Artist: Stanley Cowell


Stanley Cowell was an American jazz pianist and co-founder of the Strata-East Records label.

Cowell was born in Toledo, Ohio. He began playing the piano around the age four and became interested in jazz after seeing family friend Art Tatum play at age six. Tatum was a family friend.

After high school, Cowell studied classical piano with Emil Danenberg at Oberlin Conservatory of Music He included "Emil Danenberg" in his 1973 suite "Musa: Ancestral Dreams". During his time at Oberlin, he played with jazz multi-instrumentalist Roland Kirk, which proved to be formative. He went on to receive a graduate degree in classical piano from the University of Michigan. He moved to New York in the mid-1960s.

Cowell played with Marion Brown, Max Roach, Bobby Hutcherson, Clifford Jordan, Harold Land, Sonny Rollins and Stan Getz. Cowell played with trumpeter Charles Moore and others in the Detroit Artist's Workshop Jazz Ensemble in 1965–66.

In 1971, Cowell co-founded the record label Strata-East with trumpeter Charles Tolliver. The label would become one of the most successful Black-led, independent labels of its day.

During the late 1980s, Cowell was part of a regular quartet led by J.J. Johnson. Cowell taught in the Music Department of the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Photography credit: Tom Marcello Webster, New York, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

This content was excerpted from the Wikipedia article,Stanley Cowell - Wikipedia, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

Stanley Cowell Quintet: "It's Time" at Keystone Korner Baltimore (2019)

Stanley Cowell Quartet Live at Dizzy's 2017 Bruce Williams, Jay Anderson Evan Sherman

Stanley Cowell: Videos

The Stanley Cowell Jazz Trio at Rutgers-Newark