"Will Gaines

Dates: 1928-2014
Birth Date: Apr 5, 1928
Death Date: May 7, 2014

Place of Birth: Baltimore, MD
Place of Death: London. England

Will Gaines bebop rhythm tap dancer who became an international ambassador to tap, was born in Baltimore, Maryland and raised in Detroit, Michigan. At the age of twenty, he saw the Duke Ellington and Count Basie orchestras, master swing orchestra, but was most impressed with the new bebop style of Dizzy Gillespie. Upon seeing the young bebop rhythm tap virtuoso Teddy Hale dance, he dedicated himself to performing in the improvisational bebop style of rhythm tap. In the 1950s Gaines worked with such jazz greats as Lucky Thompson, Kenny Burrell, Tommy Flanagan, and Sonny Stitt at New York's Apollo Theatre. In 1957 he joined Cab Calloway's orchestra and Martha Ray's Night Club in Miami, and also danced in Las Vegas and Washington, D.C. for President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He became a well-respected and expensive opening act commanding $500 a night, which was quite a step up from the $65 a week he earned when he started. On the road again, he opened at the 500 Club in Atlantic City, and went on to Toronto, Canada and Buffalo, New York.

He arrived in London in July of 1963, appearing at the Pigille and Ronnie Scott's clubs, and in 1964 at the Palladium with Norman Vaughan, Tommy Cooper, and the Jack Parnell Orchestra. He appeared at Royal Festival Hall as well as in festivals in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Bracknell, and Birmingham. Like jazz tap dancer and choreographer Clarence "Buddy" Bradley who migrated to London in the 1930s, Gaines decided to make London his home, appearing at numerous venues, from concerts halls to countless street appearances alongside major names of British jazz, as well as many from the classical musical world. He was the first American jazz hoofer to perform at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden.

In 1983, Gaines appeared in the televised broadcast Masters of Tap with tap maestros Charles Honi Coles and Chuck Green, which was recorded at London's Riverside Studios. In 2005, at the age of nearly eighty, Gaines was a featured veteran performer in Cross Currents: Turned On Tap at the Queen Elizabeth Hall at South Bank Centre in London, in which he performed with English, Irish, and American tap dancers, and received superb critical reviews for his life-long career as a rhythm tap dancer. Gaines continues to live in London, where for over four decades he has taught and performed, and is regarded as one of America's ambassadors of jazz tap dance."

-Library of Congress (http://memory.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/loc.music.tdabio.95/default.html)
11/20/2024

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"Derek Bailey (29 January 1930 - 25 December 2005) was an English avant-garde guitarist and leading figure in the free improvisation movement.

Bailey was born in Sheffield, England. A third-generation musician, he began playing the guitar at the age of ten, initially studying music with his teacher and Sheffield City organist C. H. C. Biltcliffe, an experience that he did not enjoy, and guitar with his uncle George Wing and John Duarte. As an adult he worked as a guitarist and session musician in clubs, radio, dance hall bands, and so on, playing with many performers including Morecambe and Wise, Gracie Fields, Bob Monkhouse and Kathy Kirby, and on television programs such as Opportunity Knocks. Bailey's earliest foray into 'what could be called free improvised music' was in 1953 with two other guitarists in their shared flat in Glasgow. He was also part of a Sheffield-based trio founded in 1963 with Tony Oxley and Gavin Bryars called "Joseph Holbrooke" (named after the composer, whose work they never actually played). Although originally performing relatively "conventional" modal, harmonic jazz this group became increasingly free in direction.

Bailey moved to London in 1966, frequenting the Little Theatre Club run by drummer John Stevens. Here he met many other like-minded musicians, such as saxophonist Evan Parker, trumpet player Kenny Wheeler and double bass player Dave Holland. These players often collaborated under the umbrella name of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, recording the seminal album Karyobin for Island Records in 1968. In this year Bailey also formed the Music Improvisation Company with Parker, percussionist Jamie Muir and Hugh Davies on homemade electronics, a project that continued until 1971. He was also a member of the Jazz Composer's Orchestra and Iskra 1903, a trio with double-bass player Barry Guy and tromboneist Paul Rutherford that was named after a newspaper published by the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin.

In 1970, Bailey founded the record label Incus with Tony Oxley, Evan Parker and Michael Walters. It proved influential as the first musician-owned independent label in the UK. Oxley and Walters left early on; Parker and Bailey continued as co-directors until the mid-1980s, when friction between the men led to Parker's departure. Bailey continued the label with his partner Karen Brookman until his death in 2005[citation needed].

Along with a number of other musicians, Bailey was a co-founder of Musics magazine in 1975. This was described as "an impromental experivisation arts magazine" and circulated through a network of like-minded record shops, arguably becoming one of the most significant jazz publications of the second half of the 1970s, and instrumental in the foundation of the London Musicians Collective.

1976 saw Bailey instigate Company, an ever-changing collection of like-minded improvisors, which at various times has included Anthony Braxton, Tristan Honsinger, Misha Mengelberg, Lol Coxhill, Fred Frith, Steve Beresford, Steve Lacy, Johnny Dyani, Leo Smith, Han Bennink, Eugene Chadbourne, Henry Kaiser, John Zorn, Buckethead and many others. Company Week, an annual week-long free improvisational festival organised by Bailey, ran until 1994.

In 1980, he wrote the book Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice. This was adapted by UK's Channel 4 into a four-part TV series in the early '90s, edited and narrated by Bailey.

Bailey died in London on Christmas Day, 2005. He had been suffering from motor neurone disease."

-Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Bailey_(guitarist))
11/20/2024

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