Allan Praskin

Allan Praskin, 2010

Allan Conrad Praskin (born December 17, 1948 in Los Angeles ) is an American modern jazz musician ( alto saxophonist , composer and band leader ). He has lived in Europe for more than 30 years.

Live and act

Praskin began taking clarinet lessons at a young age , but also made the acquaintance of jazz early on through his father's extensive record collection, which eventually led him to switch to his future main instrument, the alto saxophone.

He made some practical experience with improvised music already as a teenager in the time still very vibrant jazz scene of his hometown of Los Angeles, where he under the aegis of George Morrow (the bass player in the Clifford Brown / Max Roach - quintet ) with the Modern Jazz familiarized has been. Through his lessons with Morrow, the young saxophonist became known to other prominent California-based musicians, including Bobby Hutcherson , JR Monterose and Harold Land , with whom he also worked.

At the end of the 1960s, at the height of the Vietnam War , Praskin was drafted into the military , but not sent to combat in Indochina, but stationed in Korea . During a short stay in Tokyo in 1967 he produced his first LP under his own name, Encounter .

As a result, the saxophonist came into contact with the free jazz scene in New York, which was flourishing at the time ; he quickly made a name for himself within the avant-garde in the metropolis through sessions and recordings with leading musicians such as Sunny Murray , Beaver Harris and Sam Rivers . The LP Freeken , recorded in this creative phase under the direction of drummer James Zitro for the then style - defining record label ESP-Disk , was long considered a rare collector's item (which changed when the ESP catalog was re-released in CD format).

Gunter Hampel engaged Praskin in 1972 for his Galaxie Dream Band , to which the saxophonist was to belong until 1975 and with which he came to Europe as part of an extensive tour in 1973, where he finally moved. In the course of the following years, Praskin turned his musical interest back to the older forms of jazz, without fundamentally discarding his previous experience of free play. This led to the collaboration with stylistically diverse artists such as the organist Barbara Dennerlein , the singer Özay , the pianist Fritz Pauer , the Serbian drummer Lala Kovačev or the saxophone colleagues Warne Marsh and Hans Koller .

From the end of the 1970s to the beginning of the 1990s, Praskin was among the American expatriates in Europe “one of the most employed of his instrument”, whose idiosyncratic instrumental sound and characteristic phrasing reflect his extensive knowledge of the entire jazz tradition in a very personal way.

Longstanding musical partnerships connect Praskin with the pianists Wolfgang Köhler and Larry Porter . Together with Porter, he led the Porter / Praskin Quartet from 1984 to 1993 , which made several highly acclaimed recordings in various line-ups. The collaboration with Köhler began in the Just Friends group in the 1970s and has continued to the present day.

Allan Praskin has been teaching jazz saxophone at the Anton Bruckner Private University in Linz , Upper Austria , since 1983 . His musical activities, which at the beginning of his stay in Europe were concentrated in northern Germany, he later relocated to the Bavarian-Austrian region, where he played an important role in the jazz scenes of Munich , Salzburg and Vienna at times. After 1990 and increasingly since the beginning of the new millennium, the saxophonist, although still based in Passau , Bavaria , is closely associated with the Berlin music scene .

Discography (selection)

• Freeken (with James Zitro et al., 1967)
• Encounter (Three Blind Mice, 1971)
• Just Jazz (Just Friends, 1979)
• Beak to Beak (International Jazz Consensus, 1981)
• First Date (Porter / Praskin Quartet, 1984)
• Bebab ( Barbara Dennerlein , 1985)
• Acoustic Music (Porter / Praskin Quartet, 1985, with Bob Arkin, James Baker)
• Sonnet For Sal (Porter / Praskin Quartet with Sal Nistico , 1988, with Marc Abrams and Paolo Pellegatti)
• Bop Top (with Jeff Gardner et al., 1992)
• More of Me (with Rachel Gould et al., 1993)
• Around Jazz (with Wolfgang Köhler , Christian Ramond and Felix Astor 2001)
• Allan Praskin Trio (with Markus Schieferdecker and Sebastian Nay, 2006)

swell

1. ↑ Kunzler, p. 1038

literature

• Wolf Kampmann (Ed.), With the assistance of Ekkehard Jost : Reclams Jazzlexikon . Reclam, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-15-010528-5 .
• Martin Kunzler : Jazz Lexicon . Directmedia, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-89853-018-3 .

Web links

Commons : Allan Praskin  - collection of images, videos and audio files