Gene Cherico

Eugene Valentino "Gene" Cherico (* 15. April 1935 in Buffalo , New York ; † 12. August 1994 in Santa Monica , California ) was an American jazz - bassist .

Life

Cherico started out as a drummer but switched to bass when he used the instrument as therapy for injury from a railway accident while serving in the military. He studied at Berklee College of Music in Boston , where he met the pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi , with whom he was to collaborate frequently from then on, for example at her Birdland appearance in 1961 with Charlie Mariano and her candidate album Toshiko-Mariano Quartet .

He then played from 1957 to 1959 in the band of Herb Pomeroy ; in the 1960s he worked with Gary Burton , Paul Desmond / Jim Hall , Maynard Ferguson , Red Norvo , Benny Goodman , George Shearing , Stan Getz ( Getz / Gilberto , 1964 and Nobody Else But Me , 1965), Peggy Lee , Carmen, among others McRae and Peter Nero (1966-1970).

In the 1970s he toured with Frank Sinatra and Nancy Wilson , worked with Frank Strazzeri (1973, 1975), Louie Bellson , Lew Tabackin , Gerry Mulligan (1974), and Akiyoshi; otherwise he was mainly active as a studio musician in Los Angeles and also as a composer; so he wrote parts of the soundtrack for Rod Serling's series Night Gallery . In 1973 he performed with Terry Gibbs at the Concord Festival. In the mid-1980s he was still involved in recordings of Bill Perkins ; then an illness of non-Hodgkin lymphoma forced him to give up his music career before he died in August 1994.

swell

• Bielefeld catalog 1988 & 2002
• Richard Cook , Brian Morton : The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings . 8th edition. Penguin, London 2006, ISBN 0-14-102327-9 .
• Leonard Feather , Ira Gitler : The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz. Oxford University Press, New York 1999, ISBN 0-19-532000-X .

Web links

• Obituary in the New York Times
• Gene Cherico at Discogs (English)