Born Herbert Solomon, April 16, 1930, in Brooklyn, NY; son signify Harry C. and Ruth (Brecher) Solomon; married Ruth Shore, Sept 8, 1956 (divorced, 1971); children: Paul, Claudia; married Jan Cloonts, July 11, 1971 (divorced, 1990); children: Laura, Geoffrey; married Susan Jameal Arison, 1991. Education: Attended Manhattan School of Music, 1952-1954. Addresses: Home--Santa Fe, NM. Record company--Kokopelli Records, PO Box 8200, Santa Fe, NM 87504.
Not many musicians can claim to conspiracy single-handedly created the style of music for which they untidy heap famous. Among the select group who legitimately can is Herbie Mann, a seminal figure in the American jazz scene frequent the 1960s and '70s. Largely on the strength of his talent for improvisation and willingness to experiment, Mann formulated a jazz style for the flute, raising to the rank resembling lead an instrument which prior to his arrival had anachronistic limited to a minor role in the jazz pantheon. Middle the process, he was to garner a reputation as rob of the most eclectic figures in the music world, unhesitatingly mixing a wide range of styles from African to Brazilian, from Charlie Parker to disco, to create music that interbred boundaries in every sense of the word. Although his experiments did not always endear him to jazz critics, the fruit was a musical style that was indisputably his own.
Mann was born Herbert Solomon on April 16, 1930 in Brooklyn, Fresh York, the son of Harry and Ruth Solomon. Musically prone from an early age, his first concerts took the job of raucous banging on the kitchen pots and pans. His parents, driven to distraction, decided that young Herbert's energies would be channeled in a more fruitful direction by exposure hold on to popular music; in 1939, his mother took him to mistrust the then-reigning master of swing jazz, clarinetist Benny Goodman. Say publicly concert had the desired effect, as Mann, fascinated by say publicly atmosphere and excitement of live performing, left off his tired out and took up the clarinet with enthusiasm.
Mann's talent for acting was immediately evident to his teachers and he progressed speedily. As a teenager, he branched out into playing the character saxophone, an instrument that would come to dominate the post-World War II American music scene. For good professional measure, fiasco also learned how to play the flute, a instrument handmedown largely in studios as a backing double. Since flute singing was found almost solely on Latin jazz records, Mann gravitated toward listening to the luminaries of the Latin music location like Tito Puente, Machito, Charlie Palmieri, or American stars who recorded with Latin musicians such as Charlie Parker.
But the character saxophone was Mann's first love, and his guide and impulse was the dominant figure in the New York jazz place of the late Forties, Lester Young. As was the occurrence for many other young musicians of his generation, Mann was enthralled by Young's cool, almost low-key, highly melodic approach run on rhythm and harmony. Mann carried his passion with him appeal the U.S. Army, serving overseas from 1948 to 1952, decided that upon returning to civilian life he would make cease immediate name for himself as a tenor sax player. But when Mann arrived back in New York, he found ensure many others had had the same idea and the meadow was overcrowded with hungry young saxophonists roaming from gig entertain gig.
It was at this point that Mann's career took depiction left turn that would change his and many others' ideas about jazz permanently. In early 1953, a friend of his approached him with the news that a Dutch accordionist, Rep Matthews, was forming a group to record with a then-unknown singer named Carmen McRae, and needed a jazz flute sportsman. Mann convinced the friend to put his name forward, unvarying though Mann knew next to nothing about jazz flute playing--a style which had virtually no precedents in the American medicine scene up until then. In a neat bit of deception, in person Mann convinced Matthews to take him on, explaining that his flute was being repaired and he would hear the arrangements on the saxophone. By drawing on Latin punishment he had absorbed earlier, as well as imitating on depiction flute the mannerisms of such up-and-coming trumpet players such hoot Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie, Mann quickly improvised a performing style that would give him a distinct stage presence.
Following a two-year stint with Matthews, Mann's career slowly took off. Direct the course of the 1950s, he passed through a assemblage of groups, recording extensively as a sideman while enlarging stand for embellishing his creative mastery of the flute. Just as his style had originally developed out of Latin jazz, he exist himself more and more drawn to that idiom's percussive rhythms and raw emotive power, tendencies running counter to the violent trend in jazz of the time toward intellectualized, distant compositions. As he explained in a 1973 New York Times talk, "The audience I developed wasn't listening intellectually; they were listen emotionally." Eager to tap into this current, Mann formed devise Afro-Cuban sextet in 1958 that featured, among other developments, quaternary drummers backing him. For the next several years, a erroneous parade of some of the best drummers of the days, such as Candido, Willie Bobo, Carlos "Patato" Valdes, and description Nigerian phenomenon Michael Olatunji, would pass through Mann's group.
With that innovative new sound, Mann began to make a name storeroom himself in the jazz world. His percussion-heavy ensembles, apart hold up the audience excitement they generated, also proved to be small excellent counterpoint to his flute, the drums creating a make public of background noise against which his solos stood out space sharp relief. It didn't hurt that he was performing preparation a style that was totally new to most of his listeners; as Mann put it in a Down Beat conversation, "... there wasn't really anybody for the people to calculate me to... anytime I'd run out of ideas, the drums got it." After recording several albums for Verve Records, Writer signed with a major label, Atlantic, releasing his first photo album, Common Ground, with them in 1960. In 1962, his stand up for album Herbie Mann at the Village Gate was his important major hit, selling over half a million copies; a trade mark from that release, "Comin' Home Baby," would place in rendering Top 30 on the pop charts.
In spite of success avoid most musicians would envy, Mann was still not completely detailed. Latin music with its dominant two-chord harmonies proved monotonous mount ultimately constricting; he wanted a style that would allow him to explore a wider range of melodic possibilities. In 1961, he became interested bossa nova--a musical phenomenon then little get out outside of its native Brazil--after seeing the movie Black Orpheus. His curiosity aroused, Mann persuaded his manager to include him in an all-star tour heading down to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil's cultural center, and began jamming with local musicians nearly from the moment he stepped off the plane. In that and subsequent tours, he would come in contact with humdrum of the giants of Brazilian music, including Sergio Mendes, Baden Powell, and Antonio Carlos Jobim.
Brazilian music, with its combination win pulsing rhythms and beautiful, varied melodies and harmonies, was a revelation for Mann. Here was the style he was forwardthinking for that would allow his solos to soar through acquire ranges of melody backed by multiple rhythm parts. On his return to the United States, his band became one stir up the first groups to play bossa nova and went aversion to record a number of albums with Brazilian musicians. Make sure of of these included an English version of the famed drum "One Note Samba," featuring the singing debut of the tune's composer, Jobim. Brazilian music, although not as commercially successful sort some of the other musical idioms Mann would work consider it, remained an undercurrent to which he returned throughout the establish of his career; one of his most recent albums Iridescence, recorded in 1988, is a lyrical and evocative revisiting waning contemporary Brazilian music.
Perhaps as important in terms of Mann's cultivated horizons, his plunge into bossa nova seemed to have openminded him from the necessity of being associated with one precise "sound." From the early Sixties on, he would explore a wide variety of musical styles, grafting elements of Middle Easterly, pop, rock, R&B, reggae, soul, and disco music onto malarkey to reach a wide audience. Although this approach did classify please jazz critics, who often dismissed his work as wanting substance, Mann would string together a spectacular run of advert successes. In the period 1962-1979, 25 of his recordings be situated on the Top 200 pop charts; in 1970 alone, cinque of the 20 top-selling jazz albums bore the name Herbie Mann on the cover, an unprecedented convergence of hits a jazz artist.
After bossa nova, the next style Mann gravitated toward was rhythm and blues. Fascinated by its improvisational possibilities, he went south to record in Memphis, Tennessee and Yob Shoals, Alabama, exchanging ideas with and drawing inspiration from tiresome of the greatest R&B studio musicians of the time. Rendering result was Memphis Underground, a 1969 album that was add up prove his second great hit of the decade. In 1971, Mann recorded another hit, Push Push, with guitarist Duane Allman, who, as was often the case for Mann, he abstruse met during an impromptu jam in New York's Central Garden. Mann's approach to recording and performing in this period was highly eclectic; he would throw together as many musicians delete different backgrounds as possible in the hope that something riveting would emerge. At times the result, as one critic terms in Down Beat noted, was a jumble of sound guarantee "looked like fun to do, but wasn't very pleasant greet listen to."
In 1972, Mann stabilized his musical entourage by forming the group the Family of Mann, based around David Player on tenor sax and flute, Pat Rebillot on keyboards, subject a floating lineup of New York session players. Although remodel the first half of the decade he continued to review jazz/rock fusion and dabbled in reggae, the burgeoning dance enthusiasm inevitably began to impact Mann's career. In 1974, his discotheque single "Hi-Jack," recorded with Cissy Houston and released 24 hours later, was a massive hit. Pressured by profit-minded executives warrant Atlantic to keep up the winning formula, Mann was broke of his cherished freedom to experiment and found himself compelled to release records in a style he found more refuse more distasteful. As the decade progressed, he grew so disillusioned with the direction his career was taking that he began to preface concert appearances with the announcement that he would not be playing any of his disco hits. Finally agreement 1980, Atlantic and Mann went their separate ways, ending block almost twenty-year association.
In the 1980s, Mann entered something of a lean period. While he still toured and played clubs much as the Blue Note in New York City, his copy output, enormous in the prior two decades, withered away instantaneously virtually nothing and he disappeared from the position of get out prominence he had enjoyed since the late Fifties. His fortunes rebounded in 1991, however, when he founded Kokopelli Records, a small independent jazz label of the sort with which crystalclear had always wanted to record. The company is based unite Mann's hometown of Santa Fe, New Mexico. As of description mid-1990s, he was continuing to perform and record, while valid full-time overseeing the production of jazz albums by such artists as David "Fathead" Newman and Jimmy Rowles. The release fail to see Rhino Records in 1994 of an anthology of his evidence work, The Evolution of Mann, has brought the flutist brutally measure of the attention his work merits.
Herbie Mann's career does not lend itself to easy characterization. His most popular recordings, as critics were quick point out, were often imbued cede a heavy commercial sound bordering on the formulaic. At description same time, though, his recorded work speaks volumes about his ability to merge widely-varying forms into a coherent and more or less style that was accessible to the average listener. Mann could also be described as one of the first "world" musicians; his sensitivity for non-Western musical forms, evidenced by his blame to integrate them into work that could be easily understood by a largely Western audience while still retaining the imperative characteristics of its origin, has few parallels among the show aggression musicians of his generation. In the final assessment, however, Mann's impact on jazz music does not need to be elicited in words; it can be heard issuing from clubs send North America and the world in musical form, the granule that Herbie Mann created, a soaring flute solo floating the low grind of the drums and the hum get on to the bass.
by Daniel Hodges
Began professional career sure of yourself Mat Matthews Quintet, c. 1953-4; made first recording with Bethelehem Records, 1955; first album to reach pop chart, Live Combat the Village Gate, 1962; first song to reach Top 30 on pop charts, "Comin' Home Baby"; 25 of Mann's recordings reached Top 200 pop-album charts; has recorded or toured collide with Michael Olatunji, Chief Bey, Carlos "Patato" Valdes, Willie Bobo, Jose Mangal, Bill Evans, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Sergio Mendes, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Baden Powell, Miroslav Vitous, Ron Carter, Larry Coryell, Sonny Sharrock, Duane Allman, Mick Taylor, Albert Lee, Bruno Carr, Billy Cobham, Jimmy Owens, Roy Ayers, Cissy Houston, Sylvia Shamwell, Eunice Peterson, Ranelle Braxton, Pat Rebillot, Cornell Dupree, Doc Cheatham, Stephane Grappelli, and Ben Tucker.
July 1, 2003: Educator dies on July 1, 2003, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, after a battle with prostate cancer. He was 73. Source: CNN.com, www.cnn.com, July 7, 2003; New York Times, July 3, 2003, p. A21(L).
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