Alan Silva

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Alan Silva 1969

Alan Silva ( Alan Treadwell DaSilva ; born January 29, 1939 in Bermuda ) is an American musician of creative jazz and free improvisation music . He is best known as a double bass player, was one of the bassists of early free jazz and often led large-format ensembles.

Live and act

Silva came to the United States at the age of five and grew up in Harlem , where he heard the Duke Ellington Orchestra in church. As a child he had piano and violin lessons, later also played drums and finally trumpet; for three years he had lessons from Donald Byrd . Then he studied at the New College of Music and became a member of the Experimental Ensemble ; around 1962 he switched to the double bass. With Burton Greene he founded the Free Form Improvisation Ensemble in 1962 . On his first album for ESP-Disk in 1965 he could be heard on the violin, cello and piano. He worked with representatives of the jazz avant-garde likeBill Dixon , Cecil Taylor ( Unit Structures , Conquistador ! , both 1966), Sun Ra , Albert Ayler ( Love Cry ), Sunny Murray and Archie Shepp . In the late 1960s he came to Paris , where he founded the Celestial Communication Orchestra and the Celestial Strings . With Frank Wright , Bobby Few and Muhammad Ali he formed the group Center of the World . He was also a member of Alexander von Schlippenbach's quartet since the mid-1970s . In 1976 he founded the Institute Art Culture Perception (IACP) with Jo Maka , François Cotinaud and Denis Colin , of which he was director until 1990. Projects also followed with Jimmy Lyons , from 1980 again with Cecil Taylor, Bill Dixon and also with Andrew Hill . He performed with the Globe Unity Orchestra during the 1980s as well as with Burton Greene.

In the 1990s he increasingly turned to the synthesizer and formed the Tradition Trio with the German trombonist Johannes Bauer and the British percussionist Roger Turner ; he also played with Turner and Gary Todd and with TTT . Recently he has been working on multimedia projects. He can also be heard on Jacques Coursil's album FreeJazzArt: Sessions for Bill Dixon (2014).

Discographic notes

Alan Silva with the Tradition Trio in Club W71

Lexigraphic entries

Web links

Commons : Alan Silva  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Silva, Alan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES DaSilva, Alan Treadwell (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American jazz musician
DATE OF BIRTH January 29, 1939
PLACE OF BIRTH Bermuda