member of the Gerry Mulligan Quartet, joining the influential piano-less group in the summer of 1952. He also worked with Art Pepper, Chet Baker, Stan Getz, Buddy DeFranco, Joe Albany, Jack Sheldon, Warne Marsh, and others. He also led his own small group late in the decade and attended the University of California. He worked in France in the early 1960s, playing with Zoot Sims, Vi Redd, Curtis Amy, and Victor Feldman. Later in the decade he worked with Joe Pass and extensively with George Shearing. In the 1970s he worked with Albany once again.

Juan Tizol
22 January, 1900 – 23 April, 1984

“You can say anything you want on the trombone, but you gotta be careful with words.” – Duke Ellington

Juan Tizol Martínez was a Puerto Rican jazz trombonist and composer. Music was a large part of his life from an early age. His first instrument was the violin, but he soon switched to valve trombone, the instrument he played throughout his career. He is best known as a member of Duke Ellington’s big band, and for writing the jazz standards “Caravan”, “Pyramid” and “Perdido”.

Django Reinhardt
23 January, 1910 – 16 May, 1953

“Jazz attracted me because in it I found a formal perfection and instrumental precision that I admire in classical music, but which popular music doesn’t have.”

Jean Reinhardt, known by his Romani nickname Django, was a Belgian-French Manouche or Sinti jazz guitarist and composer. With violinist Stéphane Grappelli, Reinhardt formed the Paris-based group Quintette du Hot Club de France which was among the first to play jazz that featured the guitar as a lead instrument. Reinhardt recorded in France with many visiting American musicians, including Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter, and briefly toured the United States with Duke Ellington’s orchestra in 1946. Reinhardt’s most popular compositions have become standards within gypsy jazz, including “Minor Swing”, “Daphne”, “Belleville”, “Djangology”, “Swing ’42”, and “Nuages”. The jazz guitarist Frank Vignola said that nearly every major popular music guitarist in the world has been influenced by Reinhardt. Over the last few decades, annual Django festivals have been held throughout Europe and the U.S., and February 2017 saw the world premiere of the French biographical film Django, based on his life.

Etta James
25 January, 1938 – 20 January, 2012

“A lot of people think the blues is depressing but that’s not the blues I’m singing. When I’m singing blues, I singing life. People can’t stand to listen to the blues, they’ve got to be phonies.”

Jamesetta Hawkins, known professionally as Etta James, was an American singer and songwriter. Starting her career in 1954, James frequently performed in Nashville’s R&B clubs, collectively known as the Chitlin’ Circuit, in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. She sang in various genres, including gospel, blues, jazz, R&B, rock & roll and soul, and gained fame with hits such as “The Wallflower” (1955), “At Last” (1960), “Something’s Got a Hold on Me” (1962), “Tell Mama”, and “I’d Rather Go Blind” (both 1967). She faced a number of personal problems, including heroin addiction, severe physical abuse and incarceration, before making a musical comeback in the late 1980s with the album Seven Year Itch (1988).

Stéphane Grappelli
26 January, 1908 – 1 December, 1997

“Improvisation, it is a mystery. You can write a book about it, but by the end no one still knows what it is. When I improvise and I’m in good form, I’m like somebody half sleeping. I even forget there are people in front of me. Great improvisers are like priests; they are thinking only of their god.”

Stéphane Grappelli was a French jazz violinist. Born and raised in Paris, Grappelli was involved with music at a very early age. By 12 years, he had acquired his first violin- just one of several instruments he learned to play. He began professionally with theatre bands, eventually being introduced to jazz music. He is best known as a founder of the Quintette du Hot Club de France with guitarist Django Reinhardt in 1934. It was one of the first all-string jazz bands. He has been called “the grandfather of jazz violinists” and continued playing concerts around the world well into his eighties. Occasionally Grappelli would play piano, as when harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler recorded with the group in 1939, the year when Reinhardt (guitar) and Grappelli (violin) first recorded (with delightful results) as a duo.

Bobby Hutcherson
27 January, 1941 – 15 August, 2016

“The whole thing of being in music is not to control it but to be swept away by it. If you’re swept away by it you can’t wait to do it again and the same magical moments always come.”

Robert Hutcherson was an American jazz vibraphone and marimba player. “Little B’s Poem”, from the 1966 Blue Note album Components, is one of his best-known compositions. Hutcherson was exposed to jazz by his brother Teddy, who listened to Art Blakey records in the family home with his friend Dexter Gordon. His older sister Peggy was a singer in Gerald Wilson’s orchestra. Hutcherson went on to record on a number of Gerald Wilson’s Pacific Jazz recordings as well as play in his orchestra. Hutcherson’s sister personally introduced Hutcherson to Eric Dolphy and Billy Mitchell. Hutcherson was inspired to take up the vibraphone when at about the age of 12 he heard Milt Jackson with Thelonious Monk, Percy Heath, Kenny Clarke and Miles Davis playing “Bemsha Swing” on the Miles Davis All Stars, Volume 2 album (1954).

Acker Bilk
28 January, 1929 – 2 November, 2014

“I look at my clarinet sometimes and I think, I wonder what’s going to come out of there tonight? You never know.”

Bernard Stanley “Acker” Bilk was an English clarinetist and vocalist known for his breathy, vibrato-rich, lower-register style, and distinctive appearance – of goatee, bowler hat and striped waistcoat. Bilk’s 1961 instrumental tune “Stranger on the Shore” became the UK’s biggest selling single of 1962, spending 55 weeks on the charts and reaching Number 1. Born in Pensford, Somerset, Bilk earned the nickname “Acker” from the Somerset slang for “friend” or “mate”. His parents tried to teach him the piano but, as a boy, Bilk found it restricted his love of outdoor activities, including football. He lost two front teeth in a school fight and half a finger in a sledging accident, both of which he said affected his eventual clarinet style.

Ed Shaughnessy
29 January, 1929 – 24 May, 2013

“I think I’m playing the best I’ve ever played now. I love that Dizzy Gillespie quote: ‘You finally learn what to leave out.’ As we mature, I think we all learn what to leave out. If you work at your craft every day, you can only get better. So I play every day.” – Shaughnessy at 75

Edwin Thomas Shaughnessy was a swing music and jazz drummer long associated with Doc Severinsen and a member of The Tonight Show Band on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Shaughnessy was born in Jersey City, New Jersey and grew up in the New York City area, working in the 1940s with George Shearing, Jack Teagarden, and Charlie Ventura. In the 1950s he worked in the Charlie Ventura, Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey bands. In the 1960s he played for Count Basie prior to joining The Tonight Show Band. Shaughnessy recorded extensively throughout his career and was known for his drum competitions with Buddy Rich.

Roy Eldridge
30 January, 1911 – 26 February, 1989

“You have to remember the trumpet is a mean instrument, the meanest there is. It’s a damn monster. Sometimes I feel like throwing it out the window, it’s such a beast. There are times when it treats you so sweet and nice that everything comes out just perfect.”

David Roy Eldridge, nicknamed “Little Jazz“, was an American jazz trumpeter. His sophisticated use of harmony, including the use of tritone substitutions, his virtuosic solos exhibiting a departure from the dominant style of jazz trumpet innovator Louis Armstrong, and his strong impact on Dizzy Gillespie mark him as one of the most influential musicians of the swing era and a precursor of bebop.

Bobby Hackett
31 January, 1915 – 7 June, 1976

Robert Leo Hackett was a versatile American jazz musician who played swing music, Dixieland jazz and mood music, now called easy listening, on trumpet, cornet, and guitar. He played Swing with the bands of Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman in the late 1930s and early 1940s, he played Dixieland from the 1930s into the 1970s in a variety of groups with many of the major figures in the field, and he was a featured soloist on the first ten of the numerous Jackie Gleason mood music albums during the 1950s.