Here is an eclectic selection of jazz musicians, born in October, prepared by Louise Levy and Phillip Cant
Dave Holland
1 October, 1946
“I think that what is important is that the music be honest and direct and that it is relevant to today. I think music needs to be of its time and speak to that time.”
Dave Holland is an English jazz double bassist, composer and bandleader who has been performing and recording for five decades. His work ranges from pieces for solo performance to big band. Holland runs his own independent record label, Dare2, which he launched in 2005.
Django Bates
2 October, 1960
Django Bates is a British composer, multi-instrumentalist, bandleader and educator. He plays the piano, keyboards and the tenor horn and writes large-scale compositions on commission. He has been described as “One of the most talented musicians Britain has produced”, and his work covers the entire spectrum of jazz, from early jazz through bebop and free jazz to jazz-rock fusion.
Von Freeman
3 October, 1922 – 13 August, 2012
Von Freeman was an American hard bop jazz tenor saxophonist. Freeman’s father taught him to play piano and bought him his first saxophone when he was seven. Freeman enlisted into the Navy during World War II. After his return to Chicago, where he remained for the duration of his career, Freeman played with his brothers George on guitar and Eldridge “Bruz” Freeman on drums at the Pershing Hotel Ballroom. Various leading jazzmen such as Charlie Parker, Roy Eldridge and Dizzy Gillespie played there with the Freemans as the backing band. In the early 1950s.
Steve Swallow
4 October, 1940
Steve Swallow noted for his collaborations with Jimmy Giuffre, Gary Burton, and Carla Bley. He was one of the first jazz double bassists to switch entirely to electric bass guitar. Swallow studied piano and trumpet, as a child, before turning to the double bass at age 14. While attending a prep school, he began trying his hand in jazz improvisation. In 1960, he left Yale, where he was studying composition, and settled in New York City, playing at the time in Jimmy Giuffre’s trio along with Paul Bley. After joining Art Farmer’s quartet in 1963, Swallow began to write. It is in the 1960s that his long-term association with Gary Burton’s various bands began.
Tord Gustavsen
5 October, 1970
“Jazz today is at a very fascinating crossroads between staying in touch with its pure history and being a part of different scenes—contemporary music, pop music and world music scenes. This complexity can be confusing, but it is precisely in this complexity that the music develops, with individuals developing their own synthesis and cultivating unique voices.”
Tord Gustavsen is a Norwegian jazz pianist and composer. He tours extensively worldwide, and he has been a bandleader for a trio, ensemble and quartet at various times, all bearing his name. He attended the Trondheim Musikkonsevatorium for a three years study of jazz (1993–96). Thereafter he became a graduate (Cand.philol.) of musicology at the University of Oslo, where he was a guest teacher of jazz piano and theory (1998–2002). In addition, he has recorded as a session musician, and guested on friends’ albums. Collaborative projects have included Norwegian jazz vocalist and songwriter Silje Nergaard.
Mark Whitfield
6 October, 1966
Mark Whitfield graduated from Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music, the world’s foremost institution for the study of Jazz and modern American music in the spring of 1987. Shortly thereafter, he returned to his native New York to embark on a career as a Jazz Guitarist that afforded him the opportunity to collaborate with legendary artists including Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Quincy Jones, Ray Charles, Herbie Hancock. In 1990, the New York Times dubbed Whitfield “The Best Young Guitarist in the Business”. Later that year, Warner Bros. released his debut album “The Marksman”. The success of his debut release led to a recording career that has produced a total of 14 solo recordings and a myriad of collaborative efforts with some of the most important artists in recent years; Sting, Steven Tyler, Mary J. Blige, John Mayer, Chaka Khan, Jill Scott, Diana Krall, Christian McBride.
Larry Young
7 October, 1940
Raised in Newark, New Jersey, Young attended Newark Arts High School, where he began performing with a vocal group and a jazz band andwas an American jazz organist and occasional pianist. Young’s early work was strongly influenced by the soul-jazz of Jimmy Smith, but Young later pioneered a more experimental, modal approach to the Hammond B-3.
Pepper Adams
8 October, 1930 – 10 September, 1986
Pepper Adams was an American jazz baritone saxophonist and composer. He composed 42 pieces, was the leader on eighteen albums spanning 28 years, and participated in 600 sessions as a sideman. He worked with an array of musicians, and had especially fruitful collaborations with trumpeter Donald Byrd and as a member of the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Big Band.
Kenny Garrett
9 October, 1960
“Rather than simply say, I play jazz, I say I play music.”
Kenny Garrett is an American post-bop jazz saxophonist and flautist who gained recognition in his youth as a member of the Duke Ellington Orchestra and of Miles Davis’s band. Since then, he has pursued a solo career. In 1984, he recorded his first album as a bandleader, Introducing Kenny Garrett, on the CrissCross label.
Thelonious Monk
10 October, 1917 – 17 February, 1982
“You’ve got to dig it to dig it, you dig?”
Thelonious Monk was an American jazz pianist and composer. He had a unique improvisational style and made numerous contributions to the standard jazz repertoire, including “‘Round Midnight”, “Blue Monk”, “Straight, No Chaser”, “Ruby, My Dear”, “In Walked Bud”, and “Well, You Needn’t”. Monk is the second-most-recorded jazz composer after Duke Ellington. Monk’s compositions and improvisations feature dissonances and angular melodic twists and are consistent with his unorthodox approach to the piano, which combined a highly percussive attack with abrupt, dramatic use of switched key releases, silences, and hesitations.
Art Blakey
11 October, 1919 – 16 October, 1990
“Jazz washes away the dust of every day life.”
Art Blakey was an American jazz drummer and bandleader. He was briefly known as Abdullah Ibn Buhaina after he converted to Islam for a short time in the late 1940s. Blakey made a name for himself in the 1940s in the big bands of Fletcher Henderson and Billy Eckstine. He then worked with bebop musicians Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. In the mid-1950s, Horace Silver and Blakey formed the Jazz Messengers, a group that the drummer was associated with for the next 35 years.
Nancy Kelly
12 October, 1950
Nancy Kelly is a jazz singer known for blues, swing, and bebop music. Kelly was born October 12, 1950 in Rochester, New York and began studying music at the age of four. She studied voice at the Eastman School of Music and studied piano, clarinet, drama and dance with private instructors. She gravitated to jazz because of the freedom to improvise and then formed her own group.
Lee Konitz
13 October, 1927 – 15 April, 2020
Lee Konitz was an American composer and alto saxophonist. He performed successfully in a wide range of jazz styles, including bebop, cool jazz, and avant-garde jazz. Konitz’s association with the cool jazz movement of the 1940s and 1950s includes participation in Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool sessions and his work with pianist Lennie Tristano. He was one of relatively few alto saxophonists of this era to retain a distinctive style, when Charlie Parker exerted a massive influence.
Dusko Goykovich
14 October, 1931
Dusko Goykovich is a Serbian jazz trumpeter, composer, and arranger. He studied at the Belgrade Music Academy from 1948 to 1953. He played trumpet in dixieland bands and joined the big band of Radio Belgrade when he was eighteen. He moved to West Germany and recorded his first album as a member of the Frankfurt All Stars. He spent the next four years as a member of Kurt Edelhagen’s orchestra. In these years he played with Chet Baker, Stan Getz, and Oscar Pettiford. In 1958 he performed at Newport Jazz Festival and drew much attention on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
Bill Charlap
15 October, 1966
Born in New York City, Bill Charlap comes from a musical background. His father was composer Moose Charlap. His mother, Sandy Stewart, is a singer who was a regular on Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall television series and had a hit recording in 1962 with “My Coloring Book”. Bill Charlap is a distant cousin to jazz pianist Dick Hyman. Bill Charlap began playing piano at age three. He studied classical music, but his career has been in jazz.
Roy Hargrove
16 October, 1969 – 3 November, 2018
Roy Hargrove was an American jazz trumpeter. He won worldwide notice after winning two Grammy Awards for differing types of music in 1997 and in 2002. Hargrove primarily played in the hard bop style for the majority of his albums, especially performing jazz standards on his 1990s albums. Hargrove was the bandleader of the progressive group the RH Factor, which combined elements of jazz, funk, hip-hop, soul, and gospel music.
Sathima Bea Benjamin
17 October, 1936 – 20 August, 2013
By the 1950s Sathima Bea Benjamin was singing at various nightclubs, community dances and social events, performing with notable Cape Town pianists Tony Schilder and Henry February, among others. She built her repertoire watching British and American movies and transcribing lyrics from songs heard on the radio, where she discovered Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday, Doris Day, Ella Fitzgerald. These musicians would come to influence her singing style, notably in terms of light phrasing and clear diction.
Anita O’Day
18 October, 1919 – 23 November, 2006
“Just get up there and let it rip!”
Anita O’Day was an American jazz singer and self-proclaimed “song stylist” widely admired for her sense of rhythm and dynamics, and her early big band appearances that shattered the traditional image of the “girl singer”. Refusing to pander to any female stereotype, O’Day presented herself as a “hip” jazz musician, wearing a band jacket and skirt as opposed to an evening gown. She changed her surname from Colton to O’Day, pig Latin for “dough”, slang for money.
Sarah Montes
19 October, 1970
“At 16 I was hired to sing with a casino act here in Las Vegas… the first night I performed; everything else went out the window and my life became all about the music.”
Sarah Montes grew up with an array of musical influences. Her mother, a professional ballet dancer, had the family record player spinning Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky and various Broadway musicals. When the records did stop her father played flamenco guitar with really cool syncopated Latin rhythms. And her older sister would listen to the local AM radio station, introducing Sarah to a plethora of musical genres; so between them all they formed the inspiration and foundation for her musical dreams and the obligatory nightmares. After performing in 52 cities around the world and over 2,800 performances to her credit, (which she proudly thanks Las Vegas for that astonishing number) Sarah is truly at home on stage. Her sassy and playful attitude combined with her natural ease and sincere passion creates an emotionally charged and captivating experience with the audience.
Jelly Roll Morton
20 October, 1890 – 10 July, 1941
“It is evidently known, beyond contradiction, that New Orleans is the cradle of Jazz and I, myself, happened to be the creator in the year 1902.”
Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe (né Lemott, later Morton), known professionally as Jelly Roll Morton, was an American ragtime and jazz pianist, bandleader, and composer. Morton was jazz’s first arranger, proving that a genre rooted in improvisation could retain its essential characteristics when notated. His composition “Jelly Roll Blues”, published in 1915, was one of the first published jazz compositions. Morton also wrote “King Porter Stomp”, “Wolverine Blues”, “Black Bottom Stomp”, and “I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say”, the last tribute to New Orleans musicians from the turn of the 20th century. Morton’s piano style was formed from early secondary ragtime and “shout”, which also evolved separately into the New York school of stride piano. Morton’s playing was also close to barrelhouse, which produced boogie-woogie.
Dizzy Gillespie
21 October, 1917 – 6 January, 1993
“It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.”
John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, composer, educator and singer. He was a trumpet virtuoso and improviser, building on the virtuoso style of Roy Eldridge but adding layers of harmonic and rhythmic complexity previously unheard in jazz. His combination of musicianship, showmanship, and wit made him a leading popularizer of the new music called bebop. His beret and horn-rimmed spectacles, his scat singing, his bent horn, pouched cheeks, and his light-hearted personality provided some of bebop’s most prominent symbols. In the 1940s Gillespie, with Charlie Parker, became a major figure in the development of bebop and modern jazz.
Jane Bunnett
22 October, 1955
“We started pre-#MeToo movement. You kind of ride the wave of presenters starting to say, ‘Maybe we should have some more women in the festival.’ We had a really successful year.”
Jane Bunnett is a Canadian musician and educator. A soprano saxophonist, flautist and bandleader, she is especially known for performing Afro-Cuban jazz. She travels regularly to Cuba to perform with Cuban musicians. She changed her instruments, from pursuing her career “as a classical pianist…at age 20 to jazz and to flute and soprano saxophone.” Bunnett founded and leads an all-female Afro-Cuban/jazz group,
Dianne Reeves
23 October, 1956
“Jazz is such a living art form. It happens right in the moment. You weave a story by changing certain elements and components.”
Dianne Reeves is an American jazz singer, born into a musical family. She was a member of her high school band, and while performing at a convention in Chicago was noticed by trumpeter Clark Terry, who invited her to sing with him. She signed with Blue Note in 1987 and that year her eponymous album, featuring Herbie Hancock, Freddie Hubbard, and Tony Williams, was nominated for a Grammy Award. She went on to win five Grammy Awards.
Odean Pope
24 October, 1938
“It’s incredible and rewarding to play for different generations. Thanks to residencies, the young keep the music going.”
Odean Pope is an American jazz tenor saxophonist. Pope was raised in Philadelphia, where he learned from Ray Bryant while young. Early in his career, at Philadelphia’s Uptown Theater, Pope played behind a number of noted rhythm and blues artists including James Brown, Marvin Gaye and Stevie W
Jimmy Heath
25 October, 1926 – 19 January, 2020
“I prefer music where melody, harmony and rhythm come together and no one element overshadows the other. Jazz at its best is a democracy of creativity.”
Jimmy Heath was an American jazz saxophonist, composer, arranger, and big band leader. He was the brother of bassist Percy Heath and drummer Albert Heath. Heath originally played alto saxophone. He earned the nickname “Little Bird” after his work for Howard McGhee and Dizzy Gillespie in the late 1940s, during which his playing displayed influences from Charlie Parker (Parker’s nickname was “Bird”). He then switched to tenor saxophone. From late 1945 through most of 1946, he performed with the Nat Towles band. In 1946, he formed his own band, which was a fixture on the Philadelphia jazz scene until 1949. The band included John Coltrane, Benny Golson, Specs Wright, Cal Massey, Johnny Coles, Ray Bryant, and Nelson Boyd. Charlie Parker and Max Roach sat in on one occasion. The band performed at venues such as the Apollo Theater in Harlem.
Vijay Iyer
26 October, 1971
“No one ever told me not to do anything on the piano, so I always thought of my progress as a series of accidents.”
Vijay Iyer is an American jazz pianist, composer, bandleader, producer, electronic musician, and writer based in New York City. The New York Times has called him a “social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway.” Iyer has received a 2013 MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Grammy nomination, and the Alpert Award in the Arts. In 2014 he received a lifetime appointment as the Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts at Harvard University, where he is jointly appointed in the Department of Music and the Department of African and African American Studies.
David Hazeltine
27 October, 1958
“Bebop is the fundamentals of music, the foundation, something to learn early on.”
David Hazeltine is an American jazz pianist, composer, arranger, and educator. He began studying the piano at the age of nine, and first performed professionally when he was thirteen. He attended the Wisconsin College Conservatory of Music from 1976 to 1979. In New York, Hazeltine led a trio that included Peter Washington on bass and Louis Hayes on drums. He also worked with the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band, Slide Hampton’s big band, and the group One for All. His first solo album, Four Flights Up, appeared in 1995. He has spent time composing, but has stated that he does not find it easy. Although he is a pianist, he feels influenced more by saxophonists, particularly Charlie Parker.
Kurt Rosenwinkel
28 October, 1970
“It’s an exciting thing when all the chemistry works together, and you hit upon a magical combination where the sum is more than its parts.”
Kurt Rosenwinkel is an American jazz guitarist. A native of Philadelphia, Rosenwinkel attended the Philadelphia High School for the Creative and Performing Arts. He studied at Berklee College of Music for two and a half years before leaving in his third year to tour with Gary Burton, the dean of the school at the time. After moving to Brooklyn, he began performing with Human Feel, Paul Motian’s Electric Bebop Band, Joe Henderson, and the Brian Blade Fellowship. In 2016, Rosenwinkel formed the independent
Zoot Sims
29 October, 1925 – 23 March, 1985
“Music keeps people sane.”
Zoot Sims was an American jazz saxophonist, playing mainly tenor but also alto (and, later, soprano) saxophone. He first gained attention in the “Four Brothers” sax section of Woody Herman’s big band, afterward enjoying a long solo career, often in partnership with fellow saxmen Gerry Mulligan and Al Cohn. Sims began on tenor saxophone at age 13. He initially modelled his playing on the work of Lester Young, Ben Webster, and Don Byas. By his late teens, having dropped out of high school, he was playing in big bands, starting with those of Kenny Baker and Bobby Sherwood. He joined Benny Goodman’s band
Clifford Brown
30 October, 1930 – 26 June, 1956
“There have been many great musicians that, Clifford Brown is one great example, I mean he died very early, 25.” – Sonny Rollins
Clifford Brown was an American jazz trumpeter. He died at the age of 25 in a car accident, leaving behind four years’ worth of recordings. He was also a composer of note: his compositions “Sandu,” “Joy Spring,” and “Daahoud” have become jazz standards. Brown won the Down Beat critics’ poll for New Star of the Year in 1954; he was inducted into the DownBeat Jazz Hall of Fame in 1972 in the critics’ poll. Brown was influenced and encouraged by Fats Navarro. His first recordings were with R&B bandleader Chris Powell. He worked with Art Blakey, Tadd Dameron, Lionel Hampton and J.J. Johnson, before forming a band with Max Roach. Brown’s trumpet was partnered with Harold Land’s tenor saxophone. After Land left in 1955, Sonny Rollins joined and remained a member of the group for the rest of its existence.
Ethel Waters
31 October, 1896 – 2 September, 1977
“We are all gifted. That is our inheritance.”
Ethel Waters was an American singer and actress. Waters frequently performed jazz, swing, and pop music on the Broadway stage and in concerts. She began her career in the 1920s singing blues. Waters notable recordings include “Dinah”, “Stormy Weather”, “Taking a Chance on Love”, “Heat Wave”, “Supper Time”, “Am I Blue?”, “Cabin in the Sky”, “I’m Coming Virginia”, and her version of “His Eye Is on the Sparrow”. Waters was the second African American to be nominated for an Academy Award. She was the first African American to star on her own television show and the first African-American woman to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award.