Artist: Don Byron
Donald Byron is an American composer and multi-instrumentalist. He primarily plays clarinet but has also played bass clarinet and saxophone in a variety of genres that includes free jazz and klezmer.
Byron listened to Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis while growing up, but he was exposed to other styles through trips to the ballet and symphony orchestra. When he was a child, he had asthma, and a doctor recommended playing an instrument to improve his breathing, so he began playing clarinet.
Other influences include Joe Henderson, Artie Shaw, Jimmy Hamilton, and Tony Scott. In his teens he took clarinet lessons from Joe Allard. George Russell was one of his teachers at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. In the 1980s he moved to New York City where he played with avant-garde jazz musicians such as Hamiet Bluiett, Craig Harris, and David Murray.
Byron is a member of the Black Rock Coalition. In 2001, he performed "Bli Blip" for the Red Hot Organization's compilation album Red Hot + Indigo, a tribute to Duke Ellington which raised money for charities devoted to increasing AIDS awareness and fighting the disease. He has recorded with Bill Frisell, Joe Henry, Marc Ribot, Vernon Reid, and Allen Toussaint.
Byron is a practicing jazz historian, and some of his albums have been recreations (in spirit) of forgotten moments in the history of popular music. Examples are Plays the Music of Mickey Katz and Bug Music. Byron won the Rome Prize Fellowship awarded by the American Academy in Rome in 2009. His Seven Etudes for solo piano, commissioned by pianist Lisa Moore, made him a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Musical Composition in 2009. He was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo in 2005 for his bass clarinet solo on "I Want to Be Happy" from Ivey-Divey.
He has worked as a professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver, The University at Albany, and MIT, teaching composition, improvisation, music history, clarinet, and saxophone.Byron was named a 2007 USA Prudential Fellow and awarded a grant by United States Artists, a public charity that supports and promotes the work of American artists. He also won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007.
Further Information about Don Byron can be found here.
This content was excerpted from the Wikipedia article, Don Byron - Wikipedia, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).
Don Byron — June 23, 2019 — Something Else! Festival — Hamilton, ON
Don Byron: Videos
George Russell: A Bird in Igor’s Yard | Don Byron & NEC Jazz Orchestra
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoixw7917Go