Jon Faddis via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Jon Faddis:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix via ↴
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Jon Faddis
- City: Teaneck, New Jersey
- Country: United States
- Hometown: Oakland, California
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Jon Faddis is a complete and consummate musician – conductor, composer, and educator. Marked by both intense integrity and humor, Faddis earned accolades from his close friend and mentor John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie, who declared of Faddis, “He’s the best ever, including me!” As a trumpeter, Faddis possesses a virtually unparalleled range and full command of his instrument, making the practically impossible seem effortless.
Born in 1953, Faddis began playing at age seven, inspired by an appearance by Louis Armstrong on the Ed Sullivan Show. Bill Catalano (an alumnus of the Stan Kenton band) hipped Faddis to the music of Dizzy Gillespie. Meeting Dizzy Gillespie at the Monterey Jazz Festival and then sitting in with him at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco proved to be a pivotal beginning of a unique friendship between Gillespie and Faddis, one that spanned almost three decades. Two days before his 18th birthday, Faddis joined Lionel Hampton’s band as a featured soloist, moving from Oakland, CA to New York. Shortly after arriving in Manhattan, Faddis was invited to sit in with the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra at the Village Vanguard; he rapidly became lead trumpeter for the band, touring the world. He soon formed his own quartet, and began directing orchestras, including the Grammy-winning United Nation Orchestra, the Dizzy Gillespie 70th Birthday Big Band, the Dizzy Gillespie Alumni All-Stars, the Chicago Jazz Ensemble (2004-2010), the Carnegie Hall Centennial Big Band, the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band (1992-2002), and the Jon Faddis Jazz Orchestra of New York (2003-present). Faddis has also served as guest conductor and featured guest with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra.
Faddis’ distinctive trumpet appears on hundreds of records and numerous soundtracks for film and television. Faddis’ original compositions include the Jazz opera Lulu Noire (1997) (named a “Top 10” pick by USA Today); other Faddis compositions may be heard on his Grammy-nominated Remembrances (Chesky 1998), Hornucopia (Epic 1991), Into the Faddisphere (Epic 1989), and TERANGA (Koch 2006).
Faddis is known as one of the most innovative and inspiring jazz trumpeters of our time. He has an unfailing commitment to the education of young musicians and frequently conducts clinics and mater classes worldwide to help the next generation of jazz musicians. In Chicago, Faddis served as the Jazz Institute of Chicago’s first mentor for the Jazz Links program and also created the Louis Armstrong Legacy Program. Faddis is a full-time faculty member at the Conservatory of Music, Purchase College-SUNY, where he began in 1999 as Artist-in-Residence, becoming shortly after Professor and Director of Jazz Performance. Faddis holds the first-ever honorary doctorate in Jazz from Manhattan School of Music (which he attended for about a semester when he was 18), as well as numerous other accolades and awards.
Whatever the context – classroom or concert hall – and whatever the style, Jon Faddis epitomizes the best in Jazz.
from www.msmnyc.edu/faculty/jon-faddis
Contact Information
- Email: jon.faddis@purchase.edu
My Media & Markets
- ▶ YouTube Music: http://music.youtube.com/channel/UCVGpOGnIDS0SbhchoPASn4A
- ▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/0OFNvizCDmXDlEUb3obNCU
- ▶ Spotify 2: http://open.spotify.com/album/6wEdZfcDAEMAG8N69N5BHV
- ▶ Spotify 3: http://open.spotify.com/album/5Ba2tuBhDuGDkgazASw0Jz
- ▶ Spotify 4: http://open.spotify.com/album/2ccvMo1Ni0HMGgvQ1ItOQn
- ▶ Spotify 5: http://open.spotify.com/album/7jtHIfta9qfralGDQI3Y87
- ▶ Spotify 6: http://open.spotify.com/album/2DG18uozcjfd4w3NrYmbEd
Clips (more may be added)
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging through New Orleans and Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... and Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
