Phineas Newborn

Phineas Newborn Jr. (born December 14, 1931 in Whiteville , Hardeman County , Tennessee , † May 26, 1989 in Memphis , Tennessee) was an American jazz pianist and composer who, with stylistic diversity, a tonal and rhythmic ease and possessed an immensely diverse sound in his music. The jazz critic and jazz author Leonard Feather said of him in 1964 that he was the greatest living jazz pianist.

Life

Newborn comes from a musical family and began playing the piano at the age of six . His father was a drummer and Newborn took lessons from the pianist in his father's band. Further studies at a high school in Memphis followed, and he acquired knowledge of various brass instruments there. He also played the vibraphone . In the army he also played various saxophones .

In 1948/49 Newborn finished his musical education, played with trombonist Jimmy Cleveland and studied another year at LeMoyne College in Memphis. During this time he also played with Louis Smith . He played with Lionel Hampton in 1950/52 and with Willis Jackson in 1953 and then worked in rhythm and blues bands. His military service lasted from 1953 to 1955. He then played in his father's Rhythm'n Blues Band, with his brother Calvin on guitar.

Newborn had a marked reluctance to leave Memphis for the music profession. After Count Basie became aware of him and initiated his debut in New York , there is an anecdote that Basie dragged him to a concert in Brooklyn and forced him to make an off-program appearance. At the age of twenty-four, Newborn had a completely mature sound, personally and in terms of jazz style, which in its diversity has not been repeated to this day. He then played with his own band in 1955/56, around 1956 in a trio with Oscar Pettiford and Kenny Clarke or in a quartet in which Pettiford and Clarke or Philly Joe Jones and George Joyner played in the rhythm section and his brother Calvin played the guitar. He played in 1957/8 with Charles Mingus in the soundtrack to the film Shadows by John Cassavetes . In 1958, he toured Europe (including England and Stockholm) with Jazz from Carnegie Hall (with JJ Johnson , Kai Winding , Zoot Sims , Lee Konitz , Red Garland , Kenny Clarke and Oscar Pettiford) and played with his own trio with Italian musicians in Rome . In 1959 he was in Europe with the Mills Brothers. From 1958 to the early 1960s he played with his own trio, which also included drummers Roy Haynes and Philly Joe Jones at times. Health problems repeatedly interrupted his career. After a break in the late 1960s, he returned to the music scene in the mid- 1970s . He also played with Philly Joe Jones, Howard McGhee and Teddy Edwards , among others .

His music

Newborn's style is that of the modern swing pianist of jazz after bebop . In doing so, he extends the swing to the possibilities gained by the bebop. Just as Newborn's sound is reminiscent of that of the early Oscar Peterson , he also plays with his bassist Ray Brown and Coltrane's drummer Elvin Jones . He mentions Art Tatum as his influence . Newborn is characterized by the use of parallel octaves for lightning-fast runs, distributed between the left and right hand. In addition, he uses a perfected block chord style of playing in a virtuoso manner similar to George Shearing , an imitation of the 5-part saxophone setting of the swing big band, in which the left hand doubles the melody of a four-part voicing of the right hand an octave below.

Newborn has a strong, secure left hand accompaniment, well thought-out middle voices, light melodies and free characters, heavy bass characters, rhapsodic insertions, and cross-expressionist passages. On the one hand his style sounds ancient, on the other hand he takes advantage of it by building on it a melody and theme improvisation that ventures into areas that other pianists are not familiar with.

His style is at the beginning of a development of the jazz piano, which brings together composition with Afro-American expressiveness, shaped by gospel , blues, soul and rhythm and blues. There are boogie , stride piano , rhapsodic, playful, the lightness of gospel, and the earthiness of the blues combined with European compositional accuracy.

You can use your varied block chord style on Cheryl on A World of Piano! hear over two choruses.

Newborn's piano music is relatively unknown, but many musicians known today are in close contact with his playing, including the Marsalis clan, trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard . He is very much appreciated in artistic circles. The jazz pianists James Williams , Donald Brown , Harold Mabern , Mulgrew Miller and Geoff Keezer explicitly refer to him. His style is an independent approach to bring African-American creativity into music on an equal footing with European culture. That is why, for example, George Shearing composed the piece She (She Means Everything To Me) for Newborn. What he started is a reliable, extremely resilient foundation that is increasingly being further developed today.

Discography selection

• Phineas Rainbow , RCA Jazz Classics 1995, recorded 1956, also with Latin percussion
• We Three 1958, with Roy Haynes , Paul Chambers
• The Newborn Touch , Contemporary Records / OJC , 1963
• Harlem Blues , Contemporary, with Ray Brown, Elvin Jones
• A World of Piano! , 1961
• Send Me Somebody to Love with the same line-up, contemporary
• Phineas Is Back , Pablo Records

Web links

• Additional information on Jazzwax in an article about Newborn
• Discography

Individual evidence

1. ^ Obituary New York Times
2. ↑ "A year later, in 1964, I went out on a rare limb to declare unequivocally, in Down Beat , 'Newborn is the greatest living jazz pianist'." Feathers Liner Notes for Newborn's Send Me Somebody to Love album (A year later, 1964, I was alone when I declared beyond doubt, "Newborn is the greatest living jazz pianist")
3. ↑ Article New York Times 1984