Gail Thompson

Gail Thompson (born June 15, 1958 in London ) is a British flautist , saxophonist , composer and arranger of modern jazz .

Live and act

Thompson comes from a musical family and learned to play the clarinet as a child. At the age of 16 she became a member of the National Youth Jazz Orchestra as a baritone saxophonist and then founded her first bands. She was then a founding member of the British band Jazz Warriors with Courtney Pine and also played briefly with Art Blakey (she was the second female member of his Jazz Messengers after Joanne Brackeen ). In 1986 she led the Charlie Watts big band . Eventually she founded her first own big band formation Gail Force , for which she also composed. Her musical inspirations come from the music of Africa and hard bop ; the resulting music is stylistically close to the big band projects of Abdullah Ibrahim and Quincy Jones .

In 1994 she made her first album under her own name Gail Force , a year later as the product of a journey through the continent she recorded the album Jazz Africa live in Duisburg , released on the Enja label with Harry Beckett , Claude Deppa , Jerry Underwood and Partick Hartley . After a stay in Queensland , Australia , she recorded the album JADU (i.e. Jazz Africa Down Under ) in 1999 . a. the bass player Mario Castronari took part.

For health reasons, Thompson had to give up playing the saxophone and concentrated increasingly on music teaching activities. In 2003 she organized the Afro-European women big band Femmes Noires , which played her compositions.

literature

• Ian Carr , Digby Fairweather , Brian Priestley : The Rough Guide to Jazz London: Rough Guide 2004 (3rd ed.), ISBN 978-1-84353-256-9 .
• Richard Cook , Brian Morton : The Penguin Guide of Jazz on CD . 6th edition. Penguin, London 2002, ISBN 0-14-051521-6 .

Web links

• Article about Thompson by Mike Zwerin
• Gail Thompson at Allmusic (English)