Loren Pickford

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风格: #后波普　#硬波普　#冷爵士
地区: 欧美

艺人介绍

by Alex HendersonSometimes a very intense and aggressive player, alto saxman Loren Pickford has often favored a big, robust sound along the lines of Jackie McLean and Phil Woods. Pickford, however, is also a lover of "cool jazz" and has been exploring his softer, more lyrical side in the late 1990s. The altoist (who plays the flute and piano as secondary instruments) was born in New Orleans and raised in Fresno, CA, but he has also lived in L.A., San Francisco, Paris, New York and Chicago. As a young musician in the 1960s, Pickford listened to jazz extensively and hoped to someday earn his living playing bop, but it was R&B that often paid the bills. After backing Jackie Wilson on tour and writing horn arrangements for the late soul icon, Pickford went on to back Percy Sledge, the Chi-Lites, Tyrone Davis, Clarence Carter and other R&B greats of the 1960s and 1970s. It was during the 1970s that he also backed rocker Van Morrison and served as band leader for the popular CBS sitcom, The Mary Tyler Moore Show. But his passion for acoustic jazz remained, and in the mid-1980s, he got a nice break when trumpeter/singer Chet Baker hired him to play piano and/or alto on some live dates. Though playing with Baker (who died a few years later in 1988) called for restraint and an appreciation of "cool jazz," Pickford took a much more forceful approach when, in 1986, he recorded his debut album, Song For A Blue Planet, for Cexton. That album was followed by 1990's equally hard-driving Dancing In The Spirit Fires on Cexton and Elysian Fields on Dinosaur. The late 1990s found Pickford living in New Orleans, where he continued to play straight-ahead jazz (both hard bop and "cool jazz" as well as some Dixieland) and did his share of zydeco, Cajun, funk, R&B and world-music gigs.