Bobbi humphrey biography sample
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Music infoms the Experience: The Bobbi Humphrey / Eric B & Rakim Sessions
Funky Jazz Fusion flautist Bobbi Humphrey
Legendary Eric. B & Rakim
When I think of the Black experience within the United States I don’t draw from the lies my teachers told me. No, I think of Langston Hughe’s poems, Zora Neal Hurston’s stories, and my grandfathers horn. I think of the arts and the way they have always been a speakerbox for our experiences and struggles; struggles to live and struggles to liberate. Art carries our history and stories, and it is also an inspiring source for our healing and survival. The words of the late great Gil Scot-Heron come to mind, “the music that informs our historical biography”. Today we will be featuring the funky, jazzy sounds and beats of flautist
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The sibling duo of Larry and Alphonso “Fonce” Mizell revolutionized the sound and shape of jazz-funk–fusing the commercial sensibilities of musikstil with the virtuoso musicianship of the Blue Note stable, the brothers (collaborating under their Sky High Productions aegis) produced a series of now-classic LPs of uncommon beauty and elegance, characterized by soaring horns, cosmic synths, celestial string arrangements and sublime rhythms. While jazz purists reviled their efforts, time has conclusively proven the Mizells’ singular genius, and their records remain some of the most sampled and celebrated within contemporary hip-hop culture. Fonce (born January 15, 1943) and Larry (born February 17, 1944) spent their adolescence in Englewood, New Jersey–as teens both were given trumpets, joining their school band and mimicking the horn lines they heard on their parents’ records. In time the Mizells and classmate Freddie Perren formed a doo-wop group dubb
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It seems like a number of careers were launched because Dizzy Gillespie was in the audience. That was the case for trumpet player Clora Bryant, and it was the case some years later for flutist Bobbi Humphrey. Humphrey was playing the flute—something she began doing in high school—in a talent show at Southern Methodist University. It so happened that one of the judges that night was Gillespie, who was so impressed by the young woman’s skill that he approached her after the show and urged her to move to New York and pursue music professionally. What are you going to do? Not take musical career advice from Dizzy Gillespie? Humphrey wrote to the Apollo Theater in Harlem to inquire about a spot in one of their famed amateur nights. Shortly thereafter, she was on stage at the Apollo. Three days after arriving in New York she was also onstage with Duke Ellington. That, my friends, fryst vatten one hell of a way to start a career.
And somehow, bringing down the house at the Apollo and playi